Quick Summary:

Beginning with a crucial scene from the film LINCOLN, the sermon moves from 1865 to the Civil Rights movement which began in earnest when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a while man and move to the back of the bus.

In his letter to Birmingham clergy written from jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out the "inescapable network of mutuality" that defines us as human beings. "Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

We live in a salvation-hungry world. But our understanding of salvation has become so spiritualized, so narrowly privatized, it no longer resembles the SALVATION proclaimed by the prophets and demonstrated by Jesus. But salvation has to do with healing and safety now, at every level.

To be the light for the world that Jesus envisioned, the church must be a public church, engaging the issues that face our world with the same tenacious spirit and moral clarity as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King engaged the issues of their days. For if it does not, the church runs the risk of becoming merely a nostalgic enclave or superfluous footnote.