Freedom is a constant struggle. It is not just a word to wrap oneself in like some security blanket that will justify just about any act of oppression in order to preserve well, freedom. In these difficult times when fear is so high and yes, sometimes quite justified what price will we pay for freedom or how much of this precious commodity will we be willing to give up for security? Most of us will gladly give up our shoes to travel safely on a plane although as one comic suggested traveling naked is likely not going to catch on. How about a national identity card or some kind of biological identity check? I can hear the new hit tune "I got a microchip implanted in my cheek." What seemed like paranoid fantasies a few years ago suddenly sounds reasonable, even feasible. We North Americans have been shaken to the core. It seems to me, we are tottering, off balance a bit, trying to weigh personal freedoms against safety, accepting restrictions and even injustices we would have fought just one year ago. Fear is the basis of both reasonable precautions and blatant racial profiling. Will the word terrorist be used to imply guilt merely by association? As was in another anxious era the word communist? Do not misunderstand me, I know there are people motivated by hate who commit horrific acts and yes, we must protect ourselves. But on this day when we honor and remember a man of peace who preached nonviolence the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King it would be good to look back and recall what language we used back then. Dr. Martin Luther King was repeatedly called a communist by segregationists. Acts of terror were committed, murder and shootings and beatings and yes, bombings. Most of you know of the 1963 bomb in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four little girls. It took 39 years to bring the three surviving perpetrators to justice. And freedom without justice, without true equality is meaningless. It becomes like in the song Bobby McGee "just another word for nothing left to do. nothing is worth nothing but it is free."

On this Sunday, as we remember the birthday of Martin Luther King, I invite you to pause for a moment and take a long look back to an earlier time, a time of both great struggle and great hope. Duncan Howlett who wrote No Greater Love, The James Reeb Story recalls those days: " We, who lived through those exiting, tragic and often ennobling times of the civil rights movement find them more vivid today than most of yesterday's headlines. They were a time of intense struggle and bitter suffering for many, yet also of surging hope for us, as we toiled and sang, marched and prayed in our denomination to achieve justice for African Americans.

(But of course) we said "Negro" then. From the 1930's through the 1950's, the NAACP fought to reestablish "Negro" as a respectful designation for people who today prefer "Black", "Afro American", "African American" or the more inclusive (coming full circle)" people of color".

Howlett is not alone in looking back to those days with its bright hope and feel a bittersweet nostalgia mixed with sadness. When we look at those old black and white familiar photographs and see the Alabama state troupers in a menacing unbroken line across Route 80 on the Edmund Pettys bridge and then look at the enemy facing them: unarmed non violent demonstrators; well, we have little trouble sorting out who the good guys are. It was a battle over rights far too long denied to Black Americans, in this case, in Selma: the right to vote regardless of the particular color of their skin. It was also a morality play and I grieve even today the loss of a leader like the Rev. Martin Luther King who would hold this nation to what it preached, to its own ideals. "Show me!" he told this nation: " Show me if you really believe that we are all equal citizens of this nation. Do you follow your own constitution? " He called us to our better selves. And he died for it. Awakening a people's consciencecan be a dangerous thing.

It seems, when we look back at those faces and names that by now have become nearly mythical, it seems as if we no longer have such hopes or such nobility among us. But that would be wrong to assume. For the truth is that even though many sensed history in the making and felt that they did right when they marched in Selma, still few of them saw themselves as heroes. Many were trust by fate into a martyr role that they never sought. One such man was the Rev. James Reeb. He neither sought nor wanted martyrdom when he went to Selma, Alabama, on the night of Monday, March 8, 1965 in answer to a call from Martin Luther King. So we can, as we have with King, look upon James Reeb as a martyr and make him bigger than life. We demand impossible perfection of our heroes. But in the process we lose sight of the real human being. And forget that the reason this Civil Rights movement succeeded was because of all the ordinary, everyday people who came forth when they were called and acted in that momentwith extraordinary courage. Rosa Park would tell you that she was tired and felt that she simply had enough that day when she refused to give up her seat and go to the back of the bus. In that one extraordinary act she revitalized the movement that would end legal segregation in the South. She did not know what she had started. None of us really know. There is hope in that and in the very humanness of our heroes and heroines. Like the villains they can all be just like us. It depends upon how we answer the call of our conscience. If we are to get that surge of hope back we first have to believe that we can change things.

So let me tell you about the ordinary life of James Reeb who certainly does not look in his photographs as a candidate for martyrdom. We can claim him as one of our own since he was at the time of his death a Unitarian minister. His life was a reflection of the times and we have no way of knowing if we would remember him today if he had not died so brutally.

He was born in 1927 on New Years Eve to a Catholic mother and a German Lutheran father in Wichita, Kansas and was considered to be a special blessing since they had already lost one child at birth. Both parents were hard working, well educated but economically never well off. Jim as they called him would remain their only child, and he was for much of his childhood also a very ill young boy. He had a long list of childhood diseases that are nearly unknown today and a severe bout with rheumatic fewer. During his many illnesses his mother taught him and he always managed to do well in school. His childhood was spent mostly in adult company until he, as a teenager was able to attend High school. It was not bad training for the ministry to be so much in the company of books but it must have been lonely. James grew into a serious and very earnest young man. High school classmates remember that although Jim was both a good and captivating speaker he never made the debating team because he "wasnever able to argue with any persuasiveness for a point of view which he himself did not believe." He had what might be called a virtue or a flaw, he could not pretend and he was honest to a fault. Which drove others to distraction. And he could be judgmental. Where other teenagers might talk about dating girls or the special club they wanted to join he would instead launch into world events, the war (World War II ) and its moral justification, human society, religion and the church. A former classmate John Murray recalled years later how one afternoon on their way to the ice cream parlor Jim stopped, got into a heated debate and that they sat on the steps of the school and discussed the deeper meaning of the war. Jim was perhaps making up for his appearance. He was born cross-eyed and began wearing glasses before he was one year old. He knew that people were turned off by his eyes which often focused in opposite directions. It was a great relief when this was corrected by an eye operation in1944.

He could have gotten an exemption to the draft since he planned to enter Seminary but he felt that it would not be fair. In 1944 he joined the armed forces and spent the next 18 months in a Quonset hut in Anchorage, Alaska. He hated his Quonset hut and was not fond of the army but he thought that the nature around Anchorage was the most beautiful he had ever seen. The snow-capped mountains, the wide open space and the Northern Lights impressed him and gave him a mystical feeling of being part of God and the Universe.

He entered St. Olaf'’ College, a Lutheran school at Northfield, Minnesota in the fall of 1947. There he fell in love with a girl named Marie Deason. "Jim was often fired by enthusiasm and sometimes deep in gloom, Marie was usually serene. Jim though he could be very dignified was often raucous Marie never raised her voice and was always marked by calm self possession." Marriage humanized James who could often be too severe and unbending. College friends tell a story of how he before his first child was born was adamant that there would be no commercialism of Christmas in his home, no pagan tree, no gift giving and especially no Santa Claus. The next Christmas when his son was nine months old the same friends came to visit and found both a tree and presents. After his ordination as a Presbyterian minister he worked as a chaplain in a city hospital where his faith was put to the test as he had to deal with suffering, tragedies and dying on a daily basis. He also discovered that notall people believed as he did and that even those who did not believe at all often did great good. He had always asked questions only now he began to ask them of himself. Increasingly he had trouble believing in his own words. And he was also bothered by the question of adopting a creed in religion. Once you say: this alone I believe, he felt, you inhibited the free action of the spirit. During the fall of 1956 he was introduced to Unitarianism by reading a copy of Sophia Lyon Fah's book: Today’s Children and Tomorrow's Heritage. Here was something he had not known existed: a religion that did not conflict with either psychiatry or science. Here was a faith that allowed the human spirit free reins while emphasizing personal responsibility. He soon began the process to become a Unitarian minister. This was done with some sadness and at considerable personal cost to him for neither his mother, who was very devout nor his father could understand why he would turn away from what theyconsidered to be the Christian ministry. His journey led him to a ministry at All Souls Church, Washington in 1959 and then into the heart of the struggle that was then consuming this nation. He had seen extreme poverty and inner city misery at the hospital but now he wanted to do something about it. He became acutely aware of both discrimination and of his own part in it. As long as some were enslaved he felt that no one could be free. He planned to help by working to relieve suffering in the inner cities and by giving an occasional fiery sermon but he had no plans to go South. He was happy at church and delighted to be a Unitarian minister who " had the freedom to nourish his own integrity as well as that of members of his congregation." The way people at All Souls remembered him was at his desk involved in several things at once, talking on the phone, writing and happily greeting visitors. But he was blessed or cursed with a strong conscience that demanded more of him. So he spent more and moretime with his inner city projects eventually giving up his parish ministry. He was in his office when he got the call from the Unitarian Universalist Association. They had gotten a telegram from the Rev. Martin Luther King asking for clergy to join him in the second march from Selma scheduled for the next day. Would he like to go? He wasn't sure, he said, but he was in strong sympathy with the cause and hoped the response would be good. Once he put the phone down he could not stop thinking about this call. Later that night he told Marie that he wanted to go. They knew there were risks. By now they had four children and were far from well off. He did not expect to be in danger but they had both seen on television the brutal beatings the day before in Selma. Alabama state troupers with side arms and gas masks stopped the march, first by an order, then by charging with Billy clubs swinging and at last with tear gas. Marie and Jim worried: what if he got hurt and could not work for a while? He had no health insurance. It did not occur to him that he might die. After all they were not killing freedom marchers except very occasionally in lonely spots after dark.

