Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (left) and Bishop William J. Barber II speak at the forum Sept. 20. Photo courtesy of Mayor Bass’ office.
Bishop William J. Barber II – nationally known co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and activist against societal injustice – called Los Angeles to lead a “Moral Monday” coalition of cities opposing federal policies, speaking in a Sept. 20 interfaith forum convened by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass at St. Paul’s Commons, Echo Park.
Decrying unjust immigration raids, Barber – a leader in the Disciples of Christ denomination and founder of Repairers of the Breach – urged the mobilization of 1,000 L.A. clergy of all faiths, joined by 1,000 women, 1,000 men, and 1,000 children in regular Monday protest rallies following weekends of justice-themed preaching in temples, mosques, churches, and other houses of worship. The strategy would replicate a model introduced by Barber in North Carolina.
“What’s happening here in L.A. is not just in L.A. issue, it’s a national issue, and what has to happen is L.A. has to nationalize the fightback,” Barber said. “And you have to start claiming you’ve been chosen. In other words, there comes a time that when people are fighting you, that you don’t see yourself as a victim, you see yourself as chosen for the battle.”
Video of Barber’s full remarks is here, with the mayor’s introduction here.
Attendees – numbering more than 100 local faith leaders personally invited by the Mayor’s Office – enthusiastically concurred with Barber and Bass, giving each a standing ovation.
Welcoming participants to the Commons were Rabbi Susan Goldberg of the on-site Nefesh congregation and Canon Bob Williams, who brought greetings from Bishop John Harvey Taylor in Lompoc officiating at the long-scheduled installation of a new rector there. To close the gathering, Episcopal Deacon Margaret McCauley led those gathered in singing “This Little Light of Mine.”
“I’m very grateful to be in community with you here today and view this as another step in our movement that we need to grow. They’re looking at us around the country,” Bass said, noting that cities with African American mayors have been singled out for national guard and ICE deployments. “Maybe they’re trying to use race to divide us, but race, here, will unite us.”
Barber opened his remarks by noting that three “liberty vans,” deployed in L.A. by the national Save America Movement (SAM), will be monitoring and video-recording ICE actions, which are expected to escalate in October with the release of added federal funding. SAM is mobilizing volunteers, including clergy, to staff the vans, record video, and post footage widely on social media.
Barber said the new effort “is bringing together unlikely allies, because I think that when you talk about moral fusion coalitions, if you have everybody in the group that has always been together, then the group is too small, and part of what you have to do is be able to build beyond just the norm.”
“We are here because of an American tendency… to lie and divide for power,” Barber said, noting that erroneous information about poverty influences lawmakers, including the congressional majority that passed the recent “big bill.”
Barber underscored statistics from the 2024 book White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, which he recently co-authored with SAM colleague Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.
“For instance, a lot of people in Washington D.C. and other places a few years ago would tell you that we had 37 million people in poverty, and it actually is 140 million people who are poor and low wealth,” Barber said. “And they… would tell you that black people have the most poverty when actually in raw numbers, that’s not true. Raw numbers: 66 million of the 140 million are white; 26 million are black. Now what is true is that 60.1% of all black people in poverty And 30%, the whites are in poverty and 30 to 40% of Latinos.
“And I remember when we wanted to put that information out, and with some folk told us, don’t do that, because you’re messing up the way we talk about things. And I said, “But the problem is, if we can’t have a truthful conversation, then we’re never going to unify it, because what was done by the forces that don’t want to address poverty is they want to make poverty, a black–brown issue, a alone marginalize it, and marginalize it, and therefore keep us from uniting. But when we can unite from California to the Carolinas, from Appalachia to Alabama, that’s when you can build power.”
Barber drew repeated applause throughout his 50-minute address, which continued with the following transcribed remarks:
“We’re here because of presidential overreach and presidential lies. And it’s not new. It was a presidential overreach and a presidential lie in 1846 that stole this land in 1848 from Mexican people. If you got a bunch of people coming together now that want to help and be a part of stopping these deportations and don’t want to deal with that truth, we’re still not being honest.
