Current injustice demands a new march on D.C.

Last week, I had the honor of being invited to speak at a rally at a rally at the Lincoln Memorial commemorating the March on Washington 40 years ago. The rally also was aimed at initiating a 15-month "rolling mobilization" to get millions of voters from communities of color and poor areas to the polls.

Here are the remarks I gave:

There is an ancient Jewish prayer that we say when in the spiral of time we reach a moment of transformation -- not merely a commemoration of the past, but a birthing of the future:

Blessed are you, the breathing-spirit of the world, who has filled us with life, lifted us up, and carried us to this moment.

Baruch atah Yah, elohenu ruach ha'olam, shehechiyanu v'kiymanu v'higiyanu lazman hazeh.

And I begin as well, as our Muslim brothers and sisters throughout the world begin -- In the name of God. In the name of the God of compassion, the God of justice, the God who calls us into the beloved community. In the name of the God who forbids the killing of innocents -- whether in the churches and back roads of Alabama and Mississippi or the street corners of Detroit, whether on the tip of Manhattan or in the neighborhoods of Baghdad, whether on the buses of Jerusalem or in the apartment houses of Gaza City.

In the name of the God whose very name in ancient Hebrew is not a Hebrew word but a breathing that includes and transcends all languages, all peoples, all species -- the name that can only be pronounced by breathing -- YHWH.

I invite you for a moment to look into the faces close around you -- each face so different, each face the face of God. And to look at the green faces of God as well -- the grasses and the trees -- for what the trees breathe out is what we breathe in, what we breathe out is what the trees breathe in.

Each face, the face of God.

In the name of God who is the breath, the wind, the rushing-spirit of the world, who comes sometimes as a gentle breeze of comfort and sometimes as a hurricane of transformation:

The night before Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, he spoke of standing as Moses stood, on a mountaintop where he could see the promised land of freedom -- the land he might not enter, but the people would.

Ten days later he was to have taken part in the Passover seder with his good friend, co-worker, co-marcher, co-visionary Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel -- but by that time he had passed over into a different promised land.

The Passover seder calls us to remember that the power of Pharaoh vanished before the hurricane of transformation that split the Red Sea and carried a people into freedom.

Yet the Passover seder looks not only at those days long ago but at the present and the future. For the seder teaches us that in every generation a Pharaoh will rise against us to enslave and destroy us. And it teaches us that in every generation, every human being must go out from slavery to freedom. Every one of us must become the midwives who defied Pharaoh's murderous orders. Every one of us must become Pharaoh's own daughter who broke the Pharaoh's law to save a life; must become Moses, Miriam, Aaron.

Who and what is Pharaoh in our own generation?

The present government of the United States has attacked our neighbors, violated our rights, broken our laws, endangered our children and thwarted our hopes.

The present government of the United States is strengthening racism, trying to reverse the great achievements of those who stood here 40 years ago -- not only by opposing affirmative action, but by imprisoning 2 million people, the highest number in the world, mostly people of color.

The present government of the United States has handed over to the extremely wealthy and to great corporations tax breaks of hundreds of billions. Even the rich cannot eat more food than they do now, wear more clothes than they do now, live in more mansions than they do now. There is only one thing they can get with those hundreds of billions of dollars -- more power. The present government of the United States is bleeding dry our own city and state governments so that they can no longer provide what the people need -- health care, schools, pensions, even local police and fire protection.

The present government of the United States lied to its own citizens and broke our sacred obligations to all peoples, violating the U.N. Charter to undertake an aggressive war against a people so weak and helpless as to be a threat to no one -- sending our own men and women to die and be wounded and sickened alongside tens of thousands of another people.

The present government of the United States is plundering our forests, poisoning our air, and raising high the very corporations of big oil that are scorching the earth and endangering the futures of our children.

The present government of the United States has endangered freedom of the press by encouraging extreme concentration of control of the news media, and by erecting high walls of secrecy around the public business of the government.

The present government of the United States has undermined the civil liberties of its citizens and shattered the human rights of its immigrants.

The present government of the United States is putting in power judges who will uphold corporate interests against those of the people and will attack the personal dignity, privacy and freedom of women and gay and lesbian people.

The present government of the United States has undermined the labor movement through which workers seek to protect themselves against the greed of great corporations.

In short, once again: The present government of the United States has attacked our neighbors, violated our rights, broken our laws, endangered our children and thwarted our hopes.

In our own generation, who is Pharaoh? The present government of the United States.

How do Americans respond to such abuses of power? We remember how Americans respond

We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all human beings are born with equal dignity and worth, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights: -- to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We hold this truth to be self-evident: That whenever any government or corporation becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right, the duty, of the people to alter or abolish it and to recreate the beloved community.

When our forebears -- some of them; just the men, just the whites -- asserted truth, they took up the sword of war. We know today -- we learned it 40 years ago -- that we can win a deeper, fuller, more just American revolution by taking up the plowshares of vigorous nonviolence.

In the name of the God of compassion, the God of justice, the God who is the breath of life -- are we prepared to act? Are we prepared to recreate the community of nonviolent action? Are we prepared to become the midwives who resisted Pharaoh, to become Pharaoh's own daughter who broke the law to save the life of Moses, to become Moses, to become Aaron, to become Miriam?

Are we prepared to face the Pharaoh of today -- by lobbying, by voting, by demonstrating in the streets, by sitting down in the offices, the pyramids of death, that big oil builds?

Are we -- 40 years after we gathered here -- ready to become once again the beloved community?