Dr. Martin Luther King's words, I Have a Dream,
his great voice,
carry us to the mountain top.
He lifts our spirits, stirs hope in our hearts,
touches our deepest longing for a truly beloved community.
It's easy to make him something larger than life,
somebody different from regular folks.
You know in two public-speaking courses
his first year at Crozer Theological Seminary,
he received Cs.
You know Dr. King was initially hesitant
to get involved with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Rosa Parks had been arrested
for not giving up her bus seat to a white man.
Now was the time for the black community to act.
Dr. King approached the first meeting with apprehension.
The Montgomery Improvement Association was formed.
The floor opened for nominations for president.
Martin Luther. King was nominated.
The motion was seconded and carried,
and in a matter of minutes he was unanimously elected.
In his autobiography, King writes,
"The action caught me unawares.
It happened so quickly
I did not even have time to think.
If I had, I may well have declined the nomination."
They probably picked him, he said,
because he was the new minister in town.
Not long before that election, Dr. King and his wife Coretta Scott King
had talked about his not taking on any heavy community responsibilities,
since he had so recently finished his thesis,
and needed to give more attention to church work.
King was newly married and they had a baby daughter only two weeks old.
And he was only 25.
Dr. King wrote, "I was now almost overcome,
obsessed by a feeling of inadequacy,
in a state of anxiety...trembling."
His were some really human reasons for why not to get involved.
I'm new. 
I'm busy. My life is full.
I'm inexperienced.
I'm not enough.
I'm afraid.
Sound familiar?
The first day of the boycott, the buses were nearly 100% empty.
What a miracle!
Dr. King wrote, "During the rush hours the sidewalks were crowded
with laborers and domestic workers trudging patiently
to their jobs and home again, sometimes as much as twelve miles.
They knew why they walked,
and the knowledge was evident in the way they carried themselves.
And as I watched them I knew that there is nothing more majestic
than the determined courage of individuals
willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity."
That night when the meeting began, Dr. King later wrote,
"the opening hymn was the old familiar 'Onward Christian Soldiers,'
and when that mammoth audience stood to sing,
the voices outside swelling the chorus in the church,
there was a mighty ring like the glad echo of heaven itself."
Dr. King rose to speak.
He started hesitantly and then rose to more power.
"As we prepare ourselves for what lies ahead,
let us go out with a grim and bold determination
that we are going to stick together.
We are going to work together...
When the history books are written in the future,
somebody will have to say,
'There lived a race of people, a black people,
. . .a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights.
And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history
and of civilization.'"
Dr. King took them to the mountain top.
"The enthusiasm," he later said, "of these thousands of people
swept everything along like an onrushing tidal wave."
After ascending the mountain that night,
he woke up the next morning to leave the heights
and come back to earth.
The organizational demands were huge-
enough to weigh anybody down.
As the months of the boycott and the movement went on,
he received bullying phone calls, hate mail, death threats.
He was arrested, jailed, his home was bombed.
He was attacked, spat upon, jeered, set upon with dogs and fire hoses.
He feared for his family.
Dr. King knew the mountain top, the height of the wave.
He knew lonesome valleys,
and the coldest river Jordan, chilly and deep.
What kept him going?
Was it how the workers carried themselves as they walked?
Their majestic determined courage,
their willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity?
The voices inside and outside the church swelling in chorus,
a mighty ring, like the glad echo of heaven itself?
The enthusiasm of people like an onrushing tidal wave?
Was it faith that something larger than himself would sustain him?
All of us have times of dryness, of bitter cold,
times of sunshine and warmth,
times in the storm, in the night.
We've know heights and lonesome valleys.
What keeps us going?
When have you known, glimpsed, beloved community...
felt part of a multicultural, multiracial, multi-spiritual "network of mutality"?
Each of us has an inkling of deeper invitation,
connection to something larger than just ourselves.
We long for a beloved community,
a community of love and justice, with fairness and dignity for all.
When we step out there to make the beloved community,
to be more fully who we sense we were meant to be,
we have to hold on to something...
something we've known or glimpsed,
something we feel connected to, something sacred.
Those sacred moments lead us into our aspirations.
To transform the world, or help transform the world,
we have to be willing to be transformed.
We have to draw on something larger, deeper, bigger, wider, broader...
some essential wholeness.
Dr. King was not a Christian literalist.
He once referred to the Bible as "mythological,"
meaning not factual but symbolic truth.
He saw discussion and hairsplitting about Biblical miracles
as a huge distraction from the real business of religion-
work for social justice.
He valued rational, critical abilities,
and he felt a mystical connection to a divine presence.