“It was President James Polk, who lied and said that Mexican people had started a war on American soil. Abraham Lincoln stood against him; former President John Quincy Adams stood against him. Ulysses Grant, who actually fought in that war, said it was one of the most unconstitutional wars. Abraham Lincoln filed something called a spot resolution. He said, if James Polkcan show me the exact spot that American blood was spilled by Mexican people, I’ll vote for this war; otherwise, this war is only about greed and land acquisition. And so in 1848, you had the treaty of Guadalupe, and that treaty turned over to California, Texas, Mexico, Oklahoma, and a whole lot of other states.
“So in a real sense, one of the reasons we’re in this problem to start with, is because we keep saying that people are coming here across the border, when the border came across them. We keep talking about folk are trying to come here as immigrants when people are just coming home. We took their land. They didn’t take ours, but that was a lie of presidential overreach.
“My point is, we’ve got to be clear that presidential overreach –and people going along with it for the purpose of greed – is not new. And what we see the Supreme Court doing today. Remember, right before the Civil Rights movement, right after the Korean War, you had another presidential overreach with President Eisenhower. President Eisenhower started Operation Wetback and said now that we’ve used Mexican people in the factories, we’ve used them in the war economy, we want them out of here. And his goal was to deport 2 million Mexicans down the Mississippi River in barges, and they didn’t complete it, but it was started. So when Trump is doing what he’s doing, he’s modeling; there are some nuances to what’s happening now, but it’s not totally new.
“And the one thing, clergy – whether you’re Muslim, or Christian, or Jewish – that we have to do for the people, is tell the truth. See, this is not merely about Republican versus Democrats. It’s not merely about a crisis of democracy. This is a crisis of civilization.
“There was another lie that has always underpinned this kind of move, and we call it the lie of manifest destiny. That certainly people have a right to take from others. There was a lie that undergirded slavery, the lie that undergirded taking the land from Texas, you know, because one of the reasons that Texas didn’t want to be a part of Mexico is because in the 1840s Mexico was anti–slavery, and Texas wanted to hold on to those slaves.
“Today, we have the undertow of the so–called replacement theory. It used to be on the fringes, and now you have senators and other folks talking about it in Congress. The replacement theory claims that white people are being deliberately replaced by black and brown people, and the lie that immigrants are driving crime when the truth is crime among immigrants is lower and less than the crime from native–born people.
“About this replacement theory: Now, it is true that by 2035, 2040, America is going be in a place, for the first time in Western culture, in the Western world, where the people who were formerly enslaved, and the people who were formerly the ones that did all of the work on the farms, the Latino people in the fields, will be in the majority. There would be no longer a clear majority. It will be 33, 33, 33. And a lot of that is what’s driving what we see happening.
“Just by demographics alone, extremists know that if we get to that place, they won’t be able to hold on to offices. They won’t be able to dictate their extremism, because black and brown and progressive white people will be able to join together and control the levers of power. And some believe that the goal now … You remember when Trump used to say this is the last election you’ll have? That was coded language. In other words, this is the last time you’ll have the chance to elect somebody like me. The demographics are shifting. See, it was a total of 7,000 votes that put the Congress in the hands of Mike Johnson. Did y’all know that? Seven thousand votes, it wasn’t 70,000; 90 million people didn’t vote. A 7,000–vote majority was the difference between having the House of Representatives we have today or having another one. Trump got less votes this time than he did.
“And when you when you look at what’s going on, there is this deep fear about the politics, and what does authoritarianism and neofascism always do? What it has always done: It finds the people you think you can target with the least resistance, and you use them as the experiment to how far you can push along. So, you challenge Latinos to see if folk will stand up and stand with them, or will we say, ‘That’s not us. That’s not our people. That’s them?’ And it’s a testing out that you see that happen.
