A Prophet for Divided Times

Proper 15C

I grew up with the lyric “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” etched in my memory. That reference surely dates me, although I confess that I was a pretty small child when my parents were playing Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” on our home stereo. My parents were themselves young antiwar activists when the Weathermen—who took their name from this song—broke away from Students for a Democratic Society to pursue an explicitly revolutionary agenda for social change.

We’ve been here before, People of God. We’ve lived through times when households were divided, three against two and two against three; father against son, son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother. When our politics were so bitter that violence seemed like the only viable means to an end, and the sin of racism threatened to undo any semblance of civil society. All this was occurring two generations ago… but it sounds eerily like January 6, 2021. Or maybe even like liked the response to the FBI search of Mar a Lago just this past last week.

If history is any teacher, it seems like we are a species inclined to divide ourselves into warring camps. Especially in times of anxiety. So we could interpret this apparently bad news Gospel, the one just proclaimed in our midst, as Jesus doing nothing more than telling the truth of the human condition. We are a house divided, and—weather forecasters notwithstanding—we really don’t know how to interpret the present time.

Specific to the twelfth chapter of Luke Jesus was describing the anticipated end of the age—what’s called the apocalypse—and its dangerous impact on the world the disciples knew. But more generally, Jesus was underscoring what we all know to be true, which is that sometimes the status quo cannot—and should not—stand.  That, in seasons of social upheaval, things can get worse before they get better. I myself would sure rather skip the historical cycles of social progress and backlash. But human beings rarely improve our lot simply by virtue of trying harder.

The fact of which didn’t seem to bother Jesus at all. His vision of a transformed society was not based on better public policy—although I’m sure he’s all in favor of that too—but rather on people formed in radical faithfulness to God. His own baptism revealed the clarity of his purpose and identity. And he acted in the faith that his mission would be completed, even under extreme duress. Indeed, he himself embodied God’s vision for a free and fearless humanity. A vision grounded in scripture and illuminated by the saints of the church.

Speaking of saints of the church. At just about the same time as Dylan was singing of wind blowing and hard rain falling, Jonathan Daniels was studying for the ministry at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge Massachusetts. And this very Sunday our church remembers him as a martyr for his civil rights activism. He died in Hayneville, Alabama in1965, a result of putting his 26 year old body in the path of a bullet intended for 17 year old Ruby Sales.

His early years didn’t suggest that Jonathan had any particular vocation towards civil rights activism, much less martyrdom. He grew up in a comfortably middle class New England family and attended high school at Virginia Military Institute—then a bastion of conservative southern military culture—where he graduated as valedictorian. It was when he entered Harvard to study English literature that his own faith in the status quo began to crumble, and he experienced a Christian conversion that eventually led him to divinity school.

His subsequent conversion—to the cause of civil rights—he attributed to the words of  Mary, mother of Jesus. Who happens to be another saint of the church whom we remember tomorrow. In his journal, Jonathan wrote “I had come to Evening Prayer as usual that evening, and as usual I was singing the Magnificat with the special love and reverence I have always felt for Mary’s glad song. ‘He hath showed strength with his arm.’ As the lovely hymn of the God-bearer continued, I found myself peculiarly alert, suddenly straining toward the decisive, luminous, Spirit-filled ‘moment.’ Then it came. “He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things.”

It was 1965, and The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King had just issued an appeal to white clergy to join the march for voting rights in Alabama. “I knew then that I must go to Selma,” Jonathan declared. And he went. To march for voting rights, to integrate the local Episcopal church—that didn’t go especially well—and in his final act of protest, to picket segregated stores with Ruby Sales and other Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee volunteers.

Thank you, Jonathan Daniels. Thank you to all our saints and martyrs. Not because we should do exactly as they did: we are actually responsible to interpret the present time in light of our own capacities and circumstances. Some of you already live very saintly lives—in quiet ways, right where you are—and some of you may be called to extraordinary vocations as Mary and Jonathan were. But we are all better for hearing and telling stories of saints because they are the cloud of witnesses among which we run own faithful races. They show us the myriad ways in which we—in our own time and place—can live into the freedom that God revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

As Christians, we live in a creative  interplay between past and present, possibility and promise. As every baptism we say ancient words about renunciation of evil and trust in God’s grace. And we believe it’s possible for people to live those commitments, even though we already know we’ll get it wrong sometimes. We make these commitments not because we are confident in our goodness, but because we are confident in God’s goodness. We can love with radical abandon—loving even our enemies, loving even to the point of death—because God so loved the world. That’s the promise we have in Jesus Christ.

“I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed,” said Jesus. And Jonathan Daniels, protesting segregation in Lowndes County, took Jesus’ faithfulness to heart. “I lost fear… when I began to know in my bones and sinews that I had been truly baptized into the Lord’s death and Resurrection, that in the only sense that really matters I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God.”

It would be tempting to polish up Jonathan Daniels’ story as one of extraordinary faithfulness, except that he won’t let us. Like so many of the saints we revere, he clothed himself with humility. “I began to lose self-righteousness when I discovered the extent to which my behavior was motivated by the self-seeking messianism of Yankee deliverance! The point is simply, of course, that one’s motives are usually mixed, and one had better know it.”

Jonathan knew that he was but one of many runners looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. He ran alongside Mary the mother of Jesus, he ran alongside Martin Luther King, and—when he could run no more earthly race, he passed his baton to Ruby Sales, and to us.  There are plenty of saints in this race, so we have no cause to be discouraged. But nor do we have permission to give up. Someone—in your family, among your friends or colleagues—someone needs the witness of your faithfulness in order to persevere in their own race.

“As I said the daily offices day by day,” Jonathan wrote, “[I] became more and more aware of the living reality of the invisible ‘communion of saints,’ of the ones gathered around a near-distant throne in heaven who blend with theirs our faltering songs of prayer and praise. With them, with black men and white men, with all of life, in Him Whose Name is above all the names that the races and nations shout, whose Name is Itself the Song Which fulfills and “ends” all songs, we are indelibly, unspeakably ONE.”