From Senior Minister Jay Leach: Andrew Young has a professional resume of remarkable breadth. Pastor. Staff person at the National Council of Churches. Organizer. Activist. Mediator. Then, still just 32 years old, he became the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and one of the leading figures in the civil rights movement. His work in Birmingham and St. Augustine and Selma and Atlanta helped spur the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Young was elected to Congress for three successive terms where he helped lead the Congregational Black Caucus. He was selected by President Jimmy Carter as United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Later he was elected mayor of Atlanta. He returned to the National Council of Churches for a brief stint as its president. Then he created the Andrew Young Foundation, an organization advocating for education, health, leadership and human rights in the United States, Africa and the Caribbean. He has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Frances Légion dhonneur, a Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award and more than 45 honorary degrees. By any measure, Andrew Young has been a momentous presence in our time. Young’s remarkable life has also included incredible challenges. He experienced, firsthand, the specter of oppression and racism. He was arrested for his activism. He was there in Memphis on that fateful day in 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. He lost his first political campaign. And, his comments have continued to stir controversy and conflict, resulting in resignations and personal setback. I had the privilege of hearing Andrew Young deliver an address on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Houston’s Rothko Chapel. There, in that intimate setting, a couple hundred of us listened as Young recounted his experiences and offered his commentary on where we had come from and why efforts devoted to human rights are still so very necessary. To conclude his brilliant speech, Andrew Young turned to the words of a song penned by the famed African American composer Harry T. Burleigh. With deep and compelling emotion, Young recited: I dont feel no ways tired, Ive come too far from where I started from. Nobody told me that the road would be easy, I dont believe He brought me this far to leave me. I thought about Andrew Young as I was viewing our congregation’s showing of “State of Conflict,” the Bill Moyers’ analysis of North Carolina’s political shift to the radical right. Many of us have been deeply concerned about what is going on in our state. We’ve raised our voices in protest, we’ve written our elected officials, penned letters to the editor, we showed up, spoke out, acted out of moral obedience resulting in several of us being arrested. And yet, to date, little seems to have changed. In fact, since the conclusion of the legislative session, we’ve encountered new sources of discouragement. Lax environmental oversight has resulted in the befouling of our state’s water. New attacks on public education threatened to continue our backward march. Candidates for national office dismiss science, deny equal rights, and debate one another for the title of most radically conservative candidate of all. For many of us, this is a time of such deep disappointment. So much of what we hold dear is being threatened. In some cases our professional lives and in others our personal lives are made so much more difficult by what is being said and done. It is discouraging. I find myself thinking often about what Andrew Young said. I reflect on all he had been through, all of the challenges and setbacks and insults and animosity and struggle. He’d been a first-hand witness to some of the worst we humans know to do to one another. But, his message to us wasn’t about giving up or giving in. Instead, in the words of the song, he actually claimed that he was not weary, having known for a long time that the road toward justice and equality was not an easy one to travel. I’ve come to realize: despair is a luxury of the privileged. Cynicism is an indulgence offered only to those who see giving up as an option. The pessimistic sense that nothing will or even can change is an extravagance that is simply out of the reach of those who realize that participation in the struggle for justice is not a voluntary activity but the compelling calling of a lifetime. If the summons within is strong enough, if the sense of how much it matters is strong enough, if the passionate commitment to the good and the true and the beautiful is strong enough, then it proves sustaining in the face of all that would seek to impede or reverse human progress. Our liberating religion beckons us not to believe but to act, to embody the best we know. Nobody told us that road would be easy. And, right now in our state, it is not. But words in another African American spiritual urge: O, walk together children Don’t you get weary Walk together children Don’t you get weary Walk together children Don’t you get weary . . . Despite the privilege that many of us have, we still cannot afford despair or cynicism. Things can and things will change. Because, as we know, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Peace, Jay
Posted on: Thu, 01 May 2014 18:40:50 +0000
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