The Mennonite Church USA convention’s July 9 worship service in Greensboro, N.C., featured a 62-year-old sermon.

Martin Luther King Jr. preached the sermon in 1963. It was based on the convention’s theme scripture, Luke 4, which begins with Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.

Guest speaker Lerone A. Martin read the sermon, presenting it as a source of lessons relevant to justice-seeking followers of Jesus in 2025.

Martin is a historian, cultural commentator and faculty director at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. He is overseeing the editing and publishing of King’s papers.

Martin said Christians who want to proclaim good news to the poor “need to be clear about the temptations that will come our way.”

King said Jesus’ three temptations — to turn stones into bread; to jump from the top of the temple and be rescued by angels; and to gain worldwide power by worshiping Satan — are tests every generation must face.

Each involves taking a shortcut — trying to use bad means to achieve good ends — which is sure to fail.

King called the first temptation “the bread problem” — the desire to end poverty with a purely external solution.

But Jesus said people can’t live by bread alone because he knew human problems are not only external but also rooted in spiritual matters.

Jesus knew that “if we learn the other words that proceed from the mouth of God — love, brotherhood, justice, equality — then the bread problem, poverty, will be solved.”

The second temptation, to be rescued by angels after jumping from the pinnacle of the temple, calls attention to a temptation King said “every nation faces in every generation”: to consider itself exceptional.

“America says we are the richest nation in the world . . . and so we can drop off the pinnacle of international relationships and . . . the universe will make an exception on America’s behalf because we are special,” King said.

The final temptation — to rule the world in exchange for worshiping Satan — was a real test, King said, because Jesus wanted the whole world to hear his message.

This temptation tests “every man and every woman, in every generation,” King said, because Satan still offers this shortcut: “Use my methods, and I’ll help you get the ends that you seek.”

“This philosophy is running rampant in our society today,” he said. But it is a false promise.

“Immoral means can’t bring about morality,” King said. “Destructive means can’t bring constructive ends. . . . There’s a voice saying, you have a good end in mind — integration, ending poverty, equality, justice — why don’t you use violence to get there?

“But we must say, ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ For if we succumb to the temptation to use violence and bitterness as the means of our struggle for freedom, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate nightmare of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of violence and chaos. . . .

“There is another way — a way as old as Jesus saying love your enemies and as modern as the thousands and thousands of boys and girls sitting in at lunch counters across this nation,” King said.

He was referring to protests against segregation that were sparked by a lunch counter sit-in by four young Black men at a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro in 1960 — now the site of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, which some conventiongoers visited.

Martin concluded: “In the midst of all we are experiencing in this country right now, there is enough in the daily news cycle to anger all of us. . . . We must make sure to keep our means as just as the ends we seek. We have to continue to wage peace if we want to seek peace in the world. . . .

“Be mindful of the temptations our Lord and Savior experienced so that you, like Christ, will pass the test with an A plus.”

In the second installment of remembering 500 years of Anabaptist history by noting events of different centuries, Jay Bergen, pastor of Germantown Mennonite Church in Philadelphia — the oldest Mennonite congregation in America, founded in 1683 — gave brief remarks.

Many in the crowd applauded when Bergen described Germantown as “a congregation that has welcomed and celebrated and affirmed queer people in leadership for decades.”