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Good morning. It may sound strange to note tomorrow’s 150th anniversary of the death of Charles Dickens in the midst of this weekend’s huge demonstrations in support of Black Lives Matter. Yet both raise the question of how an individual and a nation should stand with people who are oppressed. It’s interesting that Dickens had a complex relationship with America. On his first visit to see and learn about the young country, he was greeted by large enthusiastic crowds. But he was troubled by the overwhelming experience of celebrity, the nature of copyright law and even American table manners. His brief observation of slavery coupled with experience of US political structures led him to conclude ‘This is not the republic of my imagination’. He went further, ‘I do fear that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty will be dealt by this country, in the failure of its example on the earth’. He communicated his revulsion of slavery and distaste of America in the biting satirical novel Martin Chuzzlewit. More gentle satire about the nation, can be seen in the Peanuts comic strip of Charles Schulz. In 1963, in the midst of controversial debates about church and state, Sally at her classroom desk pledges ‘allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’ She pauses, trying to remember something important and then blurts out ‘Amen!’ For my Christian faith, being one nation under God is not holding a Bible aloft, it is opening it and learning to live the Jesus way in standing with rather than against the oppressed. It is only then that I can say amen. On Saturday I joined with over 3000 people in an on-line demonstration to support Black Lives Matter in Newcastle. One of the speakers, Chantal Herbert, used the refrain ‘When you tell me all lives matter, I’ll tell you’ and she then named statistics referring to numbers of senior University academics through to deaths in childbirth to illustrate the structural inequality impacting black lives here in the UK. It brought home to me that this is not the country of my imagination and questioned what example we set to the world. An epitaph circulated at the death of Charles Dickens noted that he was ‘a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed’. Black Lives Matter challenges me that sympathy is not enough – I need to educate myself and use my gifts and position to bring about change.