The bridge had a name before the marchers gave it another one. Edmund Pettus—Confederate general, U.S. senator, reputed leader of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. Steel trusses arced over the Alabama River like the bones of an old beast, and on March 7, 1965, a Sunday, people of prayer walked up its back with songs on their lips and the quiet courage of those who’ve decided that fear no longer gets the last word.

They came out of Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, where the hymns had woven themselves into strategy, where the Lord's Prayer learned how to hold a clipboard. John Lewis was twenty-five, Hosea Williams a few years older, Amelia Boynton Robinson in a Sunday coat that would soon carry tear gas like a perfume nobody asked for.

They weren't there for a handout. They were there for a path forward. Not charity, but a remodeling of the house. They crossed the county line that the sheriffs had warned them not to cross, and the bridge turned from architecture into a test. On the other side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, there were helmets and horses, troopers with clubs and gas, a line of men organized to hold back the irresistible tide of history.

Maybe you remember what happened next: The sheriff gave the order to disperse. The marchers refused to run. There was a big rush of bodies, then the nightsticks started with their deadly drumbeat, and then came the tear gas that makes you forget which way is home.

Lewis's skull cracked. Amelia Boynton Robinson went down, unconscious, photographed like the black and white patron saint of stubborn hope.

The bridge, faithful to its namesake, tried to hold the old world in place on Sunday, but the people kept showing up. Then they marched again on Tuesday. This time with clergy from all over the country, who’d gotten on planes and buses and made their way to Selma, Alabama, after an urgent national appeal for clergy was sent out.

Now, we tell that story and we cheer the courage. We look at the black and white photos and nod solemnly at our heroes. But I want to focus on something smaller and sharper than the kind of epic courage on display—something closer to the daily grind of following Jesus.

Because, here’s the thing: the people who walked onto that bridge to be beaten down by the forces of fear had been walking into county courthouses built on a foundation of fear for years. They were trying to register to vote, to finally get what everyone else enjoyed, just because when they came out, they weren’t the right skin tone. But before they could sign anything, they had to pay a poll tax and then recite the Constitution without missing a comma or name all 67 counties and their mayors. Or some equally ridiculous test meant to keep Black people from exercising their self-determination.

They'd been walking into churches to plan who’d sit with whom at the registrar's office, who could drive, who had bail money, who could stand long enough to be told "come back tomorrow." I mean, they held fish fries to fund an entire theory of democracy.

Pastors preached sermons that weren’t about how to feel better but how to fill out forms together. When charity showed up with a sandwich, they were grateful; when justice showed up with a federal examiner and the Voting Rights Act, they finally glimpsed freedom.

And Jesus-followers are trying to make a way in a century when so many are addicted to busyness, tempted to make goodness a hobby rather than the focus of a good life. Nowadays, most people prefer helping episodically—sign up, show up, snap a photo, go home. Discretionary charity is the casserole after the fire ... and God bless the casserole; it keeps a family fed while the smoke clears.

But structural justice is the building code that means the next family doesn't have to live through another inferno.

Charity is a hand on the shoulder; justice is a hand on the lever of power. One is tenderness we should never lose, while the other is love that refuses to bow.

We learned that on Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, because church folks decided that Moses and the prophets in the syllabus weren't just poetry. They read, "Open your hand to the poor," and it sounded like clearing traffic bollards from a voting ballot.

They heard, "Loose the bonds of injustice," and it fueled a march. But it also gave strength for the discipline not to strike back, and then the hospitality of a safe house where you could sleep and not get arrested before dawn.

They prayed Psalm 146 about the Lord who lifts those bowed down. And then they lifted each other—boots and elbows and everything—through a thicket of laws designed to make dignity a scavenger hunt.

Amos said, "Let justice roll down like waters," and those marchers put their feet into a river and insisted that bridges should carry people toward their destiny, not away from it.

In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus told a story about a gate that, instead of a bridge with a pathway to a better future, became a canyon where the dying go to make a bed while they wait. A rich man in purple and fine linen feasted every day on the right side of a threshold. A poor man named Lazarus lay outside, on the wrong side of the gate, covered in sores. The dogs showed basic mercy, licking his wounds. Interestingly enough, the rich man couldn't muster any compassion for one of God’s children languishing in the street.

Death arrived for Lazarus, and suddenly the gate to keep everyone where they were supposed to be became a permanent chasm. In death, the rich man begged for a messenger from the dead to warn his brothers. And Abraham—the ancestor of broad tables with a seat for everyone—said, “Sorry.”

"They have Moses and the prophets. If they were going to listen, they’d have done it by now." It was a hard thing to hear, I imagine, because it was true. We don't need a miracle when we have the syllabus right in front of us.