For the past three years I have been involved with a wonderful organization called ICUJP: Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace. We have become a place for people to come when their faith traditions are not giving them the answers that feel right – answers to questions like:
- Why should I hate gay people, or fear those with AIDS, or be afraid of women who speak their mind and heart?
- Why is the Prayer of Jabez becoming more important than Jesus call not to neglect "the least of these"?
- I don’t lump all Christians with unreasoning, polarizing, elitist, warmongering Fundamentalists, why do you define all Muslims as terrorists?
And most importantly:
- Why are we at war with someone who did not attack us?
Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace is having a Jubilee for Justice & Peace, Sunday, April 15th 5:00 pm, at historic Bethel AME Church in Los Angeles, and we would like to invite all the SoCal Kossacks to this free event.
This month marks the 40th Anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s historic speech in Riverside Church in New York, where he addressed the lack of cohesive action by religious communities around the Vietnam War. Rev. King famously said these words, as powerfully resonant and timely now as they were 40 years ago:
...Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
We will be giving attendees "Peace Toolkits" to take back to your communites, to use in working for peace starting in your own neighborhoods:
...There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor - both black and white - through the Poverty Program. Then came the build-up in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political play thing of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
We will also be highlighting ways for people to get involved in counter-recruitment, so we can stop the tide of poor people killing other poor people to expand the coffers of the rich:
...We were taking the young black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
We will also be helping people coordinate visits to your county, state, and federal representatives in government, because they need to hear and respond to what you have to say, not just their lobbyist friends:
...I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.
We want to show the world that there is another religous and spiritual voice - one that believes that peace and tolerance is attainable:
...As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the "brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant or all men, for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that He died for them? What then can I say to the Viet Cong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death, or must I not share with them my life?
And most of all, we want to work towards ending all killing in the name of our government - we owe it to our servicepeople, our children in our own country, and the people on other shores:
...And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula...They must see Americans as strange liberators. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long.
Rev. King remarked that we are all accountable, that silence is betrayal. We would like to add your voice and commitment to our mission.
Confirmed participants include:
Rev. Dr. Lewis Logan – Pastor, Bethel AME Church
Rev. Dr. William Epps – Pastor. Second Baptist Church, LA
Gail Blackwell, FAMILES TO AMMEND 3 STRIKES – FACTS
Maria Elena Durazo - LA County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO
Rev. Dr. George F. Regas - Rector Emeritus, All Saints Church; Founder, ICUJP
Stephen Rohde – Civil Rights Attorney and Past President of ACLU, Southern California
Rev. Louis Chase – Pastor, Hamilton United Methodist Church
It's amazing to think that we live in a time where the simple premise that religious communities must stop blessing war and violence is a radical idea, but ICUJP and many other interfaith groups are working around the country to change the religious discourse in this country.
There will also be music from a few different choirs and bands, because we know you won't come to the revolution if there is no dancing...
I hope many of you can make it - it will be a powerful evening.