In response to his critics, Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinonia Farms in southern Georgia, asked a simple question:  “What would it be like if Jesus were born into the world right smack dab in the middle of the Jim Crow South?” As a New Testament Greek scholar, he set about translating the New Testament with that simple question in mind.

His rendering of Luke 21 reads, “And then they’ll see the son of man leading a Movement with great strength and authority. When these preliminary things happen, hold up your heads and throw back your shoulders because your freedom is arriving.”

Sometimes we call the “Movement” that Jordan was talking about “the Kingdom of God.” However, a phrase from the Civil Rights Movement, “The Beloved Community,” may be more appropriate for our purposes.

The Civil Rights hero John Lewis wrote, “We defined [the Beloved Community] as a society based on simple justice that values the dignity and worth of every human being.”

I don’t know about you, but I want to be a part of and help build that kind of Beloved Community. But y’all, it’s hard.

Whenever we feel like we’re part of the Beloved Community, somebody or something tries to tear us from it or to tear it down. What do we do about that tearing? 

Advent reminds us that the Beloved Community is already in this big, wide world around us.

Because of the birth of Jesus into the lowly manger, the Beloved Community is already in the lowly, humble people and the lowly, humble places around us. Because God is a God who is with us, the Beloved Community is already here.

When John Lewis was a teenager in Troy, Alabama, he heard the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. over the radio. Those words inspired him to join the Civil Rights Movement. In 1960, he participated in the first lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a Freedom Rider and risked his life to challenge the South’s failure to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision in Boynton v. Virginia, which ruled that segregation of public buses was unconstitutional.

In 1963, at 23 years old, he was a keynote speaker at the March on Washington and became chairperson of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In his leadership role with SNCC, he organized voter registration and community action programs during the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964.

The following year, he and Hosea Williams led over 600 peaceful protestors marching for voting rights across the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to the state capital, Montgomery. Lewis was building the Beloved Community. He was building a community where every human being would know their dignity and worth.

As he sat beside the other students at the lunch counter in Nashville, he knew that the Beloved Community was already there.

As he sat beside the other freedom riders on that Greyhound Bus from Washington, DC, to New Orleans, the Beloved Community was already there.

As his voice rang out between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument in the ears of a quarter of a million people standing up for civil rights, the Beloved Community was already there.

As he marched alongside other marchers over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the Beloved Community was already there.


The Beloved Community is already here.


But let’s shine a little brighter light on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. As Lewis and the other marchers were on the bridge, they were attacked by Alabama state troopers on what will forever be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

You might ask, “How can you say the Beloved Community is here in the light of ‘Bloody Sunday?’” It is because even though the Beloved Community is already here, it is also not here yet.

Racism is still here. You can find it in people’s hearts. You can find it in the structures on which our society is built.

Whenever we build the Beloved Community as John Lewis did, there will be more Bloody Sundays.

But we can still preach, sit-in, freedom ride, speak out, organize and march against racism because, as Clarence Jordan wrote, we can “hold up our heads and throw back our shoulders, because our freedom is arriving.”

The Beloved Community is not yet here in its fullness.

But Jesus is coming. Racism is going. And the Beloved Community will be in its fullness forever and ever.

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