Jesus would have grown up hearing Sunday’s first reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah, who preached in the mid-700s before Christ. Isaiah protested against an aristocracy that ignored people who were homeless, naked, oppressed. Civil rights worker Fannie Lou Hamer was a prophetic voice in the tradition of Isaiah.
Ms. Hamer was born in Mississippi, the granddaughter of slaves. Her family were sharecroppers—a position not that different from slavery. In 1962, when Ms. Hamer was 44 years old, she attended a voter registration meeting. To her surprise she learned that African Americans actually had a constitutional right to vote.
When asked by the meeting facilitators for volunteers to go to the courthouse to register to vote, Ms. Hamer was the first to raise her hand. She made a dangerous decision. “The only thing they could do to me was to kill me,” she reflected later, “and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.”
When Ms. Hamer and others went to the courthouse, the police jailed and beat them. Ms. Hamer’s courageous act got her and her family thrown off the plantation where they were sharecroppers. Receiving constant death threats and even being shot at did not discourage Ms. Hamer. She became a Field Secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and traveled around the country speaking and registering people to vote.
Ms. Hamer understood that voting was the first step to securing a decent life for people living in poverty. “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” she often said. She answered to no one except God. Her rallying song of non-cooperation with systems that violated her was “This little light of mine, I’m going to make it shine.”
Ms. Hamer understood the call of Isaiah. She worked to remove the yoke of segregation, pointed her finger at what was wrong, and addressed the evil inherent in a system that kept people hungry and homeless. She knew how to let her little light shine.
Acts of mercy will restore Isreal.
Thus says the Holy One:
Is it not time to share
your bread with the hungry,
bring the homeless into your house;
clothe the naked when you see them,
and not turn your back on your own?
Then your light shall break forth
like the dawn, and your wound
shall quickly be healed;
your vindicator will go before you,
the glory of the Holy One
shall be your rearguard.
Then you shall call,
and the Holy One will answer;
you shall cry for help,
and God will say, “Here I am.”
If you remove oppression,
false accusation, and malicious speech from among you,
if you offer your food
to the hungry and satisfy
the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise
in the darkness and the gloom
shall become for you like midday.
Isaiah 58.7-10
- Who has inspired you by the way they make their light shine?
- How has doing acts of mercy affected your life?