“And so what we know is happening is wrong, it’s inhumane, it’s violent. It’s racist. But it’s also constitutionally inconsistent. The amendment in our Constitution that saved America was the 14th Amendment, because it answered the question about citizenship, but it also answered another question. And that is, who is protected by the law?
“And when when that law was passed with black and white folk for the first time, leading our United States, House of Representatives, you had a black man named Hiram Revels from Mississippi, who was in the United States Senate, the first African American. And when the debate went down, the question was about citizenship and the citizenship of the formerly enslaved. That question had to be answered. Slavery was outlawed, but the question is, can the former slave be a citizen? But the other question that had to be dealt with was, who does the law protect?
“And this is why when you hear Trump saying he wants to do away with the 14th Amendment, because the 14th Amendment made possible the rebirthing of America. Because what it says is that all citizens are guaranteed equal protection under the law. No, it doesn’t. That’s not what it says. That’s exactly what he doesn’t say. What it does say is all persons. It has nothing to do with whether you’re born here or not. It has nothing to do with whether you have papers or not. If, in fact, you are inside of the borders of the United States, all persons have a right to equal protection under the law. and they have a right to due process, so that means everything time you grab somebody up with a masked man; and you know, down south, we don’t like people in masks, because it reminds us of the Klan, right? And you put people in and they grab somebody, and they grab them and lock them up, or they take them or they disappear them, that they have violated the Constitution. It is a constitutional violation, and the Supreme Court is actually enabling the violation of the very document is supposed to protect. Equal protection under the law is being violated and when the government does it, that means they’re doing it in our name.
“And the reason we have to stand up in this moment, no matter where we are and engage in massive nonviolent, fierce resistance, is for two reasons. Number one is you can’t let somebody misuse your name. They’re doing this in our name, and number two, if you allow the violation of persons’ constitutional right to one group, then you can’t say anything when it comes to your group.
“What we see here happening in Los Angeles across this country is a direct violation of the 14th Amendment. And there are forces in this country that want to have a constitutional convention. You ought to read a book called Democracy in Chains. where [the author Nancy MacLean] actually got inside of these groups, and they are licking their chops for a constitutional convention. If they can get enough states with enough extreme leadership, they want a constitutional convention because they believe that the Constitution needs to be changed out of this fear of replacement and out of the lies where they are criminalizing brownness, just like blackness was criminalized, and poverty was criminalized. It’s morally indefensible, constitutionally inconsistent, and it’s morally indefensible. What is going on?
“And that is why we have to start talking about a moral movement. See, moral movements rise when the government and the politicians aren’t doing their jobs. And when we recognize this factor, the same forces that are deporting our Latino brothers and sisters, and Haitian brothers and sisters and others, are the same forces that are taking land afresh from native people, right now, are the same forces that are passing voter suppression laws, are the same forces that just voted to take 16 million people’s health care and 51,000 people will die this year from that bill that was just passed in Congress. The same forces that took taken nearly 20 million people’s food stamps at a time when groceries are going higher and higher. The same forces that are attacking the trans community, that are attacking the gay community, that are attacking women’s right to choose, they are all the same forces.
“And if they are the same forces and they are cynical enough to be together, we have to be smart enough and moral enough to come together. When we stand up, when we stand up and say we’re against the lie that has created a deportation, we are also standing up for all the other lies that are being told, and all of the other bad policies. We have to stand up together.
