Altar call

I saw The Reverend Doctor William Barber preach at Riverside Church in April 2017, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s revolutionary speech at that church. 

Rev. Barber read passages from MLK’s Letter From A Birmingham Jail, such as: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” It was clear that King’s call to liberal Christians to put themselves on the line was still urgent, that it was time to show up. I heard that call and needed to respond to that call and join the Movement, but I didn’t know what to do.

The second time I saw Rev. Barber was at Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village on the last night of something they called a Revolutionary Love Conference. I returned the following Sunday and immediately felt at home, or felt I was someplace that could become a home, a community, a place where I could get involved in the movement. I started going every Sunday and hadn’t been going long when Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, the senior minister, asked for volunteers to go to Washington, DC to commit an act of civil disobedience and likely get arrested. 

King’s call from the Birmingham Jail was summoning me. “One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” is what King said. I had nothing to lose. I was unemployed, and no family responsibilities at all, so I joined a group of 31 clergy, medical professionals, and other activists to disrupt the Senate Republican effort to do away with affordable healthcare. We were arrested and charged with the crime of disrupting the crime of robbing people of healthcare. I didn’t go to jail, I had to do community service.

The experience was an initiation, a baptism into the Movement, and I officially became a member of Middle Church the following Sunday. I fulfilled my community service obligation at Middle, doing clerical work and helping hand out sandwiches to the homeless people in Tompkins Square Park and Sara Roosevelt Park with the Butterfly meal program. I continued with the Butterfly mission after my community service hours were done and got more involved with Middle, going to protests and rallies, book groups and support groups.

I joined Middle Collegiate Church three years ago. Two years ago Rev. Dr. Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis founded the New Poor Peoples Campaign and I signed up. They were taking up the revolutionary movement MLK had started in 1968, one that unites blacks and whites and Asians and everybody else who labors and who are heavy laden and not getting a living wage, who are without healthcare, who are serving in a system that rewards those who exploit workers, punishes the poor for being poor, and punishes the sick for being sick. 

A system that punishes the black for being black.

I joined this campaign because it was evident we are now in a revolutionary situation and we need to get our values straight. We call this a moral fusion movement. We know that poverty is not a crime and is not natural selection but conditioned by an economic system that concentrates too much wealth in the hands of the few and that fails to provide enough for the essential workers. And all workers are essential in an economy. 

From quarantine to curfew in three easy months. Two years of preparing for the big June 20 rally in DC and now we are reinventing it as a virtual rally, but who knows what will be happening in two weeks? I was ready to get arrested in DC on June 20. How can we really put ourselves on the line? How can we turn this moment into a movement and this uprising into a revolution?

I stand with this call:

“Building a movement to overcome systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the war economy. Everybody's got a right to live. #PoorPeoplesCampaign”

#STOPWHEREYOUAREMONDAY

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