A Sermon Preached November 7, 2010 (All Saints C) by Lee Cheek

FREEDOM TO LOVE

“Love your enemies.” Luke 6:27
“But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever” Daniel 7: 18

It’s Sunday, March 7, 1965, and Jonathan Daniels, a 25 year old, white seminary student at what was then known as Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass., is watching on national television the dramatic and violent events of a civil rights march gone wrong. A little later in the broadcast he hears Martin Luther King urge Northern white religious leaders to come to Selma, to complete the 52 mile historic march to Montgomery.

Later, at evening prayer, Jonathan sings with gladness the words of the Magnificat: “My Soul doth magnify the Lord.” When he gets to “He has cast down the might from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly,” he knows that he must answer King’s call. On March 9, Jonathan and ten other ETS students travel to Selma where they join thousands of clergy and nuns who accompany King and his followers to Montgomery.

Because of a ban preventing the second march, many leave before it finally takes place on March 21. Jonathan and fellow student Judith Upham decide to stay in Selma through the spring semester. They move in with a black family, tutor the children, and take them to the city’s segregated Episcopal Church, St. Paul’s. Their activism earns them the title of “white niggers” from the local white supremacists. Jonathan writes: “We are deep in enemy territory.”

Jonathan participates in a voter registration march in Camden and has a realization about his attackers while being tear-gassed and threatened. He writes in his journal: “I began to change. I saw that the men who came at me were themselves not free. Even though they were white and hateful and my enemy, they were human beings, too. I began to discover a new freedom in the cross: a freedom to love the enemy and in that freedom to will and to try to set him free.”

In August 1965 Jonathan and several members of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) picket a grocery store for abusing black customers in Ft. Deposit. They are arrested and put in the Haynesville jail for several days. They choose to not put up bail in order to buy time for an injunction for the case to go to Federal Court. They are suspiciously released. While deciding what to do they walk to a nearby store to purchase cold drinks. A special deputy is waiting for them at the door with a shotgun. He says: “The store is closed. If you don’t get off this god-damn property I will blow your god-damned brains out.”

Ruby Sales, a 17 year old black SNCC worker, is pulled from behind, the gun is fired and Jonathan falls. He dies immediately. About a month later, the deputy is acquitted by an all-white jury after only two hours deliberation.

After Jonathan’s death, people got stronger. Soon the southern jury system came under attack in scores of affirmative law suits. Within five years blacks were serving on juries, voting, sharing public facilities and holding public office.

Today Jonathan Daniels is honored in the Martyrs Chapel of Canterbury Cathedral and in 1994 his name was added to the Episcopal calendar as a martyr and witness to the Gospel.

Nearly 2000 years before Jonathan’s death, a young rabbi began to proclaim that God is love and has nothing to do with violence. A large group of disciples gathered to join him in his project of turning the long page of history by revealing once and for all the truth about human violence. To make absolutely clear what living in the Kingdom of the God of Love entails, he told them this: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.

His message was clear: Do not return tit for tat if you have faith that the world can be otherwise.

Less than three years later, every single one of his friends abandoned him to the jaws of the sacrificial death machine that says it is better that one man die. But … three days after his death, they were—to their astonishment—met by a forgiving, totally pacific, loving presence of their betrayed friend that was so real to them, that they rededicated themselves to the spreading the Good News that the True God NEVER requires a sacrifice.

The pilgrimage to the Kingdom of God ceases early for some like Jonathan Daniels, and we call them the holy ones, the saints. Through the witness of their lives, they have passed on the treasure of our inheritance: The knowledge that God is love which bestows upon us the freedom and power to love others without exception.

A very necessary part of my own pilgrimage is the time I spend with you each week to hear the stories and sing the songs of the people who gradually came to know that God is Love. Today, like always, we will come to the table together and together be forgiven. We will be sent out together to magnify this Love in the world in the unique way given to each one of us.

But can I remember by the time I even get to coffee hour? Will I continue to blame my less than charitable responses on someone else’s behavior? Will I continue to make my home in a world shot through and infused with self-righteousness, resentment, reprisals, and the triumphalism of avenged honor? Will I slip out from under the demands of justice and compassion and continue to reproduce what is done to me?

Of course, it is not easy. But to a God who loves me so much that I am forgiven before I ask, I pray: Guide me each moment of my life. Keep me company each day with the un-triumphant saints. Help me learn to love my enemies. So that one day, I may be able to say as Jonathan did:
“I realized that as a Christian I was totally free … at least free to give my life if that had to be, with joy and thankfulness and eagerness for the Kingdom no longer hidden from behind my eyes.”

AMEN.

[Facts from Jonathan Daniels’ story are taken from the 2005 film broadcast on PBS Here I Am, Send Me (available in streaming video at http://episcopalonline.org/Featured_Video). The remainder of the sermon was borrowed heavily, gratefully and shamelessly from the writings of James Alison (see publications at http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/index.html), René Girard (Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Stanford University Press, 1987, and other publications http://www.imitatio.org/), and Rowan Williams (Writings in the Dust, Eerdmans, 2002).]