Fifty
years ago this week—August 20, 1965—Jonathan Daniels was shot and killed in
Hayneville, Alabama. Jon Daniels was a
seminarian at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He
had spent the summer demonstrating for civil rights in Alabama and doing voter
registration work in Lowndes County. On
the day he died, Jon Daniels had been released from jail. Along with a Roman
Catholic priest and two African American civil rights workers, he approached
Varner’s Cash Store in order to buy some cold drinks. A deputy sheriff with a
shotgun aimed at Ruby Sales, one of the women in the party. Daniels stepped in
front to protect her and was killed. The man who shot Jonathan Daniels pled
self-defense and was later acquitted by an all-white jury.
Several
years later, I entered the seminary Jonathan Daniels attended, and I studied
with faculty members who had known and taught him. That seminary—now called the Episcopal
Divinity School—has long had a tradition of remembering Jonathan Daniels in its
liturgical calendar, and in the last decades the larger Episcopal Church has
come to recognize him as well. This past week, my wife Kathy, our Director of
Programs Ruth Frey, and I joined Bishop Budde and many church people from the
diocese and around the nation on a Jonathan Daniels pilgrimage sponsored by
Episcopal Divinity School to Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery, and finally to Hayneville,
Alabama. We spent several days reflecting not only on Jonathan Daniels’ life
and witness but also on the ongoing issues of racial justice in America. We concluded
with a Eucharist in the courtroom where Jonathan Daniels’ killer was acquitted.
As part of the
larger church’s observance of Jonathan Daniels, the cathedral is installing his
bust in our human rights porch, and just this week the carving was completed. Following
this service we will have a special forum to say more about that installation,
and the bust will be formally dedicated at an Evensong in October.
There are so many
things to say about Jonathan Daniels, about race, about martyrdom, about reconciliation,
and there is so much going on about racial justice in America today that could
be informed by his witness. How do we
begin to think about these things? This
morning we get some help from the sixth chapter of John. This passage nominally concerns the bread and
wine of the Eucharist, but there is more to it than that. In today’s Gospel,
Jesus says:
Those who eat my flesh and drink my
blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh
is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my
blood abide in me, and I in them. [John 6: 54-56]
You and I are so
used to hearing Jesus talk this way that we don’t really hear how radical these
words are. The Torah prohibits Jews from drinking blood. That prohibition lies
behind the kosher food laws and the requirement that all the blood be drained
from an animal when it is slaughtered. A
Jew would not risk consuming blood and violating the commandment. As the book
of Leviticus tells us,
For the life of every creature—its blood is its life;
therefore I have said to the people of Israel: You shall not eat the blood of
any creature, for the life of every creature is its blood; whoever eats it
shall be cut off. [Leviticus 17:14]
For Jesus to talk
to his followers about eating his flesh and drinking his blood seems eminently
normal to you and me who use that language when we take communion. But to a Jewish audience, Jesus’s words must
have sounded radical if not openly sacrilegious. Speaking as a Jew, Jesus
cannot mean that we are literally to drink his blood. He must be telling us
something else.
What I think he is
telling us gets not only at who he is but at who we are called to be, too. It amounts
to a reversal of all our ideas about power, especially considering the way ancient
warfare was practiced. In many places in the ancient world, victorious warriors
routinely drank the blood of those they conquered. In telling us to eat his
flesh and drink his blood, Jesus turns that equation upside down. Here we have a Messiah, a king, telling us to
drink his blood. He’s not asking us to
risk our lives for him. He’s risking his
life for us.
In the second
century, Tertullian famously said, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the
church.” The Christian word “martyr”
literally means “witness”. The people we call martyrs are witnesses to a deep
truth about Jesus, God, and us. God became one of us in Jesus. Jesus put his
life at risk for us. Christianity is not only about loving your neighbor and
trying to be good. Christianity is about
this deep, mysterious truth at the heart of the universe. The one at the center of creation actually
risks everything for us. Power—in its pretentious, inflated, pomposity—power is
not the operating principle of the universe. Love—in its vulnerable,
self-giving, compassionate mystery—is.
