E Pluribus Unum

One of my favorite films is “Blues Brothers,” released in 1980.  It featured a star-studded cast of cameo performances.

The film’s plot centers around the tale of redemption of two paroled convicts Jake, played by John Belushi, and his brother Elwood, played by Dan Aykroyd.

The Mother Superior of the orphanage in which they were raised sets the two out on a “Mission from God” to raise funds to save it from foreclosure.  It is a madcap adventure involving neo-Nazis and a frantic and relentless police chase throughout.  It featured cameo performances by Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker and Cab Calloway, among others.

One of my favorite performances is by Aretha Franklin, “Queen of Soul,” as she belts out the crowd-pleaser “R E S P E C T.”

Our two appointed lessons for the occasion of our Independence Day give substance to Franklin’s song.  They’re about an ethic of respect, which is meant to be the hallmark of our covenant with one another as Americans.  It is also meant to guide our nation in its affairs with the global community.

Recently, we lost a Giant of Justice, The Rev. James Lawson.  He was a good friend and colleague of mine when he served at Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles and I was serving that denomination.

More than that, he was one of the chief strategists and leading nonviolence theorist, working with Dr. M. L. King in the sixties.

Jim began his activism while still in high school in the 1940s.  He organized his first sit-in at a Massillon, Ohio, restaurant, a diner that refused to serve Black people.  The owner finally served him but told him never to return.[1]

Jim did not start out with pacifist leanings.  One day at school a white boy was taunting him with racial slurs and obscenities.  Jim hauled off and smacked him good.  While there were no repercussions at school, it was different when he arrived home and told his mother what had happened.

His father had always told him to defend himself, not so his mother. “Jimmy,” his mother scolded, “what good did that do?  There must be a better way.”  Her words stung like needles.  She refused to even look at him as she admonished his behavior.

Jim remembered thinking that his world “just sort of stopped.”  He heard himself saying in the depths of his being, “I will find that better way.”

While in college he joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist group committed to change through nonviolence.  He later refused to serve in the military during the Korean Conflict, serving 14 months in prison.

He was recruited by Dr. King to organize weekly workshops on nonviolent action while serving as a pastor in Nashville, Tennessee.  He trained many who would become leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

In 1953 he joined a Methodist mission to India where he became aware of Ghandi’s nonviolence resistance methods.  While in India he came upon a newspaper article covering the Montgomery bus boycott.  He reports “shouting for joy.”  He returned from studying Gandhian methods of civil disobedience and enrolled in Oberlin College, later transferring to Vanderbilt’s divinity program in Nashville.

There he began holding workshops in nonviolence, soon organizing sit-ins at lunch counters.  He relied on role playing, teaching others how to ignore taunts and slurs; showing them how to use their bodies to absorb the blows of hate and use self-restraint.

He knew these students must be disciplined and highly organized.  Fellows must wear suit coats and ties, the women in dresses and heels.  They would occupy stools at the lunch counters in shifts and maintain eye contact with their assailants.

Sit-ins spread.  A “’non-violent army’ of about 500 strong, drawn from Fisk University and other local colleges – leaped into action occupying three downtown Nashville lunch counters.  Over the next three months more establishments were targeted, to include bus terminals and major department stores.”[2]

After a group of 81 students were attacked by a white mob, Lawson was expelled from Vanderbilt, causing many faculty to resign.

Lawson remembers, “We had a very disciplined movement…with students as our primary energy.”

Three weeks later, an attorney who had been representing the demonstrators had his house bombed.  This triggered a yet larger march.  The boycott of white businesses spread.  Finally, the mayor issued an appeal to the white citizens of Nashville to end their discrimination.

Soon afterward, lunch counters began serving Black customers, reinforcing Lawson’s belief that nonviolent direct action was far more effective in ending Jim Crow than lawsuits which were seen as “’middle-class conventional, halfway efforts to deal with grave social injustice.”

SNCC continued to organize voter registration drives, becoming the militant arm of the movement.  After the first “Freedom Ride” was stopped by a white mob attacking the bus, a small group trained by Lawson, completed the trip.

Finally, TV coverage of white brutality and law enforcement violence did what all the lawsuits could not accomplish.  The revulsion they engendered throughout the nation caused President Johnson to move off dead center, ending his temporizing and silence.  Soon he would deliver a speech to Congress, closing with the famous line, “We shall overcome.”  Legislation was passed enshrining the right to vote and be free of discrimination in accommodations serving interstate travel – bus and rail lines, hotels and restaurants.  This legislation was the beginning of real democracy in America. 

This is a heritage worth celebrating.  Yes, much remains to be done.  The forces of racism continue to weaken and roll back this landmark civil rights legislation.  It’s like weeding in St. Francis Garden – our work to preserve these rights and others is never done.  The force for Evil is relentless, and so must we be as well.

Lawson was relentless to the end of his days, being arrested several times protesting the police killing of Eula Love in 1979 and for participating in demonstrations protesting US military involvement in El Salvador.  Later he risked a church trial for blessing the relationship of a lesbian couple in 2000.

He served as the head of the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Leadership Conference.  He was an important voice in the founding of ICUJP, Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace.  Along with three former presidents of the United States, Jim delivered a most eloquent eulogy at the service for Representative John Lewis, exhorting Americans to “practice the politics of the preamble to the Constitution” as a way to honor Lewis’ life.

Respect was the loadstone of Jim’s journey, the center of his public and private ministry.

R E S P E C T – the only glue that will hold our nation together in these perilous times.  Our democracy hangs in the balance.  As the revolutionary slogan of 1776 cautioned, we must “hang together or we will hang separately.”

We serve a God who “executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing.”  Remember, “you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”  R E S P E C T is our praise, our way of “paying it forward.” 

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father, [your Mother], in heaven; for God makes the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”[3]  Try as we may, we poor, fallible humans will most often fall short.  But among us there are some exemplars who come close.  The Rev. Jim Lawson was one who did.  For his life and for his witness to a Living Gospel with feet, we say, “Thanks be to God.”  Amen.

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[1] Elaine Woo, “Civil Rights Era’s ‘Leading Nonviolence Theorist: 1928 – 2924,” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 2024.  (This and the following are from that article.)

[2] Ibid.

[3] Matthew 5:45b, NRSV.

June 30, 2024
6th Sunday after Pentecost
Propers for Independence Day

The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
Deuteronomy 10:17-21; Psalm 145;
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail”; Matthew 5:43-48 “E Pluribus Unum”