"The Passion of the King" - Sermon for Easter Day 4-5-26

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Fifty-eight years ago yesterday, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. was martyred, murdered in Memphis by an assassin’s bullet. Doctor King was a man of passion. His was a passion of love for the Beloved Community, a liberated society made up of all people, God’s beloved children freed from the shackles of racism, militarism, and rapacious capitalism.

And Doctor King’s was a passion of suffering in his striving for the Beloved Community. Threatened and slandered, beaten and jailed, and in his later years misunderstood and maligned by some in his own movement who felt his shift to the Vietnam War and the Poor People’s Campaign was a distraction from, rather than the sine qua non of the struggle for racial justice.

This passionate King entered eternity, the perfection of the Beloved Community, that morning of April four, when a small-caliber missile from a small-caliber man and his small-caliber movement took Martin’s earthly life. This passionate King was born into the heavenly reign of The Passionate King, his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, whose resurrection we proclaim and rejoice in today.

The Church rightly celebrates on the death day of her saints, as that is their eternal birthday. And this eternal birthday is promised and delivered – a check cashed, to use a phrase of Doctor King’s – by Christ the King, whose own life and teachings Martin modeled his after.

The first commandment of Martin’s movement was this: “Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus.” On this Resurrection Day, along with Martin, let us do just that.

Jesus was born into a working-class family and community, a people oppressed by the iron heel of occupation by the Roman Empire. Jesus saw the suffering of his people and was compelled to liberate them. Jesus was tempted to take shortcuts but instead kept to the stony road and the narrow gate. Jesus fed the hungry, ate with the outcasts, healed the sick, and raised the dead. Jesus raised hopes and taught about God’s compassion, mercy, and love. Jesus called disciples, and mentored men and women to march with him, and then in his stead when he was gone. Jesus, acting as servant, washed their feet and gave them bread and wine, his Body and Blood at the Last Supper. Jesus was maligned and misunderstood by the leaders of his own people, threatened and slandered, beaten and jailed, and crucified – executed under the sentence of sedition against the emperor.

And Jesus was raised that Easter morning, first having opened the gates of death’s prison and liberating our first parents and all the faithful from the generations that came after them.

Do you see some similarities between the twentieth-century King and the Eternal King of the first-century? Clearly, Martin meditated daily on the teachings and life of Jesus – and lived them. Well done, good and faithful servant!

And yet we know that Martin was not perfect. Saints, by definition, generally are accomplished sinners, wholly dependent on God’s reconciling and redeeming grace. Martin was no different. He would not want us to put him on a pedestal. Such slender, shaky heights are perilous places for leaders of movements to stand.

I am not perfect, neither are you. That is why, even on this Easter Day, we began by confessing our sins and receiving the assurance of God’s forgiveness in the words of absolution. It feels good to be forgiven. Maybe it has been a while since you heard those liberating words.

Because if Easter means anything, if Jesus’s resurrection is to have any purpose, surely it is to shout from the rooftops that God’s passionate love and suffering in the person of Jesus – crucified and raised – God’s passion for us can undo the worst that we can do. And we, meditating on the teachings and life of Jesus – and living them – we will roll away tomb-stones and raise the dead.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

Easter Day A – April 5, 2026

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“The Passion of the King”