Do We Have a Place in the Story?
Tomorrow, it hardly needs to be said, our nation celebrates the birthday of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who would be 96 today, if he hadn’t been assassinated at the age of 39–in the prime of his life and at the height of his public ministry. We will hear familiar phrases:
“With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”
“Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
“True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”
“I have a dream.”
“Content of their character.”
We’ll hear about successes: about the Montgomery Bus Boycott during which he emerged as a leader, and which resulted in the integration of the Montgomery buses; about Bloody Sunday and the Marches from Selma to Montgomery that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We’ll see the pictures of him and Coretta at the head of the long column of marchers. We may hear, from speakers and media outlets that bother to go beyond the easy highlights, about Dr. King’s increasing focus on economic justice and his vocal opposition to US involvement in the war in Vietnam.
We’ll hear these stories and others from the civil rights movement in this country in the 1950s and the 1960s, and it will all seem so. long. ago. Some of us were children in those years. Some of us, not yet born. Here in a new century, a new millennium, Dr. King has his federal holiday. And a memorial in Washington, DC. And if we’re weary or overwhelmed or perplexed by intersectionality of injustices and worried about getting it wrong as white, middle-class progressives–those of us who are white, middle-class progressives, that is–for all these reasons, it’s tempting to close our hearts or look away, and say “that story’s been told. That history has been written. If we weren’t there in Selma or in front of the Lincoln Monument or at a lunch counter or on a Freedom Ride, there is no place for us in the story of the pursuit of civil rights in this country.”
But I mentioned just a moment ago Dr. King’s turn toward economic justice and the anti-war movement. And the line I quoted earlier about injustice anywhere being a threat to justice everywhere, was followed immediately, in Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, with these words, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” And our own newly articulated Unitarian Universalist values have among them interdependence and transformation. So I am called to answer my own sermon title question “do we have a place in the story?” with a firm, “yes”.
[We are young and old together…]
Once upon a time in 1935 President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the Security Act, and in 1937 social security taxes were first collected and the first one-time lump-sum benefits were paid to retirees. From 1940 onward, regular monthly benefits have been made to retirees, with survivors benefits added in 1939, and disability benefits added in 1956.
Once upon a time in 1965 Medicaid and Medicare were signed into law.
Once upon a time in 1939 the first food stamps were issued in the United States. Over the next 86 years food assistance programs have expanded and contracted, eligibility requirements and program benefits have become more stringent and more generous. In fiscal year 2022 just under 60% of SNAP recipients were under the age of 18 or over the age of 59. In fiscal year 2023 Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) served about 6.6 million participants, including an estimated 39 percent of all infants in the United States.
While we can’t say definitely yet, what the new administration and Republican controlled Congress will do following tomorrow’s inauguration, we do know that in his first term the incoming President attempted to make drastic cuts to SNAP, and we do know House Republicans are calling for drastic cuts to Medicaid, and we do know Project 2025 calls for cuts to all of these security net programs that protect the young, the old, and the vulnerable, and we do know that the incoming administration has close ties to the architects of that plan.
We are young and old together, and we have a place in the continuing story of protecting the youngest and the oldest people of our country. Once upon a time one of the stories was of young people marching, subjecting themselves to violence and jail in order to fight for civil rights and protect their parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents who would have lost their jobs if they had marched. Today the story might be about older people showing up at rallies and visiting the offices of elected officials to insist that health care and food programs for our children and youth continue to be funded and even expanded. And it might be about young working adults remembering that we all do better when we all do better, and so showing up at rallies and visiting the offices of elected officials to insist that Social Security and Medicare be protected–for the senior citizens of today and for our future selves. And the story might be, the story is about all of us of any age writing checks and collecting non-perishable food items and volunteering at food pantries and meal programs, because the hunger gap in our nation is already too wide and is likely to get wider. We need to address it on all fronts–through advocacy and mutual aid and at the ballot box whenever that is an option. Because economic injustice anywhere is a threat to economic justice everywhere.
[We are a land of many colors…]
Once upon a time European explorers, conquerors, arrived on this continent where tens of millions of Native Americans, in several hundred tribes already dwelt. Once upon a time, wave after wave of European immigrants, many of our ancestors, arrived on our shores seeking economic prosperity, religious freedom, and escape from oppressions of many kinds. Once upon a time immigrants from China built much of the infrastructure of the United States. Once upon a time people from the African continent were kidnapped and brought to this continent as human chattel, and when enslavement was outlawed in our country, Jim Crow became the law of the land in many parts of the country. Once upon a time Japanese American citizens were gathered into internment camps, stripped of freedom, livelihood, property. Once upon a time and still today immigrants from Mexico, South and Central America, as well as countries on other continents, still come to the United States seeking relief from poverty and violence, religious persecution, and oppressions of many kinds.
