Isaiah 5:1-7
Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18
Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Luke 12:49-56
Homily by Fr R Christopher Heying
Almighty God, you have
given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of
godly life: Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming
work, and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life; through
Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy
Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Let there be no doubt that the Gospel of peace is a costly gospel. Scripture is clear that even just to be a Christian is to engage in battles, not just with flesh-and-blood opponents but with rulers, authorities, cosmic powers of darkness and spiritual forces of evil that dwell even in heavenly places.
First Peter tells us that we must be vigilant for the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour (1 Peter 5.8) and Ephesians urges us that even as we stand firm against the wiles of the devil to put on our feet shoes that make us ready “to proclaim the gospel of peace” (Ephesians 6.14).
For as we engage in hand-to-hand conflict with the very personal forces of evil, we must proclaim in word and deed that God was and that God is in Christ reconciling the world to himself and giving us the message of reconciliation, the gospel of peace (2 Corinthians 5.19ff).
But where there be no justice there can be no peace.
True peace is not ultimately about the absence of anything: tension, vexation, anxiety, stress. True peace is about the presence of justice—palpable, real, accessible, actionable, and not just for us but for every person, for each person is made in the image of the living God.
So it is with that critical need for justice in mind that we meet today a not-so-meek and not-so-mild Jesus this morning.
But there Jesus is, his face toward Jerusalem, moving toward that place where peace and justice do connect and where mercy and truth meet together, righteousness and peace kiss each other (Psalm 85.10), that place which will be revealed in a baptism of sharp nails, a crown of thorns, and two pieces of hard wood.
Oh and how he wishes that he were already on the other side of that event, that it were already accomplished, this fire in which he himself is the oblation that will defeat oppression and sin, destroy death and bestow life, impart to us and to all that real possibility of peace which passes all understanding.
For until it is finished, he lives under a crushing stress, just as you and I live under stress as we run with perseverance the race set before us, as we await the fullness of redemption.
Such peace does not, however, simply float out from heaven and descend on us, as we insouciantly ignore cries for justice louder than any summer thunderstorm, we who know how to interpret gathering clouds in the sky but too often fail to discern the hunger, hurt, oppression crying out right in front of us, or worse, in seeing it and in hearing it have neither the courage nor the will to do anything about it.
Our lessons today should make it perfectly clear to us: the Son of God actually did not come from heaven to earth so that you and I could have a warm, tickly feeling in our heart or a satisfying Sunday brunch in our belly.
For the owner of the vineyard, having done all he could do for his vineyard to thrive, has now found only wild grapes, has expected justice but discovered bloodshed, looked for righteousness but heard a cry, and out of his very nature he cannot but respond to it.
What would it be like if we were the ones crying out for justice? the ones with whom Jesus talked about peace but was unwilling to disturb anyone or anything that such peace could become a reality for us and in us?
What if we were the ones crying out for justice, how would we then hear and receive a Jesus who says he is willing to bring division in order to settle accounts and right wrongs, to save us not with empty words but with decisive action?
It was with such decisive action that a New Hampshire native and 1961 valedictorian of Virginia Military Institute was willing to take that spring and summer of 1965. 1 , 2
Having completed his studies in Lexington, Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Jon to his friends, enrolled in Harvard to study English literature. But while at Easter Mass at Boston’s famed Anglo-Catholic Church of the Advent, Jon experienced what he said was a deep conversion and renewal, and so he decided to study for the priesthood, enrolling in 1963 at Episcopal Theological Seminary also in Cambridge.
Expecting to graduate in 1966, he heard Dr. Martin Luther King’s invitation in March of 1965 to join him in Selma for a civil rights march to Montgomery. At Evening Prayer in the chapel of the seminary, Jon Daniels determined he must disobey the Bishop of Alabama who had urged people not to come.
Jon later wrote:
“My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God by Savior.”
I had come to Evening Prayer as usual that evening, and as usual . . . 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” that would remind me of others. . . .
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.”
I knew then I must go to Selma.
That Thursday Jon did leave for Selma. Planning to stay just the weekend, he missed the bus back to Cambridge and began to consider just how such a short-lived visit might look like to those who actually lived in Selma, and so Jon determined that he must stay.
He returned to Cambridge only to get permission to spend the rest of the term in Alabama where he participated in marches and where he brought Black people to the neighborhood Episcopal church, you know where the signs that “The Episcopal Church welcomes you.” But they received a less than generous welcome.
He returned briefly to the seminary in May to take examinations but went immediately back to Alabama where on August 14th, Jon and 22 others were arrested for picketing and were transported by garbage truck and tossed into the un-air-conditioned county jail in Haynesville where they were held for six days.
Released on Friday, the 20th of August, Jon and three others, including a Roman Catholic priest, went to a local store where Tom Coleman, a construction worker and part-time deputy sheriff, met them with a shotgun and demanded that they leave.
After a brief confrontation, Coleman then pointed the gun at a young black girl in the party. Jon instinctively jumped forward to push her out of the way, taking the blast himself. He was killed instantly, but that little girl was saved. (Coleman would be later tried and unsurprisingly acquitted by an all-white jury.)
Shortly before his death Jon wrote that while saying the Daily Office, Morning and Evening Prayer, he became keenly aware of the “communion of saints,” especially as he considered how as he was praying it, so too were his classmates at Episcopal Theological School and people all over the globe. And he wrote:
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 names that the races and nations shout. . . .
Now Jonathan Myrick Daniels has taken his place there at that near-distant throne as part of that great cloud of witnesses who watch us run the race set before us, who watch and who encourage us as we, in our own day, work for justice, as we seek to respect dignity of every human being, as we labor for true peace.
And this cloud of witnesses around that near-distant throne are themselves living testimony to that true peace and real justice can connect, mercy and truth meet together, righteousness and peace kiss each other right there, right there in that potentially divisive but always cruciform love, love willing to lay down its own life for others, love that is stronger than death, love that lasts forever and ever and unto ages of ages.
Amen.
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1 Both quotations below and other parts of the history in this sermon can be found in Biographical Sketches of Memorable Christians of the Past, Jonathan Myrick Daniels, http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bio/228.html
2 Jonathan Daniels, Civil Rights Hero, VMI http://www.vmi.edu/archives.aspx?id=14481