Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good morning Today is the shared birthday of the American black civil rights campaigner Rosa Parks and the German wartime resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Born in 1913, Rosa Parks is best known for her refusal to give up her seat on a racially segregated bus to a white person. Her action in 1955 Montgomery brought her death threats, but became iconic for the civil rights movement. Parks famously quipped ‘stand for something or you’ll fall for anything, today’s mighty oak is yesterday’s nut that held its ground’. Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born in 1906, took his stand in a different way, establishing the Confessing Church in Germany, and risking his life in a plot against Hitler. Bonhoeffer was clear that to be a Christian meant quite literally to stand in the world in the place of Christ. As Christ lived and died vicariously for others, so Christians are called to witness to the world through acts of responsible love. Bonhoeffer is famed for the faith that motivated his civil disobedience, Parks is less well known for hers, which is a shame. In her memoirs Parks says it was faith that enabled her not to give up her seat. She wrote ‘the church became our strength, our refuge and our haven, we would pray, sing…and …use the scriptures, testimonies and hymns to strengthen us against the hatred and violence going on around us’. Citing God’s protection of the Israelites fleeing Pharoah, Parks claimed that the Biblical prophets ‘showed her another world’, in which justice reigned and intimidation and violence were defeated. What was powerful was that she could see, visualise, that world. ‘I can see this world because it exists in small pockets’ she wrote. ‘I want to be remembered as someone who wanted to be free so that others could be free’. Less well known also is that Bonhoeffer too was inspired by the faith of the black churches. In 1930 he worshipped briefly in the black churches of Harlem. Here he heard powerful preaching about the Jesus who suffers with the oppressed and invites us to be responsible people who stand up in history. We often build walls between religion and politics, and sometimes for good reasons, but Parks and Bonhoeffer are amongst the best of examples of why those walls will always be, and should be, porous. Their shared wisdom is in teaching us that learning what to stand up to, and what to stand - or sit down - for, might be the only way to be truly free.