How Rosa Parks saved us

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal Church on October 30, 2005.

In 1994, a young black man broke into Rosa Parks Detroit home and stole $53 from her and beat her. When I heard that it broke my heart. I remember thinking “didn’t he know what she had done for him?” Since her death last Monday, newspapers across the nation have recounted her story – a quiet unassuming woman who was simply too tired after a long day at work to comply with the insulting Jim Crow laws that said she had no right to sit if a white person was standing. Her subsequent arrest and conviction led to a boycott of the Montgomery Alabama buses for 381 days. It took all of the ingenuity and commitment of the black community to pull it off – they walked, rode bicycles, shared rides and the buses sat idle. The next year, 1956, the Supreme Court handed down their ruling making segregated buses illegal. It was the same year that President Eisenhower signed legislation that added “one nation under God” to the pledge of allegiance and made “in God we Trust” our national motto. Isn’t it ironic?

One of the players in the drama on the bus in Montgomery is an elusive character. Nowhere I looked could I find the name of the man who expected Rosa Parks’ seat. Was he the one who complained or was it a witness, maybe the bus driver? We have no record of how he felt about what was set in motion that day. I’d like to think that his story is one of enlightened redemption but he may not have seen Mrs. Parks courage as a blessing. It’s probably as well that we don’t know his name, because in his anonymity he became the white Everyman. Did he know what Rosa Parks did for him – do we know what she did for us? There is as much need for oppressors to be liberated from their efforts as there is for the oppressed to be set free. All things considered, Mrs. Parks did at least as much for white Americans as she did for black Americans.

I’ve never been really big on “Jesus saves” kind of language – partly because I’ve never heard it explained in a way that makes sense – until reading Brian McLaren’s wonderful book A Generous Orthodoxy. He has a chapter entitled “Jesus: Savior of What?” He starts with the crucial point that salvation is never just personal, it is for the whole world. He says, “God, throughout the Hebrew Bible, repeatedly saves from danger and evil, so to say that God saves means that God intervenes to rescue. God compassionately and miraculously steps in, gets involved, intervenes, and protects his people from their enemies and themselves.” God does that in three ways; by judging, forgiving and teaching.

Judgment has something of a bad reputation. It’s the only topic that we hate hearing about more than tithing. Inherent in the idea of judgment is the inescapable presence of guilt, of being wrong. We don’t like that and we really don’t like getting caught at it. But judgment is not only a good thing – it is a blessing. In a faith context, judgment means the return truth and justice. To be judged is to have your sins named and exposed. It’s an icky feeling but without it we do not repent and then there is no forgivenenss and then there is no reconciliation – in other words, we are stuck. Having the mirror of judgment held up to reflect our behavior is what makes us change and then forgiveness is possible. Judgment and forgiveness need each other. Either alone is insufficient but together they break the vicious cycle and we are free – we are saved. Rosa Parks was the mirror of judgment for white America. That’s what she did for us. The Civil Rights movement would never happened if the sin of racism hadn’t been so clearly exposed and convicted – laid bare for all to see.

The world is better off when the things that separate us and cause fear are uncovered and exposed to the light. The Civil Rights movement wasn’t about saving any one person but about saving us all. It’s ongoing work. Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks and many others became blessings to our nation. We are a better nation for having begun the work of deconstructing racism.

Back to Mrs. Park’s young assailant. One article around the time of the assault said that, right before he beat her, Mrs. Parks said to him “Do you know who I am?” He replied that he did, but that he didn’t really care. In that moment, Rosa Parks was once again where Harriet Tubman found herself – alone in her freedom. I’ve been to the east side of Detroit and I have some idea of what his life was like on a daily basis. By no stretch of the imagination, do I excuse what he did – if he were capable of shame, he should consume a double portion. But Rosa Parks was alone her freedom because he wasn’t there with her. However life has improved for our black brothers and sisters since Harriet Tubman’s walk to freedom in the 19^th century and Rosa Parks bus ride in the 20^th the world is still needs to be saved.

I want to share a story from Brian McLaren’s book that may help illustrate how what Rosa Parks did was an act of salvation for all of us. She opened up a future for us that one day we might just realize.

“Some people I know once found a snapping turtle crossing a road in New Jersey. Snapping turtles are normally ugly: gray, often sporting a slimy coating of green algae, trailing a long serrated, gator-like tail and fronted by massive and sharp jaws that can damage if not sever a careless finger or two. This turtle was even uglier than most: it was grossly deformed due to a plastic bottle top, a ring about an inch-and-a-half in diameter that it had accidentally acquired as a hatchling when it, too, was about an inch-and-a-half in diameter. The ring had fit around its midsection like a belt back then but now, nearly a foot long, weighing about nine pounds, the animal was corseted by the ring so that it looked like a figure eight.

My friends realized that if they left the turtle in its current state, it would die. The deformity was survivable at nine pounds, but a full-grown snapper can weigh 30. At that size the constriction would not be survivable. So, they snipped the ring. And nothing happened. Nothing.

Except for one thing: at that moment the turtle had a future. It was rescued. It was saved. It would take years for the animal to grow into more normal proportions, maybe decades. Perhaps even in old age it would still be somewhat guitar-shaped. But it would survive.”

Great story from Brian McLaren. Did the snapping turtle try to bite the helping hands – probably. Was it grateful afterwards? Of course not – snapping turtles aren’t wired for complicated emotions. It didn’t even know what they had done for it.