Interpreting the Present Time (Proper 15c; Blessed Jonathan Daniels)

 

Blessed Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Icon by Tobias Haller, BSG

Interpreting the Present Time
Homily delivered the Thirteenth Sunday of Pentecost

(Proper 15; Year C RCL)
14 August 2016; 8 a.m. Said 10:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)
Readings: Jeremiah 23:23-29; Psalm 82; Hebrews 11:29-12:2 ; Luke 12:49-56

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Yikes.  “Have I come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”  This seems to be no loving Jesus, meek and mild.  This is mean, nasty, open-me-a-can-of-whup-ass Jesus.  And this gem of a Gospel is with that beauty from Hebrews:  “Some were tortured, … suffered mocking and flogging, … chains and imprisonment… stoned to death, … sawn in two, … killed by the sword, … [covered] in skins of sheep and goats [to entice wild animals to eat them in the circuses], … persecuted, tormented…. [They] did not receive [the deliverance of faith] promised, since God had [something better in mind],” being examples to us the living now, so that “they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.”  Yikes. 

The last few weeks in the Lectionary, we have been reading scriptures more and more about the cost of faith, about what we need to be willing to give up out of trust in God.   And here the scripture is telling us to give up hope on a loving, kind Jesus who will protect us from danger and fire.  Here, he wants the fire to burn.  Like the rioters in Watts in the mid sixties:  “Burn, baby, burn!”  

None of this should be taken as if Jesus is actually a mean and nasty pyromaniac and house wrecker.  It just is pointing to the truth that if we take Jesus at his word, if we take the Gospel seriously, if we don’t try to weasel out of it and try to find an easier, softer path—it sometimes feels that way.  There is no easier, softer path.   That’s because the world cannot accept Jesus, and if we do, we are bound to be in conflict with it, even with those closest to us.  The trust and love we have for Jesus, faithfulness to his heart of loving kindness and compassion, inevitably will bring stress and division.   When Jesus says here “let the fire burn!” he is basically saying the same thing that Winston Churchill expressed memorably: “When you have to go through hell, the quickest way is to just keep going!”   Jesus here is encouraging us to accept the inevitable stresses that love produces when it takes on flesh in this world, to embrace them as a way to get through them.   

In order to illustrate this truth of the Gospel, I want to talk about a saint, a martyr, whose feast day is today, August 14.

Blessed Jonathan Myrick Daniels was a white civil rights worker killed in Hayneville Alabama just after the signing of the 1965 Voters’ Rights Act. He became a martyr to the faith by living the Gospel even when it demanded that he come into conflict with others.  

Born into white privilege in New Hampshire, he went to Virginia Military Institute for High School and then to Harvard for college.  Raised by Congregationalists, he became an Episcopalian in High School.  But he had a crisis of faith in college after deaths in his immediate family.  He experienced a profound conversion experience on Easter Day 1962 at the Anglo-catholic Episcopal Church of the Advent in Boston, and felt a call to ministry.   He entered the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge.  Near the end of his second year there in March 1965, he saw on television the appeal of Martin Luther King, Jr., to come to Selma to work for black voting rights.   Jim Crow separation of the races and discrimination were the norm in the country, and most Episcopal Churches at the time were segregated.  The non-violent struggle of freedom riders in summer 1964 deeply impressed him.  In King’s appeal, Daniels heard Jesus calling him to serve the “least of these, his brothers and sisters.”   After a long weekend pursuing King’s program, Daniels returned to seminary and asked ETS to grant him a leave of absence for the rest of the semester so he could work in Selma, sponsored by the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity; the seminary approved, expecting him to return and begin his final year before ordination that fall.   

Daniels’ conviction that he was following Jesus’ way was deepened at daily Evening Prayer.  The singing of St. Mary’s Magnificat spoke of God’s call to social justice, “He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich hath he sent empty away.”  Daniels wrote, “I knew that I must go to Selma. The Virgin’s song was to grow more and more dear to me in the weeks ahead.”

In Selma Daniels stayed with a local African-American family.  He worked to integrate the local Episcopal church by taking groups of young African Americans to the church.  This caused great conflict and controversy in the Church, whose members did not welcome Daniels or his guests. In May, Daniels returned to the seminary to take his semester exams and passed.

He returned to Alabama in July, where he did more mainstream civil rights work: assembling lists of resources for the poor, tutoring children, filling out aid application forms for the poor, and registering voters.   The federal Voting Rights Act was passed and signed that Summer. 

The work and hardships of Selma had a profound effect on Daniels.  His letters tell the story:  “The doctrine of the creeds, the enacted faith of the sacraments, were the essential preconditions of the experience itself. The faith with which I went to Selma has not changed: it has grown ... I began to know in my bones and sinews that I had been truly baptized into the Lord’s death and resurrection ... with them, the black men and white men, with all life, in him whose Name is above all the names that the races and nations shout ... We are indelibly and unspeakably one.”

Fifty-one years ago today, on August 14, 1965, Daniels was arrested along with 29 others for picketing a segregated store.   His cellmate was Stokely Carmichael.   When he and his companions were unexpectedly released six days later and left stranded far from where they had been arrested, they feared that this was a ploy to allow the Klan to kill them.  As they waited for transportation, Daniels and a white Roman Catholic priest took two of their fellow prisoners—younger African American women—to a small store for cool soft drinks.  As they arrived at one of the only stores in town catering to blacks, a man wielding a shotgun stepped out and tried to shoot seventeen-year-old Ruby Sales.  Daniels pulled her to one side to shield her from harm, and was killed in her stead by the near point-blank blast from the 12-gauge gun.

Upon learning of Daniels’ murder, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called what Daniels had done “one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry.”

Fr. Tom Murphy, one of our assisting priests here at Trinity, started his Episcopalian training for ministry that fall at ETS.  He tells eloquently of the stories his classmates and teachers shared about Daniels’ faith and sacrifice.    Here was not someone who sought controversy or division, or courted martyrdom.  Here was simply a follower of Jesus, fully convicted of the truth of the Gospel, taking Jesus at his word, and letting his actions follow his belief. 

Sometimes following Jesus will cause deep division and strife.  Sometimes it may get you killed.  But that’s no reason for holding back, for trying to somehow weasel out of what love demands.  

This is what Jesus means by “interpreting the present times” right:  you don’t let the opposition or the stress deflect you from your mission.  You don’t let the complaints of members of the local congregation who just don’t want to worship with blacks get you to back down or stop inviting.  Love has a clarity of vision.  The fire that Jesus brings burns bright, and is not confounded or confused by smoke and darkness. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.  

O God of justice and compassion, you put down the proud and mighty from their place, and lift up the poor and the afflicted: We give you thanks for your faithful witness Jonathan Myrick Daniels, who, in the midst of injustice and violence, risked and gave his life for another; and we pray that we, following his example, may make no peace with oppression; through Jesus Christ the just one, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.