Dear Beloved Community,
Last month, I read a new book by author and teacher, Sharon McMahon, called The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement. (It was fantastic! Add it to your list!) The book was just as the title describes, filled to the brim with names and narratives I’d never known, telling of the courageous, life-changing, community-transforming work these good folks had done, often in the face of oppressing limits and impossible odds. McMahon’s stirring call was clear: just like these twelve, we too are the small and the mighty.
One story was that of Septima Clark, a Black woman who lived in Charleston, South Carolina at the turn of the 20th century and wanted to be a teacher. The reality in Charleston in the early 1900s, though, was that no Black folks were allowed to be teachers – not allowed to be teachers at all, not just teachers for white folks. The disparities in education were profound: Charleston spent, on average, $48.59 per year educating a white student and only $.95 educating a Black student. And the governor of South Carolina was unambiguous: “when the people of this country began to try to educate the Negro, they made a serious and grave mistake, and I fear the worst result is yet to come. So why continue?”
Into that environment and outside the city limits, Septima Clark took her 100-person classroom of Black children, on backless benches, with chalkboards but no chalk and a handful of outdated books, and began to teach. She taught them how to read. How to learn. Along the way, she began volunteering with the NAACP, and experienced what a significant tragedy adult illiteracy was for so many. With her young students in mind, she created a new curriculum that met her older students where they were. And among so many other steps Septima took, one was using that curriculum to create a Citizenship School, teaching the adults in her community how to read and access the polls. “I’m not going to be the teacher,” Septima said to the school’s students. “We’re going to learn together.” Against all sorts of roadblocks – space, violence, suspicion – the Citizenship Schools found their footing. They grew and spread, 37 schools around the Sea Islands neighboring Charleston. Graduates passed their voting literacy tests and successfully registered to vote. In their community, Black voter registration went up 300%. And as the Citizenship School model spread around the Southeast, tens of thousands more lives were changed.
In a dearth of hope, she found it. In the absence of learning, she fostered it. In the darkness, light.
I tell you this story today, because perhaps in the aftermath of a rancorous national election with big personalities and an immense impact, we all (no matter the candidate of our choice!) need reminding that we are, too, small and mighty. That, like Septima Clark, outside the largest institution in our daily lives – the American government – we have agency to find our way to meaning, purpose, care without expecting this institution to create that pathway for us.
But beyond our citizenship of country is our citizenship within the kingdom of God. Perhaps we also all need reminding that this one matters most. (I know I do.) I said in Sunday’s sermon that at her best, the church should be a school of Love. Not an institution wielding influence and demanding obedience. Not a political juggernaut that wins elections and brags about it later. But a true community, an ekklesia, where we learn together. Tend together. Gather together. Grow together. Where we are shaped by an ethos, a calling, a Way, that can’t be divided between political parties but rather transcends them. Where we learn that Love is the greatest power of them all. “A more excellent way,” Paul calls it.
This kind of school binds us together with God, our strength and ever-present help in times of trouble. It rubs the film off our glasses accrued in the dailiness of life, and allows us to see the world and each other more clearly. It corrects our worst impulses to retreat, isolate, push away, and instead gifts us with each other for belonging, community, meaning. It calls our attention away from self and toward the most vulnerable, to table and water, to lost coins and found children, to salt and light, to peace and beauty and grief and memory. It fixes our eyes on Jesus, and writes on the chalkboard each day that our task is to love God and neighbor. It gives us Sanctuary when we worry, grieve, rage, and service when we’re ready to move into action. It trains us up with hope.
What is the church for? The church is for this. A school of Love for the living of these days.
Together in God’s work of Love,
Pastor Emily