BANGOR, Maine— Three local churches will hold a Service of Light in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at 4 p.m. Sunday at St. John’s Episcopal Church, 225 French St.
All Souls Congregational Church and Destiny Worship Center will join the St. John’s congregation for the annual service. Special music will be performed by combined church choirs and the Bangor Area Children’s Choir.
The Rev. Dr. Lloyd Anthony Lewis Jr., 67, of Washington, D.C., will deliver the sermon.
“He has been an important leader in the church as a scholar and theologian, and as an African-American,” the Rev. Rita Steadman, rector at St. John’s, said of Lewis in an email announcing the event. “When we invited him over a year ago, we could not foresee that this would be a year of such painful racial prejudice and violence in our country. We are grateful to have Dr. Lewis particularly this year to raise the visibility and importance of commemorating the life, witness, and legacy of Dr. King by his presence as a national leader within the church.”
Lewis said that he wants people who attend the service to “be sensitive to the fact that the struggle for civil rights, given where society is at this time, is not over” but he did not say exactly what his sermon would focus on.
King’s message still resonates “because human dignity continues to be challenged in increasingly subtle ways,” the Episcopal priest said.
While Lewis has spent much of his career as an academic at seminaries in the Northeast, his preaching style is rooted in the African-American church.
Lewis, a native of Washington, D.C., said Sunday’s visit would be his third trip to Maine in his lifetime but the others were during the summer months.
“Memorable during one of the trips was swimming in what had to have been the coldest quarry water I have ever encountered in my life in the middle of July,” he said in an email.
Lewis also said that last Sunday he met for the first time U.S. Sen. Angus King, a lifelong Episcopalian, at “a little church on Capitol Hill.” As a teenager, King attended the March on Washington with his church youth group and heard King deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech.