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On March 25, 1965, the great civil rights activist and preacher Dr Martin Luther King Jr., delivered a speech on the steps of the State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama. In that speech, he famously said, “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” We don’t often hear that quote in context, so I thought this morning I would read a little more from Dr King’s speech.

“We are going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the Almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands” Dr King began.

“So however difficult it is during this period, however difficult it is to continue to live with the agony and the continued existence of racism, however difficult it is to live amidst the constant hurt, the constant insult and the constant disrespect, I can still sing we shall overcome. We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”

“We shall overcome because Carlisle is right. ‘No lie can live forever’” he continued.

We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right. ‘Truth crushed to earth will rise again.’ We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right. ‘Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.’ Yet that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the Bible is right. ‘You shall reap what you sow.’ With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all of God's children all over this nation - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, ‘Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God Almighty, We are Free At Last.’

Dr King delivered this speech, dubbed “How Long, Not Long: Our God is Marching On,” 47 years after the end of the First World War and 20 years after the Second. Can you imagine, fighting for values in your home country that soldiers in the Great Wars had given their lives to overseas? Values like the freedom to live, work, and play without threat of violence, to exist as a human being without fear of discrimination because of the colour of your skin, your religious beliefs, or the land and family you were born in to.

There is a story much closer to home: that of the Indigenous veterans who fought for Canada as volunteers. Under the Indian Act, which was first introduced in 1876, Indigenous people were forbidden from owning land, practicing any kind of ceremony, and voting. What’s more, Indigenous people “were not allowed to be conscripted.” So, “this led to 30,000 plus Indigenous people volunteering to participate in three wars: the First, the Second, and the Korean, volunteering to fight for a country who didn’t even recognize them as citizens.”

This was a new learning for me as I was watching the video Jenn Ashton, the Indigenous Cultural Sensitivity Leader for St Clement’s, sent out last week through our newsletter. It was my first time truly understanding why we have a separate day on November 8th to honour Indigenous veterans. What you maybe also didn’t know, is that when Indigenous people volunteered to go to war they had to “sign away their Indian status” leaving them with “no legal connection to their home or their band . . . no place on the reservation . . . no healthcare, no education . . . none of the small legal rights that came with being an Indian and certainly none of the rights that other veterans came into quite naturally.”

Indigenous veterans had no access to things like pension benefits, counselling programs, hearing aids, prostheses, or coverage for funeral costs. Not to mention, what Jenn calls in the video “one of the most heartbreaking things,” which is that Indigenous vets “were not allowed the simplest act of camaraderie and that was joining their white brothers and sister veterans in the pub or the legion to raise a glass.”

Jenn calls this battle that Indigenous veterans faced “the fourth war . . . the one that the vets and others fought on their behalf when they finally returned home, if they did, after fighting.”

Can you imagine, fighting at home for the values our soldiers fought for abroad? What, then, ought we to do? How, then, ought we to act?

The first step is remembrance. Elie Wiesel once said, “Remembering is a noble and necessary act. . . . No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.”

It is often said of Christian worship, when we gather at the Eucharist table, to do what we do every week, to say the words we say over and over again, that we, the many members of Christ’s body literally re-member ourselves. We come together to recollect our common story:  our common praise, our common lament, our common values. When we break the bread of Christ’s body and drink the cup of Christ’s blood we remember the things we stand for above all else: justice, peace, compassion, forgiveness, mercy, love of God and neighbour, and the dignity of every human being.

It’s important, then, that we commemorate Indigenous Veterans Day and Remembrance Day in our Sunday worship, so that we can learn new things about the past we maybe didn’t know before and remember things we had forgotten. We can remember that the wars that were and continue to be fought very far from home are wars that may very well be going on within our own borders, or across neighbouring borders. Rest eternal belongs to the ones who fought, to the ones who died, this we know for sure. But for those of us who live because of their sacrifice, rest is not yet ours, for we shall reap what we sow and remembering is but the first seed. Amen.

Works referenced and recommended reading:

Jenn Ashton, “Indigenous Veteran’s Day Presentation by Jenn Ashton 2024.” Accessed online on 09 November 2024.

Bob Joseph, 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality (Page Two: April 10, 2018).

The excerpt from Dr Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, “How Long Not Long: Our God is Marching On” was accessed on 09 November 2024 at Grosse Pointe Historical Society.

Anna Madsen, a graduate of Luther Seminary and a self-described “freelance theologian” runs a fabulous blog called OMG Center for Theological Imagination. Her entry, “Remember, Re-Member, Re-Imagine” was extremely helpful in writing this sermon. Accessed online on 09 November 2024.