Parker Palmer shares a story about one of God’s children like this. “On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks – an African American woman who was a seamstress and in her early 40’s – did something she was not supposed to do; she sat down at the front of a bus in one of the seats reserved for whites – a dangerous, daring and provocative act in a racist society. Legend has it that, years later, a graduate student came to Rosa Parks and asked, “Why did you sit down at the front of the bus that day?”….She replied, ‘I sat down because I was tired.’ As simple and simply life changing, world changing as that, “I sat down because I was tired.” …..Of course there were many forces aiding and abetting Rosa Parks’ decision….She had studied the theory and tactics of nonviolence at the Highlander Folk School, where Martin Luther King Jr. was also a student. She was secretary for the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, whose members had been discussing civil disobedience. But in the moment she sat down at the front of that bus, on that December day, she had no guarantee that the theory of nonviolence would work or that her community would back her up. It was a moment of existential truth, of claiming authentic selfhood, of reclaiming birthright, baptismal right, giftedness, beloved-ness and by doing so she set in motion a process that changed both the lay and law of the land.”
Rosa Parks sat down because she had reached the point where it was essential to embrace her true vocation, her calling as a child of God, a person loved and graced by God – not as someone who was trying necessarily to reshape our society but as someone who would live out her full self in the world – come what may. She decided, Palmer writes, “I will no longer act on the outside in a way that contradicts the truth that I hold deeply on the inside. I will no longer act as if I were less than the whole person I know myself to be.” The whole person God declares each one of us to be, God’s whole and holy persons, called to live as fully and honestly the authentic selves and lives God has given us, God has made us to be. (from a sermon by The Rev. Mark A. G. Huffman, St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church)