“And for us, as clergy, you know, there is a scripture that our Jewish brothers and sisters honor, and Muslims honor it, and I’m sure other religions and Christians: Isaiah 10 says, “Woe unto those who legislate evil, and rob the poor of their rights, and make women and children prey,” P-R-E-Y. And the truth of the matter is, we have to challenge those who would dare pray P-R-A-Y in opening a Congress or opening a state legislature, or opening a city council or opening a county of commissioners, they would P-R-A-Y and then pass policies that P-R-E-Y on the very people that God has sent us and God’s concerned. That’s where we come in. Where we come in as clergy is because when Jesus, for instance, was on his way to the cross, it’s interesting what he was talking about. When Jesus started his public ministry, he started his ministry talking about good news to the poor. A brokenhearted, the blind, the captors, and all of those made to feel like they didn’t matter. The unaccepted. That’s where he started his ministry, in the ghetto of Nazareth. And the Bible says he almost got killed for preaching that message. He almost got killed that day for declaring that that the message of ministry in the public square has to start with good news for the poor, and poor in that particular text is a Greek word, potokos. It means those who’ve been made poor because of economic exploitation. That’s what Jesus starts his ministry.
“Jesus ends his ministry talking about the same thing. He says that the nations will be called. Nations, not individuals, nations. And he said, the nations will be asked, when I was hungry – not individuals, nations – when I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe me? Jesus would really be asking the questions of Jubilee? They grow out of the Old Testament. When I was a stranger, when I was an immigrant, did you welcome me?
“So, in a real sense, you all say, and we’re saying that cities like Los Angeles, that Trump targeted that you, could it be the God targeted you? Because God knew you would stand up. You know, there’s a flip side of this thing. Could it be that God chose L.A.? That God chose a place where you all are more comfortable with diversity than anywhere else in the country. That God is betting on L.A. He’s betting on L.A to be able to come together, and that you all won’t have purity tests that disable you from working together. Because you know, some places, some places, the advocates fight among themselves more than they fight the thing they’re advocating for. Sometimes people don’t even know who their enemies are, but maybe in L.A. Maybe, maybe. I’m just saying, maybe. Maybe. Maybe God chose L.A. to try to save America from the judgment of God, because the text says, if the nation mistreats the immigrant, then the nation faces something bigger than a vote. The nation faces the judgment of God, and there comes a time that we’ve got to say this….
“And we know that authoritarianism is not new. It’s been around. It was authoritarianism that was part of Jim Crow. authoritarianism was slave religion. Authoritarianism was what was said to women, you couldn’t vote, because you were a woman, was what even said to poor white men, you couldn’t vote. It’s not new. And the lies that go along with it is not new. So there has to be a movement that says this, stop lying…that doesn’t owe anybody anything, that’s free enough to point out the lies and say, “Stop lying.” Our country is in a mess because the country is believing lies.
“And if I know anything about being a preacher, or being a minister, we are ordained to challenge lies. If preachers don’t challenge lies, we ain’t worth the robes we put on. Because what we declare is that we know who the father of lies is, and it’s not God, the God we serve. Jeremiah said it like this, in Jeremiah 6, he says everybody’s lying. The priest and the politicians. And it was in that moment that he understood that God called for the prophets. Could it be that God has some faith in y’all to be the prophetic voice?
“Because Madam Mayor, what I’m convinced is, you know, I love this country, but as a person of faith, I can’t bow down to this country. When the leadership of this country is taking the country in a direction that doesn’t honor God. I had somebody ask the question the other day, they read Proverbs 6, where it says, “What does the Lord hate? And what is it that the Lord despise?” And they asked me the question, “Reverend, what do you do when you got a leader of a nation that violates what God hates every hour? You ever read what said in Proverbs 6: God hates a lying tongue? Somebody that sows division, somebody that sheds innocent blood. What do you do when you have leadership that is leading the nation to walk in ways that violate the very things that God hates? And the scriptures are so clear on this. Exodus 12 says the same law that applies to native-born is supposed to apply to the immigrant. The Bible says in Deuteronomy 27, “Cursed is a nation that withholds justice from the immigrant.” The Bible says in Leviticus 19, “When the foreigner lives among you do not mistreat them, but treat them like they are your brother or your sister and remember when you were an immigrant. Jeremiah 7 says, “Do not oppress the immigrant.” Luke 10 says, “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.” The Bible says where the spirit of the Lord is, there here is liberty.
