John Robert Lewis: Memory & Legacy

Memory and Legacy

Representative John Robert Lewis died on July 17, 2020.  There have been multiple memorial services remembering his fine deeds and exemplary character.

Rep. Lewis was one of the six principal organizers of the 1963 March on Washington, a peaceful demonstration demanding civil rights for people of color.  Rep. Lewis was the youngest speaker on the platform the day of the protest.

As time passes protests have a way of becoming “marches.”  In this change of language we can domesticate the past and enable ourselves to avoid drawing direct connections between the past and the present.

Rep. Lewis was on the front line—literally—of the orderly peaceful protest on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, and was a victim of police violence on that day.  The orderly protest became disorderly when the forces of order began to beat the demonstrators.

In 1986, Lewis was elected to represent Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, where he was known as the “conscience of the House.”  He served there until his death.

One could go on quite a while cataloguing the accomplishments of Rep. Lewis.  That is all memory.

How is memory different from legacy?  Memory is rooted in what was but is no more.  Legacy is what we leave behind that lives on after we are gone.  A legacy has lasting consequences and shapes the future. It is like planting seeds in a garden we will never see.

Jesus on Memory and Legacy

The difference between a memory of the prophets and their proper legacy was a point of conflict between Jesus and some of the religious leaders of his day.

Jesus and these religious leaders went round and round about the prophets.  They both thought the work of the prophets should be remembered and honored, but they remembered that work in different ways.  They assign differing legacies to it, as well.

Jesus reminds these leaders that their ancestors killed the prophets.  He then goes on to say the present generation is not unlike their ancestors:

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous,  and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’  Thus you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets…Therefore I send you prophets, sages, and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town… (Matt 23:29-31, 34).

These religious leaders did not want anyone messing with their comforting memories of the prophets.  Thus they found Jesus rather aggravating.

Jesus saw himself as building upon the legacy of the prophets: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (Matt 5:17).  His opponents wanted to construct a different legacy.  Jesus responds to their shaping of the prophetic legacy with:  “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others” (Matt 23:23).

This argument is about differing legacies.

The Legacy of Rep. Lewis

It is important to maintain the memory of Rep. Lewis not just as “the conscience of the House” with a lyrical prosaic voice but also as an unsettling conscience that often discomforted America, aggravated people, and at times drew violent responses.  He carried in his body scars of the cost of his conscience.

We need also to ask how we will build on Lewis’s legacy.  How will the seeds he planted come to bloom in the garden of our nation?

It is easy when a great person dies to put them on a pedestal and admire the memory.  Rep. John Lewis’s legacy, however, will be built in the classrooms, in the courtrooms, in the jails, in the legislatures, in the board rooms, in the living rooms, and in the streets of our nation.  A legacy is a living thing, not a monument set in stone.

We truly honor people not just by remembering them but also by nurturing the seeds they planted into a living legacy of their lives—in Lewis’s case by getting into “good trouble.”

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister-American Baptist Churches of New York State

Apologies and Reconciliation

She lamented:  “He has never once said he’s sorry in all these years.  If he would simply say that, it could be over for me.”

Fifteen years earlier her husband had an affair.  They worked through it and were raising two children together.  As far as she knew, he had not done anything like that again; their marriage was secure.  Yet she was still waiting for an apology—nothing elaborate, simply an apology.

When we hurt one another, it is often not possible to undo all the damage done.  Yet an apology can sow reconciliation where all cannot be repaired.  Perhaps apologies are part of the ministry of reconciliation in which we have been enrolled (2 Cor. 5:18).

Apologizing for something we did that injured someone else makes sense.

What about apologizing for something in which we played no part?  

Perhaps we have some connection to the people who did this hurtful thing or maybe we have somehow benefited from what was done.  What about that?

I spent some time in Rwanda earlier this year going through a training called “Healing the Wounds of Ethnic Conflict” with a group made up mostly of Africans, with a few North Americans and Europeans thrown in.  The purpose of the program is to bring reconciliation among people who have a troubled history with one another. 

Part of our training involved a practice called “standing in the gap.”    This is where you apologize for something “your people” did in which you played no personal part.

Our group traveled one day to a community populated by both perpetrators and victims of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.  At one point a French man, who was a part of our group, walked over and kneeled before the villagers and apologized for the role France had played in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, how they helped create the divisions and then did nothing to stop the killing.  As he kneeled, an audible gasp passed among the villagers.  They were stunned that a Westerner would kneel before them and ask for forgiveness; Westerners rarely humble themselves before Africans. 

 I cannot remember the last time I have had such a compelling sense of the presence of the Holy Spirit; I felt myself standing on holy ground, like Moses by that bush that burned.

Apologizing for something “your people” did to “another people” for a thing in which you played no part—perhaps you were not even born—may make no sense in the social and political economy of our day.  We are more interested in calibrating personal responsibility than seeking out avenues of reconciliation.

If we read more of Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 5, we see Paul found this true in his day as well:

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!  All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.  So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:16-21).

Paul writes that we no longer regard others (and ourselves, I assume) from “a human point of view.”  We are “a new creation." What used to characterize us and still characterizes the world around us no longer describes us.  In other words, what makes sense to and is accepted by those around us is no longer true of us.  We are ambassadors from another land, so to speak, where the norms and values and people’s intentions are different.

That day in the Rwandan village as that French man apologized, something broke loose in me, some good and holy, I believe.  I was transported, for a moment to another land where this made sense in the interest of reconciliation.  I am now willing, for the sake of reconciliation, to apologize for things in which I played no part but from which I have benefitted if that apology can bring reconciliation where there is now hurt and division.

Some people might find this unintelligible or even infuriating. I don’t judge people who don’t see God in this or, on the other hand, have little interest in experiencing the presence of God at all. I am simply saying that I experienced the power of the living Christ in this practice.  It has made a fertile place in my heart for the growth of this “new creation” the Spirit is nurturing in each of us.

I cannot undo the past, but I can acknowledge it and own my inheritance of it.  And I can take up the ministry of reconciliation and do all I can to be a good ambassador of the one who seeks all people to be reconciled to one another and to God.

Jim Kelsey

Executive Minister—American Baptist Churches of New York State