A Sunday That Made a Difference

On Sunday morning my neighbor opened her door to get her newspaper at the same time I did. As we were saying hello, my cat dashed out of the apartment and ran down the hall to her. He loves to play with her two cats. I followed him down the hall to watch them wrestle. We get such a kick out of our cats having play dates.

My neighbor mentioned she was going to Riverside Church to hear Jesse Jackson preach. I decided to go with her. We live nearby, and she told me, “When we hear the church bells ring we can leave and be right on time.”

Just walking into Riverside Church is impressive. The sanctuary is enormous and very ornate and beautiful. The “regular” choir has about 40 singers, many of them professionals. For each service, a large number of their ministry and lay people participate. Their membership is in the thousands, and this week there were about 700 people there.

Their order of service puts the sermon at the end. When Reverend Jackson went to the pulpit, he began with a quiet prayer, which reminded me he has been a minister longer than a social rights activist. His sermon was about gun control. He talked about how many civil rights leaders were killed by guns: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy and Medgar Evers. When he mentioned Evers, I recalled just having read about his murder in Mississippi in 1963 for my college class Democracy and Participation.

In this class, we are studying historical accounts of the initiation, mobilization and momentum of political movements. At church I was listening to someone who knew and worked with the people who struggled to get the civil rights movement started, and mourned as his friends were killed. This lent a special poignancy to Jackson’s sermon for me. He gave examples of lives lost to guns: from Vietnam to Columbine; suicides to homicides; accidents to executions. He pointed out that in so many of these instances, public and political interest sparked and then quickly faded until the next incident sparked it again. People think of each event as an inevitable tragedy, when broadly encompassing and enforcing gun control laws would have had a tremendous impact on preventing each of these incidents.

There is a sense today that the dynamic civil rights activists of the 1960s are gone forever. Listening to Jesse Jackson preach, I don’t think so. If we look around, there are opportunities to see and hear people who have a clear message about our society today. I’m really glad I went to church today.