From the Pulpit: From Many, One

We've been celebrating the saints among us and those who came before, and Provost Jan Cope paid tribute to the secular saints ahead of Election Day.

Preaching on All Saints Sunday, Jan said there are figures from our collective history as Americans who can light the way in these perilous times:

We all know that we have a consequential election two days away. You don’t need me to tell you that.  It’s important that we remember those who’ve gone before, those who served and sacrificed so much for the rights that we enjoy today.

In two years, our country will celebrate 250 years since our founding.  Also recall that it took about one hundred years after our founding for the 15th Amendment to the Constitution to be passed—whereby no discrimination would impede the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. But we all know that despite that amendment, obstacles and roadblocks were put up to prevent truly living into that right. 

Saints who’ve gone before—the likes of Martin Luther King Jr,, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and so many others—fought to make that amendment a reality. And in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed that helped secure the amendment as a basic, fundamental right. In 1957, when he was then the Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson said this: “The right to vote is a basic right, without which all others are meaningless. It gives people—people as individuals—control over their own destinies.”

And as a woman, I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that women didn’t have the right to vote until 1920. That too was hard fought by the likes of Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, and so many others. You see, one of the ways that we honor those who’ve gone before is to live fully into the rights that are yours and mine—hard fought, hard won, incredibly important.

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We’re very divided. You don’t need me to tell you that. And foreign bad actors in Russia, China, and Iran, we know, are sowing divisive seeds and unfortunately, their efforts are working entirely too well. So, in this time when so many of us are fearful not knowing what tomorrow, Tuesday, or the days following will bring, where do we find our hope? Where do we find our way forward? As we heard in the gospel lesson, we follow Jesus, who’s always prepared to call us out of death and darkness into new life, new possibility, unbound, free.