Rev. Raphael Warnock took the pulpit Sunday morning at Atlanta's famed Ebenezer Baptist Church, just as he has for the past 15 years.

But this time he was speaking as an incoming U.S. Congress member — and the first Black U.S. senator from Georgia — at the church where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.

"It's unusual for a pastor to get involved in something as messy as politics," Warnock acknowledged on the campaign trail.