Unsung Heroes: Rev Dr Liz Theoharis - Sermon from June 30, 2019

I said 2 weeks ago that I mentioned Delores Huerta once when I was preaching last year about Cesar Chavez and the farm workers movement.  I did the same thing with Rev. Dr. Liz TheoHarris when I talked about Rev. William Barber and the Poor People’s campaign. But reviving Dr.King’s original Poor People’s Campaign was actually an idea that Rev. Theoharis  had been thinking about and planning for  years, and she is the one who approached Rev. Barber about  it. Almost all the photos you see when there is news about the campaign feature Rev. Barber front and center, with Rev. Theoharis standing to the side. And she is always mentioned second, as Rev. Barber is more well known.  But she is no shrinking violet, as we heard in our modern reading, and there is a video on YouTube where she is addressing a congressional committee on poverty and she speaks truth to power boldly and powerfully.

The issue of poverty has been her focus for her entire adult life. She has spent decades  organizing alongside poor people in grass roots campaigns across the United States and around the world, Her parents were social activists, and she says that she was ‘raised to see the work of ending poverty as what you were supposed to do.”When she moved from Milwaukee to Philadelphia for college, she began visiting “Tent City,” an encampment of homeless families  trying to survive one of Philadelphia’s hottest summers. It was run by the people who lived there. They shared goods and what little money they had with each other. They watched one another’s children when parents worked.  And whoever had a car drove whoever needed a ride.

It was here that she discovered the true power of people working together to understand problems and find solutions, and she realized that that was how all organizations should work. She co-founded and is the coordinator of the Poverty Initiative at Union theological Seminary, which has partnered with local groups, including domestic workers in New York, who fought for and won a wage increase, and  grassroots organizations in Vermont, who fought for and won Universal Health Care. And she is the founder and co-director of the“Kairos center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice,” which exchanges lessons with social movements globally.

In seeking ordination in the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), she insisted, against the church’s conventional wisdom, that building an anti-poverty movement was as much a part of Christian ministry as preaching, and she was granted ordained status, a very bold move for Presbyterians, who called themselves in seminary, “The Frozen Chosen.” In 2013, she invited Rev. Barber to be one of the keynote speakers at the launch of Kairos, and they decided to join their networks to start the new Poor People’s Campaign, where people could come together and try to right the wrongs of society, just as Dr. King had done 50 years before, saying, “It is wrong for 64, 000,000 people to make less than 15 dollars and hour, when there are 400 families who make 97,000 dollars and hour. This movement, like her previous ones, is led by those most impacted, and began at the local level. They build coalitions with organizations that have similar goals and now have an infrastructure of people who want to partner with them, including community and faith leaders, activists, and allies across the country. She says, “When those most impacted by injustice band together with moral leaders and advocates, that’s when change begins to happen.  The center of gravity is the local work that people are doing to build a deep and broad and strong foundation for a long-haul movement. We help people who are working for and demanding change to connect and stay organized until they get that change.”

Her commitment to work alongside the people that are suffering from the injustice in our world is what most makes Rev. Theoharis a hero to me. All of her organizations are multiracial, multi-class, and inter-generational. And she names her local partners in every statement she makes.  When she and Rev. Barber visited activists at the border, the marchers were 99% Latino, and she made it clear that the campaign’s presence there was to support the marchers.

Rev. Theoharris’ way of living and being in the world is an example for all of us especially those of us with privilege, to pause before we enter a movement we know little to nothing about and try to force our solutions on it. Every movement needs allies, and we who are in minority groups appreciate our allies.  But, as Debbie and I talked about at the Pride festival, allies to any group of people who have fewer rights than they do can’t possibly know what they have gone through because we haven’t walked in each other’s shoes.

That made me think about our work at the homeless drop-in center.  We who have never been homeless do not know what our clients go through daily.  I am so privileged that I was a junior in college when I first saw someone in downtown Atlanta reach into a trash can and take and eat what was left of a McDonald’s hamburger.  I was so shocked that I thought I couldn’t possibly be seeing what I was seeing. So when, many years later, in seminary, I felt called to work in homeless ministry, I went out to the parks in Atlanta and spent days asking homeless people what they most needed from those of us who had resources.  The number one answer, by the way, was socks.

Homeless people in big cities have to walk all day, because the moment they sit down, they can be charged with loitering and vagrancy. Their shoes might not be the best, but having a supply of clean, dry socks made all the difference.

We don’t presume to know what our clients at the center need.  We ask them I think they know that they have our respect and that we are sincerely seeking to be a resource and their advocates. We don’t always succeed. Nobody does.  We are all human, and we all sometimes think that we know what is best for someone else. Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis is our reminder to always be open to learn from those who are the most impacted by injustice and to work with them and walk beside them in their quest for justice and equality.

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Our modern reading is from Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-founder of the Poor People’s campaign: a National Call for Moral Revival, talking about using non-violent civil disobedience to try to get people to hear the truth.

There’s a quote I find very useful from Dr. King. In talking about law and order and civil disobedience, he says there is a reason for red lights.

But when there is an emergency, when someone is bleeding, the ambulance is supposed to drive through the red lights.

He said that we need brigades of ambulance drivers who are willing to ignore the red lights of the current system and drive with their sirens on full, so that it will cause people to have to pause and think about what is going on. What kind of world do we live in? And does it have to stay the same as it is?

Our country is facing an emergency. So you have to do things to break through. So people are engaging in non-violent civil disobedience.

In Kansas, when folks were arrested trying to enter the capitol, the language used in charging them said that they were violating the capitol, as if the building was a victim to poor people and clergy coming together to talk about how they have been victims to low wages and lack of healthcare and policies that hurt the poor.

It is not a crime for poor people to starve to death in this country. It is not illegal for people to die because they don’t have healthcare in this country.  But it is illegal to come together and try to get our state or our nation to raise wages and make sure everyone has healthcare.

Our biblical reading for today is Isaiah 58: 1-9, from

The Message translation.


    They’re busy, busy, busy at worship,
    and love studying all about me.
To all appearances they’re a nation of right-living people—
To all appearances they’re a nation of right-living people—
    law-abiding, God-honoring.
They ask me, ‘What’s the right thing to do?’
They ask me, ‘What’s the right thing to do?’
    and love having me on their side.
But they also complain,
But they also complain,
    ‘Why do we fast and you don’t look our way?
    Why do we humble ourselves and you don’t even notice?’
    You drive your employees much too hard.
You fast, but at the same time you bicker and fight.
You fast, but at the same time you bicker and fight.
    You fast, but you swing a mean fist.
The kind of fasting you do
The kind of fasting you do
    won’t get your prayers off the ground.
 This is the kind of fast day I’m after:
    to break the chains of injustice, get rid of exploitation in the workplace, free the oppressed, and cancel debts.
What I’m interested in seeing you do is:
What I’m interested in seeing you do is:
    sharing your food with the hungry,
    inviting the homeless poor into your homes,
    putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad,
    being available to your own families.
Do this and the lights will turn on,
Do this and the lights will turn on,
    and your lives will turn around at once.
Your righteousness will pave your way.
Your righteousness will pave your way.
 Then you’ll call out for help and I’ll say, ‘Here I am.’

Tell my people what’s wrong with their lives.

Well, here’s why:

“The bottom line on your ‘fast days’ is profit.