“So we’re in a moral movement because in a nation that mistreats immigrant stands under the judgment of God. Who told the extremists that they could silence give me your poor? Your huddled masses yearning to be free. Who said that you could change that? And you know that liberty, Statue of Liberty, when it was actually put there, it had chains on them, because it really was put there as a to talk about emancipation of slaves. And somebody tried to hide that, too. It’s still on her feet.
“But what we have to do: Maybe God is counting on you, all Mayor, to nationalize what’s happening here in L.A. What I mean by that is real change never happens from D.C down. It always happens from Birmingham up, from L.A. up, from Montgomery up.
“So it might be that God is has chosen you all to nationalize, because 180,000 people have been deported since Trump took office. Now, Stephen Miller, almost 400,000 people this year. They are flying 12 charter planes of people out of the U.S. every day. Some of them are being done on military planes. In the month of June alone, 2,000 immigrants in Los Angeles were arrested with no criminal records, the majority of them from Mexico and Guatemala. Trump told people across this country that he was only going after the so-called bad guys, but only 8% of them even have criminal records. And the Economic Policy Institute says if Trump and Stephen Miller get their way, and the budget they just passed, the bill, they just passed as another $150 million or so to hire more agents, more agents with masks. They want to put 4 million people out of the country. And if they do, there will be 3.3 million fewer employed immigrants, and 2.6 [million] fewer employed U.S. born workers at the end of that period, there will be. U.S. born construction employment will fall by 800,000. Immigrant employment will fall by 1.4 million. Deportations are going to eliminate 500,000 childcare jobs. California, Florida, New York, and Texas will have the highest number of job laws.
“So what’s happening in here in L.A. It’s not just in L.A. issue, it’s a national issue, and what has to happen is L.A. has to nationalize the fightback. And you have to start claiming you’ve been chosen. In other words, there comes a time that when people, when people are fighting you, that you don’t see yourself as a victim, you see yourself as chosen for the battle.
“Up in the mountains of Appalachia, they say it like this: When you poke the bear, you better hope the bear doesn’t wake up. Well, since they’ve decided to poke the city of angels, then the angels ought to stand up, and you know what angels do. Oh, glory. Angels, when angels come, check it out in the Bible, when angels come, they always do three things. When you call when the angel comes, they always come with some light. They won’t let the darkness stand. The angels always bring light. When the angels come, the angels always speak the truth. The angels that say, I know what other folk have said, but this is what the Lord says.” And then the third thing that angels will always do is angels will say, don’t be afraid.” It might be hard, but don’t be afraid. It might be rough, but don’t be afraid. You got help from another quarter. You got help from another place. Don’t you be afraid. You’ve been chosen, Mary. You’ve been chosen, Samson. You’ve been chosen, Jeremiah. You’ve been chosen, Isaiah. You’ve been chosen, Mayor, you’ve been chosen, L.A. Walk in it. Dr. King once said, ‘If we are wrong, then the Constitution is wrong. Walk in it.’
“And that’s why more than 15 organizations came together, and this morning, we released something called liberty vans. And the liberty vans have a painting of the Statue of Liberty on them, and these liberty vans are now going to roll in the city. It’s a gift to you all. It’s a gift. We’re not coming in trying to lead nothing. We’re coming in follow, but this is a gift to the community…. That’s SAM, Save America Movement, Repairers of the Breach, we’re bringing. And in those vans, we need people of faith; labor, business community, veterans, immigrant right activists, Latino Black, White, Asian, have all come together to say, if you touch any of us, you touch all of us.
