Friday, January 15, 2021
It’s Friday. My in-box is flooded with calls to provide service on Monday, January 18, celebrated as Martin Luther King Day. The day of service idea was developed to be a counterweight against the three-day-weekend-sale binge that accompanies most other Monday holidays such as Presidents Day, Memorial Day, or Labor Day.
Today, Friday the 15th, is the actual birthday of Martin Luther King. In 1970, just two years after King was assassinated, we had 201 million persons in the U.S., according to the Census; now we are 331 million. That means for most Americans, King is history, not memory. There is a difference between history and memory.
It is a weekend for memories. Sitting at my Aunt Ruby’s dinner table on a hot Alabama summer afternoon in 1956, I heard the family talking about the “terrible things’ going on in Montgomery – they meant the bus boycott led by that “upstart preacher.” They went on about how the “colored” who lived in miserable shacks down the back road should be grateful for what they had. This past week we saw the result of the same attitudes. God save us.
Prayer for the Day
You call us to pursue justice, Holy One, but we turn away
For we want you in moderation and not with your full fire.
Move us from out the tepid lives into the passion of love;
Merciful Creator, chastise our faithlessness and fear,
Refine our intent and give us resolve in our actions
As we strive to live the Word shared with us,
In the name of him who opens us to your Spirit,
Even Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.
Thoughts for the Day
In order to see where we are going, we must not only remember where we have been, but we must understand where we have been.
- Ella Jo Baker, civil rights leader (1903-1986)
Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just and that his justice cannot sleep forever…
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Seek good and not evil, that you may live;
And so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you just as you said.
Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gates.
Amos 5: 14-15