James Reeb did go on what he thought would be a brief journey and discovered that he was far from alone. In the airport in Atlanta there were so many Unitarian clergy that it seemed to some as if they were attending an eerie and surreal General Assembly. Clergy from all over the country and from all faiths answered the call, Catholic priests and nuns, Rabbis, Protestant Ministers of all kinds were converging on Selma to become "King's white clergy troops." To James' relief the march the next day to the bridge and back was a stand off without violence. Late that evening, after an emotional day, he decided to find a "safe restaurant" in which to eat together with two other Unitarian ministers Clark Olsen and Orloff Miller. After dinner they were walking to another meeting in Brown AME chapel when they noticed some men following them. Then they heard the words:

" Niggers, Hey you niggers!" and they walked faster. Before they knew what happened James was struck on the side of the head with a club, crushing part of his skull throwing him to the ground. Orloff Miller remembered the training they had gotten earlier that day and fell to the ground face down taking the blows on his back and side. He was kicked and pummeled him as the attackers said: " Now you know what it feels like to be a nigger!" Clark Olsen was pounded and his glasses broken but otherwise unhurt. The whole thing took less than a minute. At first they thought James was all right but it soon became clear that he was incoherent and soon after that he lost consciousness. They took him to the Negro Hospital since the "Whites Only" was too dangerous for them and then they drove him in a Negro Funeral Home ambulance over dark country roads to Birmingham all the time terrified that someone might be following them. But it was no use. He died four days later without ever regaining consciousness.

He was only one of many who died for this cause. Their names are now written in stone on the Martin Luther King memorial. They range from the well known civil rights leaders, such as Medgar Evers, who chose to fight knowing the risks, to those who had no choice at all like the four young girls whose church was firebombed. No doubt they would have preferred to live and would surely have chosen to grow up. But they had no choice anymore than did the people in the Twin Towers on the 11th of September 2002.

What is the price of freedom? It often comes at a heavy price. Are we willing to pay such a price? Likely most of us will say no. Yet it was people like us who did pay such a price, ordinary people who acted courageously as they marched against a brutal enemy unarmed except for their convictions.

For me there is hope in such deeds. For me there is nobility in such choices. To follow a call even when it is highly unpopular or dangerous is true courage. To ask those questions no one else is asking takes a leap of faith. Secret military tribunals do not cut it. It is not who we are at our best, as Americans. To ask hard questions is our birthright. How we treat even the most dangerous and brutal prisoners like those now held in Guantanamo Bay is a measure of who we are. I am glad the Red Cross has been allowed in. How willing we are to speak out on behalf of our Arab and Muslim neighbors is a measure of whether we really believe that this constitution is for everyone. Our first principle is the inherent worth and dignity of every single person. Every single person! Seldom has this been as hard to act on as it is now. Confusing as these times are, it is as always far easier to follow the bandwagon, easier to paint "the other" with our own fears. Are there evil peoplein this world? Sure, but that has always been true. There is no difference except in degree and magnitude or ability to kill between the four men who planted a bomb to explode during a Sunday Church service in Birmingham and the pilots who flew into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Both saw the killings as good acts, as necessary to achieve a so-called "higher" goal. Let us not, in our own fear, do the same and let the end goal justify any means. Let us listen once again to the better angels of our natures. Let me end with a question for you to ponder: When or if the call comes for you will you go to Selma?