Scripture Reading:  Isaiah 49:1-7 (NRSV)

Listen to me, O coastlands,
pay attention, you peoples from far away!
The Lord called me before I was born,
while I was in my mother’s womb he named me.
He made my mouth like a sharp sword,
in the shadow of his hand he hid me;
he made me a polished arrow,
in his quiver he hid me away.
And he said to me, “You are my servant, Israel,
in whom I will be glorified.”
But I said, “I have labored in vain,
I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity;
yet surely my cause is with the Lord,
and my reward with my God.”

And now the Lord says,
who formed me in the womb to be his servant,
to bring Jacob back to him,
and that Israel might be gathered to him,
for I am honored in the sight of the Lord,
and my God has become my strength— he says,
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

Thus says the Lord,
the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One,
to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations,
the slave of rulers,
“Kings shall see and stand up,
princes, and they shall prostrate themselves,
because of the Lord, who is faithful,
the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.”

In a commentary for our passage from Isaiah Charles Cousar speaks of the enlarged vision of God’s concern for humanity and calls this text “crucial” because it is one of many stories in the Old Testament that “breaks ethnic limitation and witnesses to the largeness of God’s rescue.”
that God’s saving grace is for all of us… regardless of race or ethnicity..
Cousar compares the prophet/servant to the late Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., whose vision of racial justice in the United States expanded dramatically to include issues of peace and economic justice:
“He [MLK, Jr.] knew that the question of rights is a humanity-embracing question. This poet in our passage already knows that God’s powerful will for homecoming has no ethnic limitation.”

While I was a chaplain at Syracuse University I was able to take classes for free so I took one on the Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement and we researched unsolved Civil Rights murders.
I want to share with you about 2 of our many civil rights heroes and martyrs this morning
As I prepared to do so I was mindful of how their lives were informed by the scriptures and how our scriptures today are a fitting setting to tell a bit of their stories.
I am going to tell you about Martin and James… 2 men of faith, ministers who were killed for their efforts to bring about justice for all without regard for the color of their skin

The Rev James Reeb, a white unitarian minister, had gone to Alabama at the request of the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
King had let the word out for ministers across the country to travel to Alabama following the event of a thwarted march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7. What became known as Bloody Sunday
On that bright Sunday afternoon 600 marchers, in ranks of two, moved slowly up the Edmund Pettus Bridge rising over the Alabama River.
Reaching the apex of the bridge, they saw below what was described as a “sea of blue”—an infantry of Alabama state troopers blocking the way.
Behind the troopers Sheriff Clark’s posse waited on horses.
The marchers stopped a few yards short of the troopers, asking to speak to their leader.
In response they were given two minutes to return to their “homes or church.” When the marchers did not move, the troopers advanced, hitting marchers with their nightsticks, kicking those that went down.
The posse rode directly into the panicking marchers.
Donning gas masks, the troopers released clouds of suffocating tear gas; news film captured the troopers flailing at the blinded and gagging marchers.
Perhaps there are those of you who remember seeing on television as the marchers began running back towards the bridge, stumbling over each other and trying to ward off the blows?
The troopers and posse continued to use nightsticks, whips, and rubber tubes as they drove the marchers through the streets of Selma.
Bloody Sunday was broadcast all over the US and world.

It was hoped that a call for men and women of the cloth, ministers, rabbis’ and nuns, especially white ones would deter further violence— like that of Bloody Sunday.

It did not.

On March 9, 1965 as Reeb and his colleagues Clark Olsen and Orloff Miller were returning from a meal to Brown Chapel to prepare for a 2nd march from Selma to Birmingham Alabama— Reeb was struck on the head by a group of white men.
On March 11 Rev Reeb died from the injury sustained from that attack.
He was just 38 years old, a husband and the father of 4 young children.

There were many eulogies said for the Rev James Reeb
but the words of the eulogy delivered by the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr. at Brown Chapel in Selma Alabama on Monday March 15 in 1965 has relevance for us.
They are words we still need to hear today.
Words that are about more than the death of one single man.
Words that were meant to and can still inspire us to work for justice for all.

The audience in Brown Chapel that day was a mixed crowd— Racially and religiously.
I do not believe that any members of the Reeb family were present.

There were those there who, like Reeb, had come to Selma at the request of King, and there were those who were there because of Reeb’s high profile death. Many were clergy. Black and white, old and young, men and women sat together.
There were people from many different faiths and backgrounds gathered in grief and also seeking justice.
King knew he had a multi-faith audience and chose his words and references accordingly.

