I’ve known for a while I was going to be preaching today. So, I‘ve been thinking long and hard about what I might want to say right after this election. I have had a range of emotions over the past seven days, as I realized that this Sunday wasn’t going to feel like I hoped it would.  I’ve also been growing out my undercut for a couple of months, and I thought that by now I would have a whole new look and be past this awkward in-between phase I’m in. I was planning to make a joke about how change takes time, a very long time, and I underestimated how much. Maybe you’re also feeling foolish for being hopeful. Maybe you’re also dealing with that terrible feeling of unsafety in your body. Maybe you’re also full of righteous anger for people you want to protect. If you don’t feel any of those things following this election, it would mean so much to me if you would try to understand why other people in this room do. Why I do, like so many other young women.

        Mostly I’d like to tell you about my trip to Memphis, because I think that it will resonate.  Thanks to the United Church of Christ Pension Board, and all of you who support me, I recently joined the 15^th class of the Next Generation Leadership Initiative of the UCC. I got to spend four days in Memphis with thirteen other young UCC pastors from all over the country. The community we shared in that diverse small group of ministers with different races, genders, and sexualities gave me a renewed sense of hope for what the future of the church could be. If you’d like a taste of that feeling yourself, I suggest you go look up some young progressive pastors, wherever your preferred search bar is. There aren’t as many of us, but we who remain in the pulpits of churches are so loving and brilliant.

        We met in Memphis to see the National Civil Rights Museum, which was built around the Lorraine Motel, the place where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. In more ways than one, it was holy ground, with a powerful story to tell. The museum tells the story of our country, and the deadly injustices that happened during the 366 years of the transatlantic slave trade which brought 12.5 million kidnapped human beings across the Atlantic Ocean and sold them to people here on this soil. It was the largest forced migration in human history, and those millions of people grew the sugar, the cotton, the rice, and the tobacco that supplied our country’s economy.

        When we got to the civil war, there were nearly 4 million enslaved people in America. Most of them had been born into slavery, and they fought for their freedom. They were smart and brave. Many of them were people of faith. So many of them were women. They marched, preached, and protested alongside white abolitionists – many of whom were also preachers and people of faith that were willing to go out and do the right thing.

        But it was still a battle every step of the way.  After freedom, there was sharecropping, and lynching, and segregation. Still, progress came because of people who got educated and organized. One of the most moving things I heard was the voice of a woman who joined the lunch counter sit-ins, which were a protest against racial segregation at restaurants in the 1960s. I pressed a button on the museum wall, and she explained how they went into the day knowing they would be assaulted, but they were ready to endure it because they could see themselves reflected in the long mirror of history.

        In this moment that feels so disorienting, I think we need to see ourselves in the long mirror.  We aren’t responsible for the choices our ancestors made, but we are all living with the effects of racism and sexism now. These are very old wounds that we haven’t healed yet. That dark history of ours went on for far too long for us to be over it already. The same dividing forces that separate us from each other are still at work, but the future is still ours to co-create with God. Seeing the names of so many preachers on those walls of the Civil Rights museum made me feel proud to have the role I do in this moment. I stand in this pulpit alongside countless change-makers whose faith over time has been powerful enough to move the mountain that is this country toward greater equality.

        One of those ministers was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. whose last day was spent in Memphis supporting striking sanitation workers. I learned that he almost didn’t go to that rally, because he wasn’t feeling well. Friends say he was feeling depressed, even with all he had accomplished. So, he planned to take a day off and asked a friend to go in his place. But the sanitation workers had turned out for Dr. King, so they called his hotel room and told him to come see. When he got there, Dr. King gave a sermon called “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” where he said some relevant things like “only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”[1]

        He was there to support black sanitation workers who had no sick days, no overtime pay, no breaks, and no protection from the life-threatening hazards that came with their job. He encouraged them to both get involved politically and to stand firmly in their faith. There was no separation between the two for him. “It’s all right to talk about ‘long white robes over yonder,’” he said, “But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here!… God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day.”*

        Dr. King told them the story of the Good Samaritan. That one day a man came to Jesus to ask ‘who is my neighbor?’ and Jesus “pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho”* where there was a man in a ditch. Two people didn’t stop to help because of the position it would put them in. They thought to themselves “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”* Might I end up like him? But when the Good Samaritan came by, he asked himself a different question. He had what Dr. King called “a dangerous unselfishness”* because his question was, “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”* The good neighbor was the one who went down into the ditch to give first aid to a stranger in need, because what happens to strangers is our concern.