“And since they’ve got military occupation here and masked agents and disappearing people from the neighborhood, we listened to some stories. And one of the stories ended like this this morning, a mother who hasn’t seen her husband and children haven’t seen their father, she simply said this: ‘Help us.’ She said, ‘Help us’ with tears in our eyes, her child hugging her to come. She said, ‘Help us; will somebody please help us.’ And then, when she was walking off, I saw her, she hugged me, and she said, ‘Thanks for at least showing her, putting a light on it. Because putting a light on this will help us.’
As your mayor said, if there was no camera on the Edmund Pettis Bridge, you might not have had a movement for voting rights. So these vans are coming, and what are the vans doing? They’re gonna be traveling all 24/seven, in the vans, we’re gonna put a powerful professional video crew. Since the media is acting control, you’ve got to create your own media. When we led Moral Monday in North Carolina, we started with 17 people and six months, we had 100,000 people by doing it every Monday, but also from every Monday and Tuesday, we took over the news, both online and others. You got to take over the news. You got to create activity. So these vans are going to shine a light. Inside the van is gonna be, say, a veteran, a veteran, say that veteran. We need a pastor. We need an immigrant’s rights activist, we need a neighbor, and we’re going to have a driver and a film crew. And what they’re going to do is exercise their First Amendment right to document what is happening and make sure that it doesn’t just stay here in L.A, and you don’t just get a little snippet on the news, but folks can see the whole thing, the real thing, what’s really going on. Liberty vans. And the goal is to shine a nonviolent witness with these Liberty Vans, and they will remind Americans who sworn the oath to protect and serve that they do not have to obey unlawful orders. These liberty vans, by filming this will make sure people are being questioned, know what their rights are. That’s why the lawyer will be in the van. And they will document the assaults. and how our tax dollars are being used to beat people down. Liberty vans, running all the time, and we’re setting this up so that it can happen in other cities because somebody has to put a light on it.
“In the Old Testament scriptures the prophet said, “Cry loud and spare not. Lift your voice like a trumpet. The word there is kol shofar. It means to lift your voice so powerfully that nobody can ignore it. And then that same scripture says, that the only way to get the light turned on is you’ve got to loose the bands of wickedness. You’ve got to expose it. The Bible says of Jesus in Colossians that he exposed evil openly. That was his nonviolent action. In Ephesians, he said, ‘We must reprove, reprove means to expose.’ Somebody say ‘expose.’ And the one thing darkness hates is a light. Because the truth of the matter, physicists will tell you that darkness is really not real. It’s an illusion. because you can’t make a light bulb that can shine dark. But you can make a light bulb that can shine light. If darkness was real, you could make it shine something to shine dark. Darkness is not real, because when light comes, it cannot stay. If it was real, it would be able to exist beside the light, but darkness cannot exist beside the light, and the truth of the matter is this occupation can’t exist beside the light. These deported, if enough light gets put on it, the consciousness of the world, the consciousness of the country will make it shut down. And so is time to shed the light.
“Then finally, I just want to suggest a possible something, not telling anybody what to do, but possible something. Because every now and then, when you’re in the moment of a crisis of civilization, you’ve got to do something consistently. So I just want to ask you a what-if? What if here in Los Angeles there’s a way of nationalizing this? If in Los Angeles, we may put a call out to every other city that’s been targeted to have some national Moral Mondays. and on Moral Monday, the first one, what you would do is you would stage it and you’d use the whole weekend Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and get a thousand congregations across the state, across the city that will agree to preach together… if you could find a thousand rabbis, a thousand clergy, a thousand imams total together that would preach about what God says about caring for the immigrants, and then on Monday, you have a set time tomorrow Monday, March, right in the heart wherever the occupation is, wherever. And this is how you would do it: You’d have a thousand clergy to start. in full vestments, full vestments.
“You know, when Bishop Tutu and some bishops went into the courtroom in South Africa, the story is told, and they came in in full vestments, said one of the judges leaned over and said, ‘Apartheid is over.’ And they said, ‘What do you mean, ‘apartheid is over?” He said, ‘Look.’ He said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘No.’ They got on their bishops’ attire on. They decided that this is the part of their calling. They decided that this is just as important as Passover or just as important as communion, or just as important as Ramadan. They’ve decided that if they don’t stand up against apartheid, then they have violated their calls, the ministry.
