Dr. Rick Mandl - July 23, 2020
The Death Of John Lewis And The Power Of One Life
The Death Of John Lewis And The Power Of One Life
Thursday July 23, 2020
Tribute To John Lewis
Hey church family, at the end of last week an American hero died. Friday, July 16 after a six-month battle with pancreatic cancer, John Lewis passed away. The Civil Rights icon was eighty years old. John Lewis was elected to Congress in November of 1986 and served as US Representative from Georgia’s Fifth District for 17 terms. He was awarded more than fifty honorary degrees, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2011. John Lewis was the son of sharecroppers, and he spent Sundays growing up with a great-grandfather who was born into slavery.
When Lewis was a few months old, the manager of a chicken farm named Jesse Thornton, was lynched about twenty miles down the road from where he lived. Jesse Thornton’s offense, was that he referred to a police officer by his first name rather than as “Mister.” The result was that a mob pursued Thornton, stoned him, shot him, then dumped his body in a swamp.
As a boy, Lewis decided that he wanted to be a preacher. He earned a BA in Religion and Philosophy from Fisk University, and graduated from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville. However, when he was fifteen years old, John Lewis he heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preach on the radio and he felt that God was calling him to join the civil rights movement. According to the New York Times, Lewis “Led demonstrations against racially segregated restrooms, hotels, restaurants, public parks, and swimming pools, and he rose up against other indignities of second-class citizenship.” At nearly every turn, he was beaten, spat upon, or burned with cigarettes. During the Freedom Rides of 1961, the Times reports that Lewis “Was left unconscious in a pool of his own blood outside the Greyhound Bus Terminal in Montgomery, Alabama, after he and others were attacked by hundreds of white people.” It adds that he “Spent countless days and nights in county jails, and thirty-one days in Mississippi’s notoriously brutal Parchman Penitentiary.”
Lewis was the youngest keynote speaker at the March on Washington in 1963. On March 7, 1965, he led a group of 600 people marching for Black voting rights in Selma, Alabama. They were met by a group of police officers; Lewis suffered a skull fracture when one of them beat him with a nightstick. “I thought I was going to die,” he said later. The event became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
In his early twenties, Lewis embraced a form of nonviolent protest grounded in the principle of “Redemptive Suffering.” Lewis explained his life philosophy this way... He said, “At a very early stage of the movement, I accepted the teaching of Jesus, the way of love, the way of nonviolence, the spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation... The idea of hate is too heavy a burden to bear. ... I don’t want to go down that road... I’ve seen too much hate, I’ve seen too much violence... And I know love is a better way.”
Five years ago, On the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, President Obama and former president George W. Bush joined Congressman Lewis in a walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. That same bridge where Lewis and other non-violent protestors had been assaulted by state troopers in 1965 as they called for voting rights for black citizens. Following Congressman Lewis’ death, President Obama said of him, “He loved this country so much that he risked his life and blood so that it might live up to its promise.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stated, “Progress is not automatic. Our great nation’s history has only bent towards justice because great men like John Lewis took it upon themselves to help bend it. Our nation will never forget this American hero.”
When asked if he regretted not continuing in traditional ministry as a young man, John Lewis said, “I think my pulpit today is a much larger pulpit... I preach every day.” Friends... Now it’s our turn.
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