His faith was essential to him,
gave him something to hold on to when he was tired,
when he was weak,
when he was worn,
and led him home to his deeper knowing,
to his sense of connection and oneness.
What do we hold onto? What is most sacred?
What will lead us to transform ourselves
to create the world and the community we dream of?
Let what is precious lead you home
Dr. King's favorite hymn was Precious Lord, Take My Hand.
If the royal and male metaphor of a word like Lord
doesn't carry you forward, that's understandable.
But it raises the question, inviting you to consider
the sacred moments you can hold on to,
the inspiriation that takes you by the hand,
the moments that can lead you on, carry you forward,
call you home.
Dr. King didn't act alone. He wrote in his autobiography,
"While the nature of this account causes me to make frequent use of the pronoun "I,"
in every important part of the story it should be "we."
This is not a drama with only one actor.
More precisely it is the chronicle of fifty thousand...
who took to heart the principles of nonviolence,
who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love,
and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth."
The story of Civil Rights goes back to Harriet Tubman.
The song Follow the Drinking Gourd was sung as a code,
as a map for run away slaves to head North to Freedom.
A drinking gourd was a hollowed out gourd that was used as a water dipper.
The Drinking Gourd in the song is code for the Big Dipper,
The constellation pointing to the North Star
provided celestial navigation for run away slaves.
The route to freedom, the Underground Railroad,
was a vast network of people
who helped guide, hide, feed, and shelter slaves escaping to free states...
Harriet Tubman was its captain.
The "we" of the Civil Rights story includes Henry David Thoreau.
Dr. King studied Thoreau's "Essay on Civil Disobedience."
He came to see that what the bus boycott was really doing
was withdrawing cooperation from an evil system.
The Civil Rights story includes Gandhi
who led campaigns in South Africa and India for freedoms,
massive actions of civil disobedience,
like the 248 mile Salt March in 1930.
Dr. King learned from Gandhi
collective non-violent, non-cooperation in injustice.
The unity of purpose among so many thousands of people
inspired more people to join the movement
and gave hope to the oppressed all over the world.
The "we" of the Civil Rights story includes
Montgomery's Women's Political Council,
African American women,
college and public school teachers and other professionals.
This women's organization was the first to call for a boycott.
The night of Rosa Parks' arrest, Educator Jo Ann Robinson
stayed up all night mimeographing 35,000 handbills.
The next morning students distributed the flyers,
asking blacks to boycott the buses.
Lots of people were leafleting.
The call to boycott spread all over the city.
When Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat,
it was no isolated incident.
Rosa Parks had been active for 12 years in the NAACP,
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
There had been other boycotts in other cities,
and the leaders of the boycott in Baton Rouge gave council.
E. D. Nixon, President of the Montgomery chapter of NAACP,
had relentlessly pursued justice for African Americans.
He said, "I was determined that I was gonna fight for freedom
until I was able to get some of it myself."
In 1944 he led 750 Montgomery African Americans in a march
to the courthouse to try to register to vote.
E.D. Nixon said, "The Montgomery Improvement Association
was not started just because someone came to town
or someone felt it was the proper thing to do at this time.
It was started because there had been a struggle of people for long years."
We are a part of the story.
We are ones to create the beloved community we dream about.
We haven't gotten there yet
We won't be there until everyone has food, shelter, clothing,
health care, meaningful work, respect and a say in what's happening.
It takes a sacred shift to make
a multicultural, multiracial, multi-spiritual beloved community
How can you embody it?
How can we together?
This is our holy task.
Let us rehearse this way of being.
We can witness for peace with our neighbors in Richmond.
When there is a death from gunfire,
an email notifies people of where a wreath will be laid
on Friday at the noon hour.
The wreaths' banners say, "a time for healing."
The fact that these killings are "not news"
leads to more pain for the community,
whose losses become "invisible."
There's a Sign Up at the Supercard table, if you would like
to bring a peaceful witnessing presence to this loss of sacred life.
In awhile we will sing "We Shall Overcome."
We are a soulful people transforming ourselves and the world
so let's sing like that.
Let's sing not like we are mourning a time that has come and gone.
Let's sing to show we are part of this on-going story
of making a beloved just community.
When we sing, "We Shall Overcome,"
let's rise up a little taller, in body, in spirit,
and sing a little bolder and braver.
You can coast to the promised land,
It's a long and rugged road.
We have to leave behind what's familiar
and the way we've always done things.
We have to step out in hope,
holding on to what's precious,
holding on to one another,
walking hand in hand, down the winding road,
knowing we are part of the story,
and the story is not finished.