John 1:35-42; 6:5-9a; 12:20-23
I’ve always been kind of partial to Andrew. For one thing, I feel a little sorry for him. He’s somewhat of an underdog, being the brother of one of the “Big Three” apostles, Simon Peter. In fact, he is almost always referred to as “Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter,” as if that were his only function in life, to be someone’s brother. For another thing, I admire Andrew for a specific quality in him, a characteristic that I think embodies the gospel message of Jesus Christ.
What is that quality? Andrew is always bringing people together; specifically, he is always bringing people to Jesus. He was one of the followers of John who became a follower of Jesus, and the first thing he did after meeting Jesus was to go and bring his brother to Jesus. It is quite possibly due to Andrew’s action that Peter became an apostle and leader of the early church. Then, when Jesus was teaching great crowds of people who refused to go home, Jesus asked Philip where they might get enough food to feed them. The writer says that Jesus asked this question to test Philip. Philip evidently failed the test, because his response was basically, “There’s not enough money in the world to feed all these people!” But Andrew had a solution; he had found a boy with a lunch who was willing to share, and he brought that boy to Jesus. And Jesus took that small lunch and managed to miraculously feed all those people. In a third incident, some Greeks approached Philip wanting to meet Jesus. It seems that Philip had learned something from the earlier incident; if you want a solution to a perplexing problem, go to Andrew! And Andrew took the Greeks to meet Jesus.
Being able to bring people together is a gift. When people come together around a common belief, or a common cause, good things happen. They find that working together means they can accomplish so much more than any of them could have done on their own. But creating that kind of teamwork is not easy; it is hard work, which always means cooperation and often involves compromise. Not only do leaders have to work together, but they have to convince the crowds who follow them to work together, too.
Nowhere in American history do I see greater evidence of the good that can be done when groups of people come together and work together than in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. From the Supreme Court rulings on Brown v. the Board of Education in 1954, to the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, to the lunch counter sit-ins of 1959-60, to the March on Washington in August of 1963, to the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965, people worked together to bring tremendous change in our country. There were Christians and Jews and Muslims, black and white Americans, clergy and lay people, people of all ages, men and women, who took a united stand and brought about results, including school desegregation, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Let’s look at just a few of those key moments in our history.
First, the Montgomery bus boycott that lasted for 13 months, from December 1955 till the following December. Black bus riders were expected to sit at the back of the bus and to give up their seats to white riders if there were no other seats available. Since there were significantly more black riders than white, often there were large groups of black riders having to stand in the rear of the bus while seats up front were empty. There had been talk of a boycott for a while, but the civil rights leaders were waiting for just the right opportunity, just the right person to experience an arrest for refusing to give up a seat. And that person was Rosa Parks. She refused to give up her seat to a white man and was arrested. The black community began its boycott soon afterwards, believing that the bus company would suffer financial loss and that white businesses downtown would suffer from a lack of customers.
One of the issues that had to be dealt with during the boycott was providing alternative transportation for the black bus riders so that they could get to their jobs, to stores, and to other places they needed to go. Black people who owned cars offered to use them to carpool others, and black ministers offered their cars. Churches even bought station wagons that came to be known as “rolling churches” to get blacks to their destinations. Some white men who worked at a nearby Air Force base offered to drive, and there was financial support from the Jewish community and other anonymous white donors. Some white women drove themselves to pick up their black maids and babysitters. When the city tried to prevent the rolling churches from operating by pressuring insurance companies to refuse to insure them, Lloyd’s of London agreed to provide insurance.
As months went by, with no black riders on the city buses and some buses carrying only one or two white riders, the city officials tried various ways to pressure the black community into giving up the boycott. But the people remained committed, and finally won many concessions regarding bus transport. This boycott was so successful because of all the many different groups of people who came together to make it work.
A second example of working together to bring results was led by students during the years 1959-1961. Young people began to stage sit-ins at lunch counters which refused to serve blacks. They also encouraged people to boycott the businesses where those lunch counters were located. They were especially active in Nashville, TN. One of my former parishioners, Cynthia Norton, was a student in Nashville at that time and she participated in the sit-ins. She told me about having white men put out cigarettes on her skin, and about waitresses who dumped food on the heads of the protesters who sat at the counter. These sit-ins did produce results; the businesses suffered financial loss, and agreed to integrate the lunch counters.
Other groups of students, known as Freedom Riders, worked during 1961 to press the issue of integrated interstate bus travel. The law was for integration, but it was not always kept. These Freedom Riders included white young people. They rode from Birminham to Montgomery, AL, where they experienced violence, including a bus being set on fire. But they continued on their ride all the way to Jackson, MS.
The March on Washington on August 28, 1963 was the work of a coalition of civil rights workers, church groups, labor leaders, and white liberals. Its purpose was to advocate the passing of the Civil Rights Act, the integration of public schools by the end fo the year, the end of job discrimination based on race, and the instituting of job training and placement for black workers. The themes of the march were unity and racial harmony. Freedom buses and freedom trains brought people from all over the United States, with a crowd of 250,000 people showing up, including approximately 60,000 white demonstrators. The march included an A-list group of celebrities, many of them white: Mahalia Jackson, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Josh White, Peter, Paul and Mary, Harry Belafonte, Odetta Holmes, Josephine Baker, Ossie Davis, Diahann Carroll, James Baldwin, Jackie Robinson, Sammy Davis, Jr., Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Charlton Heston, Judy Garland, Rita Moreno, James Garner, and Bobby Darin.
