Yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent. This is the season of the Church year that focuses on getting ready for the coming of Jesus. Yet this is about much more than getting ready to celebrate Christmas. The Scriptures during Advent challenge us to get ready for the coming of Jesus in our lives today and as the culmination of human history. It so happened this year that Advent started on December 1 – the 64th anniversary of the arrest of Rosa Parks that sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the early and most famous campaigns of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Although the name of Rosa Parks is familiar to most Americans, the larger story of her life and witness is less familiar. She was not just a woman who decided to challenge segregation by refusing to give up her seat on a city bus one day. Rather her commitment to both Jesus and justice had been central to her life for years before that fateful day of December 1, 1955. She was a deeply committed Christian and member of the AME Church. In the Racial Justice Calendar published by the Equal Justice Initiative, part of the entry for December 1 is quoted below:
She was very active in the local chapter of the NAACP ever since joining as the chapter’s only woman member in 1943, and had served as both the youth leader and secretary. Mrs. Parks frequently traveled throughout Alabama to interview black people who had suffered racial terror, violence, or other injustice. In 1944, she investigated the Abbeville, Alabama, gang-rape of a young black woman named Recy Taylor, and joined with other civil rights activists to organize a national campaign demanding prosecution of the white men responsible.
In the summer before her famous act of resistance, Mrs. Parks attended the Highlander Folk School along with Martin Luther King Jr. Founded by the justice activist Myles Horton, the school was a training ground for community organizing and non-violent direct action. All this came together to make Rosa Parks ready when the time came for her decision to sit down for racial justice. Her witness reminds me that ongoing practices of spiritual formation and racial justice are both important in themselves and help us to get ready for taking new and deeper actions based on our faith in God and commitment to justice. You and I are not likely to go down in history like Rosa Parks. Yet in God’s economy, even the seemingly smallest acts of love and justice have eternal significance. How are we getting ready for Jesus and Justice this Advent season?