        We read in Deuteronomy that it is God’s decree that we love the stranger, because at times we have been strangers too. And this command is for our own well-being, because a world where people are motivated to care about the needs of strangers, is a better world for everybody. As I walked through the museum and the decades that came before me, I saw that there has always been someone fighting for their right to be free and equal here. That is the reality we live in, and what we face now comes from those same old unhealed wounds. There are still more people fighting and working for equality on this soil.

        If anything that happened this week made you a little more aware of the power that whiteness and maleness still carry in this country, good. That means you are more aware of it, and you can take steps to help make it change. We are all on this boat together, but those of us who are closer to the wheel need to help right the ship. Division and fear make us easy to overwhelm, but the church knows how to be a team with a common purpose. Better yet, we already know the assignment.

        Our job isn’t to start a new movement, it is to become a part of a very old one. The movement of the Spirit of God. One of my favorite songs when I feel a little hopeless is called “You Can’t Stop the Spirit” by Ana Hernandez and Fran McKendree. It goes, “You can’t stop the spirit, she goes on and on, she is like a mountain old and strong.” That old, strong, Spirit of God is still with us now. The way forward is the same as it always has been. We build communities of care, especially now. We work with God to transform human hearts and build bridges across divides, especially now. We honor the work toward justice that people of faith have started, including the veterans we will remember tomorrow, and we use every right that they defended, fought for, and won for us to protect future generations now.

        After that rally, Dr. King and his friends went back to the Lorraine motel. One of the few places that people of color were allowed to stay in Memphis at the time. They were relaxing after a long day, laughing and making phone calls to their family. Dr. King’s last words were to ask for his favorite song, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” Then a shot came from across the street, and the 39-year-old preacher was gone. His loss devastated people everywhere, but the movement for justice was not done. We are not done. To keep going now, we will need the same things they needed then. We need wells of strength to draw on, we need spaces where we can build connections, and we need a hope that never runs dry. These are things the church knows how to offer. We will continue the work of reconciling ourselves to God and each other now by leaning into what we do best.

        We will continue to welcome everyone. We will keep making more room at our tables, embracing all that we can so that this can be a place where people grow by meeting strangers and becoming neighbors with them. We will continue to love everyone, no matter who they love, and no matter where they come to us from. We will tell them they are unconditionally loved, and then we will find ways to show up for them if it comes down to defending their human rights, or their lives. We will continue to serve total strangers and each other for no other reason than it’s the right thing to do. We will continue to make life better together, not just for ourselves but for everyone we can.

        Perhaps the greatest service we can offer to the world right now is that of changing human hearts through community and education. This is a place where we teach people how to be kind and brave, so that whatever they do with their one wild and precious life, they can do it kindly and bravely. This is where people come to learn how and why to live with compassion, because spiritually empowered compassionate people are the kind who make the world a better place. Maybe that is our act of resistance in this country where we are so often at war with ourselves. If we want a harvest, think of the harvest we could plant right now for future generations if we respond in this moment by becoming evangelists for caring about each other in a country where there is a lot of indifference.

        That mission field is right here, in our own community, and maybe the best way that we can do justice is by changing people here and raising up more kind and mindful people for the future. You’re not wrong if you think that’s a lot to do, and it is scary. There are uncomfortable conversations, and uncertain times in our future, but we are not the first Americans to face our fears. My humble prayer today is that together we will dream up some ways that right here and right now in Medina Ohio, we can bend the universe a little more towards justice.

        At the end of this church service, we closed with the song Precious Lord. I recommend you go and take a listen. You may be tempted to immediately think of white robes up yonder, but I recommend that you pluck that vision out of the air, and place it right here, right where we are, with all our emotions and everything else we carry, and see if it doesn’t feel a bit different. Amen.

[1] Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “I’ve Been To The Mountain Top,”  April 4, 1968.
You can read the whole speech here: https://www.afscme.org/about/history/mlk/mountaintop

* Denotes that a quote comes from this same speech.