I was fifteen years old when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. To be truthful, I didn’t pay too much attention to him at that age, but I knew he was a good person trying to do good things.

  His death led to riots around the country. I was listening to a Chicago radio station a couple of days after his death as I was falling asleep. There was a report about a man who had been killed in the riots there. He was simply walking out of his apartment when he was shot and killed.

  Suddenly, right as I was trying to fall asleep I was plunged into what I guess we would call an existential crisis that lasted for three pretty much sleepless nights. The more I thought about Martin Luther King, Jr., and that unnamed man who was shot coming out of his building, the more I struggled with issues like mortality, God, call, commitment, faith.

  I didn’t know anything about the man who was shot. But I assumed he hadn’t done anything worth being shot for. And I knew that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been killed not because he had done something wrong, but because he had done something right. At 15 years of age, I was trying to put an awful lot together. The universe was seeming awfully unfair, and I was realizing that no one, not even myself, could continue to assume it would be fair.

The church I had been going to for maybe a year, I didn’t go to church much before then, had an altar call at the end of each service. It wasn’t a big deal, not the verse after verse kind of thing, with every head bowed and every eye closed. But it was emphasized that a public profession of faith in Jesus Christ was the gateway to new life.

  I was pretty skeptical about all of that, but the more I laid awake those nights, the more I thought about it. Maybe this whole Jesus thing wasn’t as pie in the sky as I thought it was, maybe they were on to something. I kept thinking that Christianity didn’t really make sense, but now nothing else was making sense. And Martin Luther King, Jr. had seemed to latch on to Christianity in a big way.

  I laid awake and paced and finally realized that I needed to get myself up to the front of that church. So on the next Sunday, almost before the hymns were opened to the right page, there I was, and glad to be there.

What I hadn’t caught on to at the time, was that journey to the front of the church was a beginning, not an end. And I think that is what I learned most from Martin Luther King, Jr. as in the years ahead I realized more and more what kind of man he was.

  We’ve talked about this before, but I find it really intriguing that in the Gospels all Jesus says to the disciples when he encounters them is, “Follow me.” He doesn’t tell them where he is going. There is no statement of faith they have to sign, no set of doctrines they have to subscribe to, he doesn’t make any promises other that they will find life, whatever that means.

  Conversion, I began to realize, since those days that I appeared at the altar of the Big Walnut Baptist Church in Reelsville, Indiana is something that happens in our lives again and again and again.

  It took learning more about people like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Oscar Romero whose life story we will be thinking about tonight, to help me to realize that. They both experienced all kinds of conversions as they followed Jesus, what they did was out of commitment to the one they had decided to follow. Neither one of them would have ever imagined they would end up where they did, but they were in it for the long haul, figuring it out, like we all have to do, along the way.

  So when I think about the part Martin Luther King, Jr. played in my conversion, I realize that the what is more important is the part he has played in my conversions along the way, as I keep on trying to figure out what Jesus was saying when he said, “Follow, me.”