Jonathan Daniels
was the 28th civil rights worker killed in the earlier days of the
movement. He was neither the first nor
the last martyr in the cause of racial justice.
In recent years, months, and days we have seen other martyrs who have
put their lives at risk on our behalf:
the nine women and men killed in Charleston most obviously come to
mind. But so do Trayvon Martin, Michael
Brown, Sandra Bland and others. The one
we have come to know in Jesus keeps coming back among us in the person of these
witnesses. And yet we seem not ever to recognize him.
We are also
observing a second fiftieth anniversary this week: the Watts riots in my home
city of Los Angeles. From August 11 to
17, 1965 the city erupted in violence that began when a young black man, Marquette
Frye, was pulled over for reckless driving. The incident grew into six days of
violence covering 46 square miles of the city.
When it was all over, 34 people were dead.
In 1965 we were
saddened when people like Jonathan Daniels (or James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner a year
earlier, or Medgar Evers a year before that) were murdered, but we were not
particularly surprised. That was the south. But when Los Angeles erupted in
rage and violence many (especially whites) were shocked. Los Angeles was
considered at the time as the most hospitable U.S. city for African Americans
to live in. Reports at the time always referred to the suburban-looking “wide
tree-lined streets” of Watts. The racial injustice in Alabama was obvious. The
racial injustice in California (and later Michigan, Massachusetts, and even the
District of Columbia) was harder to see.
Fifty years later, we have
yet to learn all the lessons of 1965. We live in a country that has gutted the
Voting Rights Act which was bought at the price of the violence and death we
are remembering this week. But some things have changed, many for the better. I
have been to Alabama twice now, and each time I go there I am impressed (and
frankly a bit surprised) at how intentionally the deep south has come to terms
with its own history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and racial
injustice. But when I come back home to the north, I am struck with how we
continue to live in a kind of racial fantasy land. Jonathan Daniels was
murdered doing civil rights work in the south in 1965. But he could just as
easily have been killed working for school busing in Boston in 1975. The
killings of unarmed black people happen in southern cities to be sure, but they
also happen in Michigan, New York, Maryland, Ohio, and California. Alabama and
South Carolina have removed their Confederate battle flags. Some northern
institutions have yet to do so.
Those who eat my flesh and drink my
blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh
is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my
blood abide in me, and I in them. [John 6: 54-56]
Those Christians
who have died in the service of racial justice—from Jonathan Daniels to
Clementa Pinckney—have been strengthened and sustained by the example of
Jesus—the one who puts himself at risk for us. We don’t follow one who consumes
us. We follow one who offers himself on our behalf. As followers of Jesus, as
brothers and sisters of Jonathan Daniels, you and I need today to ask ourselves
some hard questions. What are we doing—not out there or down there but up here
and in here—to come to terms with our own history of racial injustice, with our
own personal, interpersonal, institutional, and cultural racism? Civil rights
looked a lot easier when all you had to do was get on a bus and go desegregate
a lunch counter in another state. The ongoing work right here is harder and
more risky. It asks that we open ourselves up to the questions we would pose to
others.
In telling us to
eat his flesh and drink his blood, Jesus turns the tables on our usual
expectations of what holy figures are supposed to do. He refuses to point the
finger at others. He opens himself to the world. In this time and place in
America, you and I are being asked to live out that logic in our own lives and
work. Jonathan Daniels understood it in his day and offered himself so that our
history of slavery, racism, segregation, and oppression might be healed. His life
and death ask no less than that you and I do the same--that we put ourselves—our
lives, our comfort, our privilege—at risk on behalf of others so that all may
live and thrive in an America worthy of its name.
We can’t all be
martyrs, but we can all be witnesses. We can offer ourselves in the spirit of
Jesus and after the example of Jonathan Daniels. We probably won’t get a
saint’s day in the calendar or a bust in the narthex, but the nation we inhabit
just might finally begin to live into its promise of justice and equality for
all. Amen.
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