On our civil rights trip this week, we visited Brown Chapel AME church, in Selma, Alabama, headquarters of the voting rights movement in the 1960s. Their historic brick sanctuary, built in 1908 by a formerly enslaved person, AJ Farley, is under renovation. So we crowded into a small room full of folding chairs where the congregation currently worships. An African American elder named Joyce greeted us, introducing herself as “an original a foot soldier” of the movement. She was 16 years old at the time of the Selma-Montgomery march.

At that time, she said, less than 2% of African Americans in the county were registered to vote. When Joyce’s mother, a teacher, sought to register, authorities demanded that she recite the entire Preamble to the Constitution from memory. And she did it! Still, she was turned away. Joyce recalled the daily terrorism she lived with as a child. When the kids were outside in the evening catching fireflies they would hear horns blowing, and they knew the Klan was getting ready to ride through their neighborhood. When community began to hold mass meetings at the church—with freedom songs, prayers, a stirring message, Joyce’s family was always there. Teenagers were trained in non-violence and young people began to leave school to go downtown and sit in at lunch counters. Joyce was never arrested, but her sister was.

She recalled how, on the first attempt to march from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery (now known as “Bloody Sunday”), marchers were beaten and tear-gassed until they retreated. She and her mother stayed at the church to play a support role that day, caring for people incapacitated by the gas. After that, a call for support was issued around the country. Joyce told us (a room full of white people) that she would never forget the meeting the next evening, because, when the help came, “They didn’t look like me; they looked like you.” In fact, First Church pastor Dick Griffis was among those white folks who came from the North to answer Dr. King’s call for support and solidarity. I want to honor his bravery and moral clarity because as I’m sure he knew, he was risking his life. It was during that same period that the Unitarian Minister James Reeb was brutally beaten to death in Selma.

Jesus’ teaching for today is part of the “Sermon on the Mount” and follows immediately after the passage called the Beatitudes. In the Beatitudes, Jesus declares God’s blessing for the humble and hurting, for ordinary folks suffering under empire’s oppression. Now he addresses these same people. “You are the salt of the earth.” “You are the light of the world.” The ‘you’ is plural; he’s talking not to individuals but to the entire community. He’s speaking in the present tense about what is already true. In God’s eyes, the ones society abandons and persecutes are beautiful and luminous, important and valuable.

Let’s remember how precious both salt and light were in the ancient world. In those days, you could not buy a canister of Morton’s for a few bucks, nor could you light up a whole room with the effortless flick of a switch. Salt was rare enough in the ancient world that it was sometimes used as a currency. The word “salary” comes from the Latin term “salarium” which describes funds given to Roman soldiers to purchase salt.¹ Similarly, it is expensive, time-consuming and labor-intensive to keep a lamp burning or tend a fire. I would guess that most people lit their homes sparingly at night.

“You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.” Both of these substances find their power in relationship. A light is prized for the way it reveals what is beyond itself. Salt is not tasty on its own; it brings out the other flavors in food. So, too, is it with the community of Jesus’ followers. The church exists not for its own sake but for the sake of the world. Jesus calls his disciples to “righteousness”; that is to right relationship. His says that he has come to “fulfill” the law and the prophets, to form a community that puts God’s ways of love and justice on display that lets everyone taste and see what God desires for all of us. In today’s passage, then, Jesus gives us a challenge and a warning. He knows there’s risk in involved being bright and bold. He sees how fear, exhaustion, self-doubt, and more can make us shrink away from our true identity and purpose—like salt that loses its saltiness, like a city on a hill that hides from its own prominence.

It was such a gift to hear Joyce’s story of the civil rights movement. Throughout our trip, I was stunned by how ordinary people sacrificed so much. Folks walked to work for an entire year, rather than ride the city bus. Students wrote their wills before taking “freedom rides” across the South. At the heyday of the movement, people gathered daily for mass meetings and trainings, for marching and sitting in. They went out with dignity, in their dress clothes and shoes, expecting that they would be ridiculed, beaten, jailed or even killed. And in Birmingham, families made the agonizing decision to allow their own children to face fire hoses and vicious dogs, knowing the only way forward was to force white people across the nation to look at the savagery of segregation.

Joyce expressed sadness about the political apathy that permeates her community of Selma in these present days. Walking the streets there, it was impossible not to notice the dilapidated homes, the empty storefronts, the broken windows. Joyce said that people are registered to vote now, but they aren’t going to the polls. Her own son refuses to vote. She noted that people come to Selma from around the world to hear the stories of the civil rights movement, but her own people do not come to hear them. The situation in Selma reminds me that we all continue to live under the oppression of white supremacy, a system that enforces an unjust arrangement of power. White supremacy terrorizes people of every skin color and culture, scaring us into believing that we will be safer if we remain silent, invisible, compliant. White people, in particular, lack stamina for resistance. We have a tendency to retreat or collapse rather than moving through the stress and threat that arises when we refuse to cooperate.

Amid her grief, Joyce also radiated strength and hope. She said: “After all I saw on [Bloody] Sunday what I saw on Monday (when the help came) renewed my faith in humanity. […] When I watch the news today, I call on those memories to keep me going.” Rooted in the courage and clarity of our ancestors, as well as the responsibility we have to heal the wounds they’ve passed down to us, we too, can keep going. The world needs us to keep on bearing the discomfort and weariness, the fear and the risk that change requires. The world needs our loving, nonviolent, non-compliance, and needs it for the long haul.

I think the practice of mutual aid, in particular, is offering us glimpse and taste of a different way of being that is a direct affront to white supremacy’s values of competition, scarcity, and individualism. What if we shared with each other and supported our community like this all the time? My friends, we charged out of the gate at a rapid, frantic pace when this ICE occupation began. We are going to need to slow down so that our work can be sustainable. At the same time, I pray we will not relent, that we will not withdraw from the tension and heat of these times, that we will not collapse and retreat back into our comfort zones. We’ll have to find our roles and take our turns, rising and resting, resting and rising. Let us be like weight trainers — pushing through the pain enough to build new muscles but not so much that we injure and incapacitate ourselves. Let us be, in the words of the poet Eve Merriam, a subversive sunrise. Let us welcome a glory morning, in which the sun refuses to set down in the same old sky. Amen.

¹ “Salt of the Earth: Unveiling the Surprising Link Between Salary and Salt in Ancient Rome”