For those who are over forty years old, where were you in 1963? As this generation will never forget September 11, 2001, the year 1963 was a demarcation for most of us when President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, November 22. We all have our stories. I was a senior in high school seated in Mr. Alemada's Spanish class when the announcement came over the public address system. That sudden tragic event had a great impact on us and on our nation but it was not the issue that consumed our country for the first ten and a half months of the year. The year 1963 was the 100^th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and across the land were heard the shouts of "Free by 1963!" and "Freedom, Now!" In April, protestors conducted sit-ins in Birmingham, Alabama, at segregated eating facilities. In June, Governor George Wallace "stood at the school house door" of the University of Alabama refusing to let African-American students respond to court-ordered integration. On June 12, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot and killed in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi. In September, four little girls who were putting on their choir robes at the 16^th Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham were killed when a bomb, placed by a Klansman, exploded near the rear of the church building.

I am ashamed to say that as a sheltered teenager in a de facto segregated suburb of Los Angeles, I was aware of the issues but had no idea that they were something I could or should do anything about. Luckily for our nation, there were others who stepped forward when I did not. Some of you were among those who heard and followed the call. Certainly, the most influential in the country was The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King had became the symbol of leadership in a movement that had been brewing in many cities since the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954. The Supreme Court, as you know, had ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. In August of ‘63, at the culmination of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, King stood at the Lincoln Memorial in front of 250,000 people and delivered his now-famous "I Have a Dream" speech. The words of the speech began to ripple across the country, repeated and pondered and studied, inspiring and challenging both blacks and whites to "have a dream," to truly "let freedom ring," to join hands and sing, "Free at last!" For those who were concerned about a change in the balance of power, who preferred life to continue as it had been, the words were confrontational. Even in Los Angeles, far from the southern states, hearing King's message was frightening to some.

"Our hope is that with this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray
together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom
together knowing that we will be free one day. This will be the day when all of
God's children will be able to sing with new meaning, ‘My country, tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty…'"¹

"Pray together." Still, today, forty years later there is work to be done especially on Sunday mornings.

King said, "Our hope is that with this faith, we will be able to...go to jail together." Would you be willing to do that? Just four months earlier, in April, King had written his famous Letter from the Birmingham Jail. Against the advice of fellow clergymen, he chose to submit to a jail term after being arrested for defying a court order. Challenging the injunction he had continued to march and lead sit-ins to desegregate the downtown lunch counters, fountains, and rest rooms and to demand the hiring of blacks in local businesses and the government in Birmingham, Alabama. Steeped in the non-violence teachings of Ghandi, King preached that one who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.² So there he sat in an isolated cell, writing a lengthy letter on scrapes of paper to the clergymen who remained outside, who didn't join with him but instead encouraged him to be patient, to wait, to go along with the court order. To them he wrote words that are certainly as important to us today. "If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century."³ From your experience, has that happened? That letter didn't speak simply to clergy but to people across the country questioning their own commitment to equality and freedom and the risks they were willing to take for fellow human beings.

"The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?"⁴

So…where were we in '63? Would we go to jail for the freedom of another? Some in our community were willing to risk it. Louis Patler, a high school student in 1961, participated in a Freedom Rider bus trip organized by his church in Los Angeles. Expecting to "sit in" at lunch counters in Nashville and Baltimore, his group was surprised to find segregated waiting and eating areas as early as Oklahoma City. After accidentally walking through the "blacks only" waiting area that did not include a lunch counter, sixteen-year-old Louis was approached by police and handcuffed. He sat in a squad car for several hours while chaperons negotiated with the police finally agreeing to leave town immediately in exchange for Louis' freedom. Further on in Nashville, the group slept on the sunken floor of a school gymnasium, several feet below street level. During the night, cars approached the building and unloaded bullets breaking almost every window above the frightened students. The gunmen were never apprehended. Civil disobedience is a powerful tool but it can be terrifying for those to whom it is directed. As King said in his letter from the jail, "There is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake." The choice made by Patler to participate as a Freedom Rider was quite a lesson for a young teen-age boy.

The Rev. Dr. William Perdue was the very beloved pastor of this congregation through the decade of the ‘70s. In 1965, King planned a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to insist on an end to police violence and to demand that blacks be allowed to vote. He invited white clergy from across the country to participate. While serving in the Stone Presbyterian Church of San Jose, Rev. Perdue was selected by the larger governing body, the Synod of the Pacific, to represent them in the march. He was well aware that merely being there was risky and caused worry for his family and close friends but he was determined to go and felt called to be with other clergy protestors. Bill joined with the 25, 000 who walked from Selma to Montegomery that year. Following the march, he continued on to Washington to lobby for the Voting Rights Bill meeting with Congressmen John Burton and also John Lindsay of New York.

Our final congregational story is told by registered nurse and church school teacher, Bertha Cashin. Just prior to World War II, Bertha served on the hospital staff in her town of Keene, New Hampshire, working with Dr. Phillip Daniels. Bertha loved having the toddler son of Dr. Daniels', young Jonathan, come by the hospital and visit. Years later, in 1965 as an Episcopal seminary student, Jonathan volunteered to assist with voter registration in Alabama after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. When making choices in his life, he frequently quoted the passage from the Prophet Isaiah, "Who shall I send?" "Here am I, Lord. Send me." In the Fall of 1965, in the midst of gun shots fired into the voter registration area, Jonathan pulled aside a woman who was in the line of fire and took the bullet himself. King later spoke of the heroic sacrifice of that young twenty-six-year-old man who died that day. The Maryknoll organization produced a video of Jonathan's story that will be available for your viewing in the library at 11:15 this morning.

So…what are the issues we would die for or at least be willing to go to jail for this Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday in the year 2003? Do you know what they are for you?

In our gospel lesson this morning, Jesus didn't go to jail nor was he killed for allowing his disciples to pick and eat corn on the Sabbath. However, his civil disobedience, his holding to God's law of love and mercy, a higher law than the Sabbath observance held by the Pharisees brought Jesus one more step closer to Holy Friday. We know, of course, that without Holy Friday there never would have been an Easter morning, a resurrection, a new life. What is important enough to you in your life to take that kind of a risk, to put your life on the line for some aspect of justice that has not yet been fulfilled in our world? Without having something for which we would be willing to stick our necks out, for which we would be willing to go to jail, our lives can be empty, routine and meaningless. With it we feel a passion for life and a reason for being, the excitement that comes with risk-taking and the knowledge that God has called us to something more, to a life of justice and truth. As a nation, the civil rights movement brought significant, desperately needed changes in the way we live together but recent events in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in Jasper, Texas, and in Fremont, California as well as thoughtless words from the Speaker of the House of Representatives make it clear to us that we haven't yet rid the country of hate. Forty years later King continues to challenge us from his Birmingham Letter, "Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men (and women) willing to be co-workers with God…"

Closing song - Have You Been to Jail for Justice? By Anne Feeney

1. "I Had a Dream" Speech, August 1963

2.Letter from the Birmingham Jail, April 1963

3. ibid

4. ibid