I’d like to start this morning by asking you to take out the grey hymnals and turn in the back to Reading #584, “A Network of Mutuality,” by Martin Luther King, Jr.  Please read this responsively with me.

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. 

There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted.

Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that. . . 

.  . .We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.

We shall hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.”

That passage comes from  “Letter from A Birmingham Jail,” the most important piece Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, more important even than the “I Have A Dream.”   As we all know, in August 1963, the “Dream” speech inspired a nation with vision and eloquence during the historic March on Washington.   Four months earlier, however, it was the Birmingham “Letter” that had ignited the movement.  Think about the context. Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy had been arrested for participating in nonviolent action against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama and then thrown into solitary confinement.  In jail, King got hold of a newspaper with a scolding letter written to him by eight white “moderate” Alabama clergymen. They called on King to slow down, to wait for a better time, to be patient, to refuse to engage in civil disobedience, to be nice.  The letter made King furious, and in response he expressed profound disappointment in the church.

The Birmingham Letter haunts clergy of progressive congregations, at no time more than now during the Black Lives Matter movement, which is the truest movement we have seen since the end of the Vietnam War.  And by movement I mean a coalescing of spirit and action to overcome resistance to change, to equity, and to justice.   This letter, you see, is about meeting resistance:  the resistance of segregation laws to equality under the law, the resistance of white men with billy clubs and attack dogs to demands for justice, the resistance of the church to the creation of the kingdom and the Beloved Community here and now.  “For years now,” King writes,  “I have heard the word ‘wait.’ . . . This ‘wait’ has almost always meant ‘never.’ . . . There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice.  I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.”

And, so ironically, in speaking truth to power, King’s letter itself becomes resistance of the best kind: resistance to the reluctance, fear, and white supremacy that try to stop the roll of justice.  In essence, King holds up his symbolic hand and says,  “Wait a minute!  Hold your calls for patience.  Hold your self- righteousness.  Hold your timidity.  Hold them back, and open your hearts and minds to justice now.”   In his wonderful recent book Spiritual Defiance:  Building a Beloved Community of Resistance,” United Church of Christ minister Robin Meyers says that in the “Letter from Birmingham Jail, “ King laid out not only a defense of moral resistance to immoral laws, but a sermon on ‘the shortcomings of timid moderation in the face of injustice.’”  According to Meyers, the Letter so perfectly describes the reluctance of the church in our own time that “many [himself included] have been tempted. . . to petition to have the Letter from Birmingham Jail . . . included as the last book of the Bible in place of Revelations.”  (Oh, God, I love the thought of it.)

Every Sunday morning, in the Call to Worship, your worship associate says,  “We gather this morning as a beloved community of memory, resistance, and hope. ” When I first started serving here, I struggled a little with that statement, only because I realized how much you were claiming and committing to by saying it. “Beloved Community” is what King called his vision of a human community in which each person would be equally included with respect and love; a  community of resistance is one that actively challenges and dismantles injustice.   On this weekend, nearly fifty- three years after the letter was written, I believe the way to honor the legacy of King and all the other people of the Civil Rights movement is not through treating them as saints or doing one day of service on this weekend. (We should do service the year round.)  And it is not by taking a day off from work or having a furniture sale. The way to honor the legacy is to try to keep it going, to resist actively the injustice we see every day of the year.

For those of us who are white, it means doing something very uncomfortable:  recognizing our privilege and dismantling white supremacy .   No one wants to claim that label – privilege – because it suggests we don’t deserve what we have, and it shifts the burden from other people demanding power to us giving some of it up.  And we don’t want to face that we benefit from and participate in a system of supremacy.   But we who are white do.   We have unearned advantages because of the color of our skin.  We don’t have to defend that we deserved a job or admittance to a school.   In truth, we are more likely to be admitted to the school or get the job to begin with.   And as we should all be painfully aware by now, we don’t experience the terror of being pulled over for driving through a neighborhood not our own or being followed while going for a run in track shoes and trainers near our own home.  It means police thinking twice before shooting.  It means being given the benefit of the doubt.

Let me tell you a story that sums it up in an everyday way, a story included in the powerful documentary, “Cracking the Code.”  Two women, Joy DeGruy and her sister-in-law Kathleen, along with Barbara’s ten-year-old daughter, stood in a grocery store line together.  Kathleen, a biracial woman with very light skin and blue eyes, was ahead of Joy, a black woman.  When Kathleen reached the cashier, she wrote a check for her groceries, which the young white cashier immediately accepted.  Kathleen moved a few feet away to wait on her sister-in-law.  The cashier then rang up Joy’s groceries; Joy wrote a check, and the young woman said, “I’m going to need to see two pieces of identification.”  At this point, Joy’s ten-year-old daughter visibly tensed and asked her mother why they were asked for something different. Concerned about her daughter and aware of the two restless older white women behind her in line, Joy decided to say nothing and pulled out the requested identification. The cashier took the information, but then she pulled out the bad-check book and started flipping through it, looking for Joy’s name.  The women behind Joy started whispering loudly.

At that moment, Kathleen, who had seen what happened, stepped up and asked the cashier, “Why are you doing that?  You didn’t do it with me.”  “Well, I know you; you come here all the time,” the young woman said.  “That’s not true,” Kathleen replied.  “It’s my sister-in-law who shops here frequently; I’ve only lived here for three months.” At this point, the manager came over and, we assume, brought the situation to a conclusion.  Except of course it wasn’t concluded in the heart and mind of Joy and her daughter.  In fact, the most heart-breaking part of this story is that by the time the cashier started searching the bad-check book, Joy’s daughter was sobbing uncontrollably.   Although only ten years old, she’d been there before; her world was being shaped by the culture.

Here’s my question for myself, my question for you, particularly those of us who are white.  Say you are not Joy’s sister-in-law, but you happen to be standing behind her in line.  Say you see a person in front of her have the privilege of not being humiliated and suspected, but she is. Would you speak up?  Would you resist the injustice?  Would you be willing to give up a few minutes of your day, slow down the line, possibly be confronted or embarrassed, or even arrested?  Would you be willing to be an agent of change?  A person who seeks to create the Beloved Community?  It is important to take to the streets to protest egregious acts of injustice, and it is important to advocate for changes in the law.  But it is also important to do the acts of resistance aimed at hearts and minds, the acts that challenge the way things are.

Acting to dismantle injustice is certainly in keeping with our Universalist heritage.  The late Universalist Gordon Bucky McKeeman wrote, “Hell is, in fact, a burning issue for it is the issue of separation, whether we can, with safety and impunity, set up little islands in the human experience and therefore protect ourselves against any relationship with the mainland.  And Universalism says unequivocally it cannot be done.”   It is much the same as Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking of the “inescapable network of mutuality, a single garment of destiny.”

If the “Letter from A Birmingham Jail” replaced the Book of Revelations in the Biblical canon, I wonder what it might be called.   How about the Book of Resistance?  It would be a text worth embracing, a text for a new age, a text for the Beloved Community.