Council Voices

By Rev. Craig Schaub, Parkway United Church of Christ, Winston-Salem

We were tired, hot, and hungry as we wove our way slowly through the crowd to head back to our car for the journey home. Our eight-year-old daughter was holding my hand and looked up. She said, “Dad, that was sort of cool.” On our way from the final Moral Monday in Raleigh back to Winston-Salem, she fell asleep in the backseat. Arriving home, she put on her pajamas, hunted for a book in her bookshelf, and thrust it before me. “I want you to read this to me before I fall back asleep.” It was a book about how representative government works. Not my idea of a typical bedtime story, but clearly what she wanted. Something was planted within her that night. It was enough for me.

After attending several Moral Monday protests at the NC Legislature, I finally decided to join the ranks of those who “trespass” and “fail to disperse on command.” I was by no means a groundbreaker. I may have been the 800th to face this encounter with the law while expressing disagreement with policies that punish the poor and reward the wealthy.

On top of refusing federal unemployment benefits and Medicaid to people who are economically vulnerable, our legislators are setting up obstacles to voting that will cost millions of dollars to enforce while disenfranchising those who fail to jump the additional hurdles.

The three most important people in my life happen to be young, African American men. None was born in North Carolina, but all have lived here most of their lives.

Precious as they are to me, they are also beloved children of God. Their Creator values them as much as God values anyone else, regardless of skin color, wealth, age or any other factor intertwined with recent human decisions about who gained and who lost in our state.

I am an educated, financially secure, slightly-beyond-middle-age, healthy, white, heterosexual, southern male. In other words I am a person of privilege. As a teenager in the 1960s, I lived in Birmingham, Alabama and was an almost eyewitness to the events that occurred there during that era’s civil rights struggle.

I am also a person of faith, and my faith tradition tells me that my privileged status is a gift that carries with it certain responsibilities. Primary among those responsibilities is to care for those whom we refer to as the least of these…those on the margins, the ostracized, the powerless, the voiceless.

I’ve been thinking about mustard seed as I reflect on Moral Mondays. Jesus once described the coming kingdom of God by comparing it to a tiny seed that grows into a large tree.

Moral Mondays started with a simple call to people of faith to prayer, to pursue the “moral high ground” of nonviolent protest and peaceful assembly, to register distress at the direction our state was being taken by the General Assembly and Governor. The call came from the Rev. William Barber, pastor of Goldsboro’s Greenleaf Christian Church, president of the state chapter of the NAACP, and the creator and prophetic force behind Moral Mondays. On April 29 (my birthday, but I’m pretty sure that’s just coincidental) there was a “pray-in,” followed by a rally at the General Assembly, followed by civil disobedience that resulted in 17 arrests.