Once upon a time and still today we are a land of many colors, and over and over again we have struggled to live into the depth and abundance of the creativity, prosperity, resilience, and culture those many colors offer us, having succumbed instead to fear of scarcity, fear of difference. The incoming administration has promised mass raids and deportations of undocumented beginning as early as tomorrow, and has threatened to end birthright citizenship. We have a place in the story of preserving our land of many colors as advocates, witnesses, protestors, providers of asylum. But undocumented immigration is only one chapter in our ongoing story as a land of many colors. Education, hunger, income, incarceration rates –so many metrics reveal inequities among races in our country. And we have a place in those other chapters, too–tutoring, lobbying at the state capitol, working for police reform, running for school board.
As vital as all those roles are, there is another place we must enter into the story, another kind of witness and advocacy centered on joy and celebration of all the creativity, prosperity, resilience, food, music, art that comes from being a land of many colors. Joy and celebration in and among and between communities will be increasingly crucial over these next four years.
[We are gay and straight together….]
Once upon a time same sex marriage was illegal. Gay bars were illegal. Gay sex was illegal. Gay men and women serving in the military of this country was illegal. Gay, Lesbian, and Trans existence was ignored, denied, threatened–and if it could have been made illegal, it would have been. In late June 1969 the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City, was again raided by police, as it had been many times before, as most gay bars in many cities had been many times before. For five nights the LGBTQIA community (though it wasn’t known by that set of letters then), led by transwomen of color including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, took to the streets, responding to the raids as an act of protest and self-preservation. That response that would initially be mislabeled the Stonewall Riots and later known as the Stonewall Uprising, is considered a galvanizing event for the Gay Rights movement. Forty years later the repel of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell allowed gays and lesbians to serve openly in the US Armed Forces. Five years after that with the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, same sex marriage became legal throughout the United States.
Meanwhile, once upon a time, Harvey Milk was assassinated in 1978 (and the hymn we've been singing was written in the wake of that murder), Mathew Shepherd beaten, tortured, left to die tied to a fence in rural Wyoming in 1998, and scores, if not hundreds of people have been died at the hands of others, both before Stonewall and since, because they were gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, two-spirit or intersex.
In 2024 the ACLU tracked 533 anti-LGBT bills in state legislatures across the country. So far in 2025–just 19 days into the year–that organization is already tracking 138 anti-LGBT bills. Many of these bills target trans-youth, endangering their physical and mental health, and threatening their very lives. Despite the historic and visible gains I mentioned above, and others including all the GLBTQIA people elected to public office since Harvy Milk broke that barrier, despite the gains, there is still a place for us in the story of the pursuit of recognition of the humanity of queer people–especially trans people–and the saving of queer lives. There is a place for us in working for the defeat anti-GLBTQIA legislation, in electing queer folx to office, in providing financial and material aid to families who need to move in order to keep their queer and/or trans member safe, in protesting book bans and, I repeat, in running for school board, in showing up as a faith community and as religious individuals whenever and wherever queer lives are in danger, and in showing up as a faith community and as religious individuals at PRIDE–because, again, celebration and joy are acts of resistance.
[We are a justice-seeking people…
We are a gentle, loving people…]
Once upon a time Frederick Douglass escaped enslavement and became a leading 19th century voice for abolition. Once upon a time Pullman Porters got a young boy safely to Mississippi and his body back home to his mother in Chicago. Once upon a time Rosa Park, already a trained and seasoned worker for civil rights, got on a bus and refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. Once upon a time, in 1965, James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo, and Jimmie Lee Jackson were martyred in Alabama in the fight for civil rights. Once upon a time John Lewis, a young leader in the civil rights movement who would go on to become a US Congressman, was beaten on Bloody Sunday. Once upon a time, once upon lots of time, many ordinary, extraordinary people whose names are not in history books, showed up for civil rights, for women’s rights, for gay rights, for indigenous rights in this country–writing and speaking, sitting in and teaching, marching and providing meals and rides. Some paid with their lives. All paid high prices for their commitment–beaten, fired, terrorized, spat upon, jailed.
Tomorrow is named for Dr. King, and rightly honors his great legacy. But the story was never his alone. The justice seeking people of our country, the gentle, loving people of our country predated him, and taught him, and walked alongside him in his time, and have outlived him. In our time we are called to be among the justice seeking, gentle loving people, individually and as a church. The story of the pursuit of civil rights, human rights, is older than our country and as vast as the entire world, though I’ve focused today on the United States, and there are so many places in that story for new protagonists. I don’t know the right and proper way for any one of us to take our place in the story. I know only that it matters that we attempt to find our place–in one of the ways I’ve mentioned this morning or in ways I’ve not imagined– because to do so is a beautiful, needful thing, and because our Unitarian Universalist values demand it of us, because our humanity demands it of us, because we are “tied in a single garment of destiny.”
Amen.