Bayard Rustin commented on the March, “The March on Washington took place because the Negro needed allies … The March was not a Negro action. It was an action by Negroes and whites together. Not just the leaders of the Negro organizations, but leading Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish spokesmen called the people into the street. And Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, white and black, responded.”
While the March on Washington brought great joy and a sense of possibility to the Civil Rights Movement, it also brought about a backlash from the white segregationists. On September 15, a church in Birmingham was bombed where a group of children were meeting. Four little girls were killed in the attack. But not all whites reacted in the same way. The Sunday after the four girls were killed, Rev. George William Floyd, a Church of Christ minister, preached a sermon based on the Golden Rule. He said that Jesus was asking Christians to view the bombing from the perspective of their black neighbors. During the sermon, some members of his congregation yelled, “You devil, you!” He was dismissed immediately as the pastor of the church. While not every anti-segregation minister was as outspoken as Floyd, many signed petitions, joined interracial action groups, or preached more gently about love and justice.
A fourth example of cooperation and bringing people together took place in Selma, AL in March of 1965. In a town with a population of about 30,000, about half of them were black. And yet there were only 156 registered black voters out of a group of 15,000 who were eligible to vote. Marches began to take place to the voter registration office in the courthouse. Both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X spoke in Selma. There were violent responses from the city and people were injured. A march was planned from Selma to Montgomery in March, a distance of 50 miles. On March 6, a group of 70 sympathetic whites marched to the courthouse in Selma to speak in favor of registering black voters. On March 7, the march to Montgomery left the Browns Chapel Church. The marchers were attacked when they reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge. State troopers and officers mounted on horseback used tear gas and billy clubs to break up the crowd on what came to be known as Bloody Sunday. Martin Luther King, Jr., sent out a call to hundreds of clergymen to join him in Selma on March 9, and hundreds of them showed up. Again a group of marchers left the church and made their way to the bridge; they were again met with law enforcement personnel and were told to leave. King chose to withdraw rather than encounter more violence. That night a white minister, Jim Reeb, was attacked after leaving a soul food restaurant; he died two days later from being clubbed in the head.
After further organization, the march began again on March 21. This time it was protected by the federal government, with troops from the Alabama National Guard and the US Army on hand, as well as FBI agents and federal marshals. Some 4,000 people, both black and white, set out from the church. At the front of the crowd was Dr. King, arm in arm with Rabbi Abraham Herschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary. The Jewish community represented a disproportionate number of whites who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement. But this was the most famous example of their participation. The marchers took four days to reach Montgomery. By the end of the march, there were 25,000 people walking. And the march produced results: President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6 of that year.
The march from Selma to Montgomery was also supported by a number of Roman Catholics, including Father Maurice Ouellet, pastor of St. Elizabeth’s African-American mission in Selma. Ouellet had already been enlisted by the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee to work for voting rights in Selma. He allowed the group to use the church hall for training events. He worked with black ministers who wanted to open negotiations with white leaders, and tried to begin a dialogue with white clergy. He was frustrated in all those efforts. On top of that, he was arrested and accused before a grand jury of being a communist. He received threatening phone calls at night and received repeated threats against his life.
Father Ouellet was recovering from kidney surgery on March 7, when state troopers had savagely attacked the marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He rushed to the hospital and helped the doctors and nurses who were providing emergency aid to the victims. Priests, nuns, and Catholic laypeople came to Selma to participate in the March, and Ouellet helped set up meeting space in his church hall. The Sisters of St. Joseph allowed out-of-town visitors to stay in a vacant wing of the Good Samaritan Hospital. There were at least 140 priests, 50 sisters, 29 ministers, 4 rabbis, and laypersons from 26 states who stayed at the hospital.
It is clear that the Civil Rights Movement would not have succeeded without cooperation and coordination between numerous groups and many individuals. There were religious leaders and civic leaders, preachers and lawyers, men and women, old people and young people, blacks and whites, all working together for one common cause. They came together – they set aside their differences and worked together – and they changed this country forever.
In a day where there is so much division – including renewed racial tension – in the United States, we could use more Andrews, people who bring people together. We could all be Andrews, working for unity and compassion and justice, bringing people together from various viewpoints and parties and groups in order to accomplish meaningful work. Just think what might happen if we mobilized to bring true equality and justice to every person, regardless of race or color or national origin or sexual orientation or political party! We could change our country forever. We could change the world.
Jesus was the kind of person who brought people together. His generous compassion and radical hospitality, his grace and his humor, drew people to him. And they heard his words about doing unto others, turning the other cheek, meeting violence with nonviolence, and loving one’s enemies. They learned that there is another way of living in the world than the survival of the fittest and the equating of power and wealth with God’s blessing. But first they had to learn to work together, as diverse as the early followers were: simple fishermen, wealthy tax collectors, women who had been cured of demon-possession, poor people, rich people, religious leaders and common laypersons.
When you have an opportunity, choose the way of Jesus. Choose to be an Andrew. Bring people together. You might be amazed by the results.
