June 21, 2024
Juneteenth is about more than Race
On Sunday, June 9 the Reverend James Lawson passed away. Rev. Lawson was a force for justice in the greater Los Angeles area when I lived there, even though he had retired from his ministry at Holman United Methodist Church in LA in 1999, six years before we moved there. Both before that ministry, Rev. Lawson was a prominent leader in the civil rights movement with Dr. King. Rev. Lawson followed the lead of Rev. Howard Thurman, who studied pacifism and passive resistance with Gandhi in India. Where King was the visionary and a spokesperson for the movement, and Thurman was the philosopher and spiritual director of the movement, Lawson was the organizer. It was Lawson’s ability to train troops of non-violent protestors who were able to embody grace under fire that made this movement something to be reckoned with, and forced our country to reckon with its injustices.
Once when asked about the civil rights movement, Rev. Lawson responded “Don’t call it that. Call it the justice movement.” For him, it was about much more than civil rights. It was about the fight for the “soul of America.” This justice movement was, in the minds of its leaders, a challenge to the kind of toxic thinking that devalued human beings to the point that genocide and enslavement, and later made Jim Crow laws possible.
This fight for justice still ensues. Surely racism and many other “-isms” continue to exist. And those that promote the elevation of some people groups over others still exist and are active in perpetuating their views. This is an affront to the belief that all people are created in the image and likeness of God. It denies that all people are loved equally by God, and therefore should be loved by us, God’s children. The demeaning of any person or any people group is a justice issue.
This week we commemorated Juneteenth which reminds us of how slow justice is to extend its reach to people in need. It also reminds us how incomplete justice is, a work that is never fully done. As citizens of the United States, justice is an issue that ought to concern us. But this is also the work to which our God calls us. As we read in Micah 6:8, “God has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?”
And so let us all pray for justice in the world, near and far. And let us live out that prayer in the ways in which God has gifted us—as the individuals and as the church who gathers on the corner of Bellevue and Pike.
Might our God honor and bless these prayers, unspoken, spoken, and enacted.
With audacious hope,
~ Pasor Todd