Rev Richard Leonard recalled in his journal he kept during the 18 days he spent in Selma—- that the memorial service had been called for 2 pm but those who had been in Selma that week expected that the Rev Dr King would not arrive until around 3 pm.
It was warm due to the Selma heat and capacity crowd inside Brown Chapel. There were also others gathered outside for the event.
King arrived to cheers and applause from those outside and inside the chapel.

He began his eulogy for James Reeb by quoting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet : “And if he should die, take his body, and cut it into little stars. He will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night.”
“These beautiful words,” said Dr. King, “so eloquently describe the radiant life of James Reeb.”
‘‘James Reeb,’’ King told them, ‘‘symbolizes the forces of good will in our nation. He demonstrated the conscience of the nation.
He was an attorney for the defense of the innocent in the court of world opinion. He was a witness to the truth that men of different races and classes might live, eat, and work together as brothers.’’

In the heart of the euology King continued with a string of rhetorical questions:

Naturally, we are compelled to ask the question, Who killed James Reeb?
The answer is simple and rather limited when we think of the who.
He was murdered by a few sick, demented, and misguided men who have the strange notion that you express dissent through murder.
There is another haunting, poignant, desperate question we are forced to ask this afternoon.
It is the question ‘What killed James Reeb?’ When we move from the who to the what, the blame is wide and responsibility grows.

What King said was meant to cause some in the Chapel to shift in their seats and is addressed to all of us, let us sit back and listen as if we are there:

When we move from who killed James Reeb to what killed James Reeb, the blame is wide and the responsibility grows.
James was murdered by the indifference of every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained glass windows.
He was murdered by the irrelevancy of a church that will stand amid social evil and serve as a taillight rather than a headlight, an echo rather than a voice.
He was murdered by the timidity of a federal government that can spend millions of dollars a day to keep troops in South Vietnam, yet cannot protect its own citizens seeking constitutional rights.
Yes, he was even killed by the cowardice of every Negro who tacitly accepts the evil system of segregation, who stands on the sidelines in the midst of a mighty struggle for justice…
His death says to us that we must work passionately, unrelentingly, to make the American Dream a reality, so James Reeb did not die in vain.
One day the South will know from these dedicated children of God courageously protesting segregation, they were in reality standing up for the best in the American Dream, standing up with the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
When this glorious story is written, the name of James Reeb will stand a shining example of manhood at its best.

We face a world crisis which leaves us standing amid the surging murmur of life’s restless seas.
But every crisis has both —its dangers and its opportunities,
its valleys of salvation or doom in the dark, confused world.
The kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men.

And then he said: In his death, James Reeb says something to each of us,
black and white alike: that we must substitute courage for caution,
it says to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered him,
but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murder.
King’s message was meant to be personal, moving and inspiring.
King exhorted those present to leave their comfort zones and storm the bastions of segregation and see to it that the work Jim Reeb had been killed for be continued so that the white South might come to terms with its conscience.
King exhorted all of those present and us today to look at our own actions or lack of action in the face of injustice and violence.
He challenged us to not feel hopeless in the face of ignorance, hate and violence.

43 years later the daughters of James Reeb (Anne and Karen) held each other as they listened to Barak Obama give his acceptance speech when he was elected the 44th President of US.
Karen told a reporter, “In that moment, when he became president, it was such an affirmation of (my father’s) life,”
“People were dying to make a way for this little boy to one day become president.”

Our text from the prophet Isaiah is challenging and even scandalious.
Some of us may be limited in our vision when we think of how God wants us to be in mission; for example, we might restrict God’s mission to our own families, friends, congregation, neighbors, and folks we feel comfortable with,
while in this passage God speaks of “the nations”–not just those who are beyond our borders geographically but socially and psychologically, “those others” we haven’t included in our plans.
In what ways are we “a light to the nations” so that God’s salvation might reach to the ends of the earth?…
the end of the earth… is not always far removed from us… it could be as close as middletown or hartford

Are we willing to serve and welcome and reach out even to those who will never become members of our own community of faith, but who need our presence in their lives, who need our support, our prayers, and our active pursuit of justice?

I believe we are called to continue to question systems that encourage violence and injustice.
Together let us strive to do so in the days, months and years to come… let us work and pray to bring about God’s Beloved Community.

I am grateful to the example of women and men like James Reeb and Martin Luther King who heeded the call of God’s prophets in the scriptures and struggled for justice. Amen

References:
http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/eresources/ebooks/records/efh4956.html

http://www.uuhoulton.org/sermons/serm011903.html

Call to Selma: Eighteen days of Witness, by Richard D Leonard, (Skinner House Books, Boston, 2002)
Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Witness to the Truth.” (Eulogy for the Rev. James Reeb, March 15, 1965) UU World XV:2 (May/June 2001), 20-23. www.uuworld.org