“What did we find a thousand clergy? that would say in this moment, and it would happen simultaneously, Los Angeles nationalizing it, making the call. Now, imagine going down the street a thousand clergy. and a strategically done, and then when you get to a certain block, a thousand women were joined a thousand clergy. And then you march a little more, and then a thousand men were joined a thousand women, mothers, thousand mothers, and a thousand men and fathers. And then, right in the middle of it, a thousand children. And then what if the clergy in this room, the Sikhs, the Muslims, the Christians, the Jews, would be a little Pentecostal and figure out how to speak in tongues to one another? And figure out how to have some kind of a religious service at the end of the march. You don’t have to be long, but some kind of service where you can combine some of the best of Jewish, best of Islam, best of Sikh, best of Christian, and combine it. And then the stage that you build that day, you only let the people impacted and speak and other folk come around them, and you film that, you film their tears, you film that anguish. And what if you could do that and announce it far enough in advance, and the goal would be to get two to three to five million people online to tune in. Tomorrow, March of cities, when the angels stood up. And everybody could see clergy leaning in. Everybody see clergy. What if what if we could do that together? What if we could show light together?
“And then what if on that same day, some of the clergy would make the announcement that we’re gonna go and stay in the community of immigrants. this week. We’re not gonna go back home. We’re gonna go stay. and say we are them. And they are us.
“And I don’t know, but what if we did that together and it happened in 10 cities simultaneously? And it becomes a massive moral call to nonviolent action. And if it happens simultaneously in California and North Carolina, Chicago, and Memphis, has been hurting our brothers and sisters. and it’s gone on far too long. And we won’t be silent anymore. I just wonder what would happen.
“And I tell you why I wonder, and I’m going to close. For years, Mayor, I read the scripture that justice roll down like waters. And righteousness like a mighty stream. But I found out that like many of us, I had been reading the end of the matter and not how to get to the end. If you go back a little bit in that scripture, and the rabbis can help me if I’m wrong, it says that God first said to Amos, ‘People don’t like this kind of talk, when you call out injustice.’ And then God says to Amos, ‘I need a remnant. I don’t need everybody. I need a remnant that will go out in the street.’ Who will close the factories, close the malls, the Message Bible is translated like that. We’ll close down everything. And I need a remnant who will go in the street and act like something’s wrong, will cry like something’s wrong. Will shout like something’s wrong. Will holler like something’s wrong. We’ll not go in and act like we’re dealing with something normal. And then it says, God says, and if I can get a remnant to do this, then I will visit you. And then justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a God, like a mighty dream. In other words, if you want God to get in the middle of this… God says, first, I need a remnant that’ll go in the street and shut down everything nonviolently and cry and lament in the street.
“Every time God moved into scripture, it always came after somebody cried and acted like something was bigger than them, and they needed God, and the question is, are there any pastors and religious leaders in Los Angeles that still know how to lament? They know how to cry. That know how to call wrong, wrong, and lies, lies, and injustice, injustice. Are there any folk that’ll go in the street and shut it down, shut it down, shut it down, shut it down, and trust that God will stand up if we stand up first. Is there anybody that wants to find out and see what it’s like when God shows up and justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream?
“I just came all the way from North Carolina to tell California and to tell Los Angeles, ‘You’ve been chosen, baby.’ I know it’s hard, but God is trusting you, Mayor. God is trusting on y’all. God is depending on y’all to show us how to do this thing. God needs you to stand up and call for a mighty remnant of moral leadership in this country. right now, right now, right now, right now, right now, right now, right now, right now – not tomorrow – right now, right now! That’s the call. It’s time. It’s time…. All of us from coast to coast, it’s time for the angels to rise.”