In her daily letter emailed on January 15, 2023, my favorite historian, Heather Cox Richardson, wrote this about the hero of the day:

On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee….After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

The past year or two, I’ve attended quite a number of funerals and memorial services. This is a feature of arriving at an age most people think of as “old.” Whether or not I’m friends with, or even acquainted with, the deceased, each and every eulogy has made me think, “Wow. I wish I had known this person better.” Granted, except for the humorous jibes that bring a loved one to real life momentarily, a eulogy illuminates the good parts. Nobody steps up to speak at a memorial service to air dirty laundry. But still. The biographies of person after person reveal more impact for good in the world than may be known, except in bits and pieces, by most other people.

During these speeches, I often feel a fresh resolve to be the kind of person good things might be said about. Someday, listening (I hope) from a heavenly perch, would I wonder who’s being talked about?

Partly because of these speeches, I know there are more heroes among us than we’ll ever know. Quietly, barely noticed in the supermarket, in the car repair waiting room, at the bus stop, at the pharmacy window, and in every other ordinary place where we casually meet them, people with no claims to be special are handling their lives with hope and courage, kindness and patience.

Last Sunday, on the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as we stood up to sing “We Shall Overcome” in my very white, Presbyterian congregation, it occurred to me that I don’t have the right, really, to sing this song. I don’t have the right to sing this song because I have not stood in the shoes of those who, for hundreds of years, have endured with holy patience the absence of justice, the denial of their humanity, the economic enslavement, and the violent anger of people calling themselves Christians in segregated congregations.

Recently, in the brief moments I happened to catch a football game on tv, I saw an advertising campaign with the slogan, “Jesus gets us.” Apparently it’s a well-funded, cleverly-designed campaign to update the appeal of Jesus, who heals, comforts, inspires, and restores hope for people in their everyday modern lives. All good. I believe it already. But wouldn’t it be more convincing if people like me, who already call themselves Christian, were a living, appealing “advertisement” others see in the supermarket, the car repair waiting room, at the bus stop…and in every other ordinary place where we meet them? Or, for that matter, in legislatures, community meetings, and churches.

I suppose that two thousand years isn’t much time in the view of the Creator who placed Jesus among us. Jesus, now the living Christ, still has a claim to be born in each and every human being. To experience the Spirit of Christ is to be transformed for good. Then we are empowered to sing “We Shall Overcome” with divine patience, and to perform with courage countless heroic and unsung acts of justice and love.