Year C, Proper 14: Across the Distance

Across the Distance
by James Joiner,
Preaching with St. Mary’s House Episcopal Center, Greensboro NC
August 12th, 2007

Year C, Proper 14
Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer- And, let me speak slowly and clearly enough so that everyone can hear what those words and meditations are. AMEN.

“All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.”

The first sermon I ever heard preached at St. Mary’s House was on All Saints Day, 2004- and it was about Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Martyr of the Civil Rights Movement. When I saw Jonathan’s feast day coming up on the calendar, it made me want to revisit his story and bring it back out for us to listen to, and so I asked Kevin if I could preach on the Sunday before his feast day, which is this Tuesday. Jonathan was a seminarian at ETS when he heard the call in 1965 of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., asking students and others to join him in Selma, Alabama for a march to the state capitol in Montgomery. Jonathan went with other students to Selma, intending to only stay for the weekend, but when he and another friend missed the bus back home, they began to reflect on how touch and go their visit had seemed- so they decided they would stay longer. Jon requested permission to spend the rest of his semester in Selma. On Sundays he would bring small groups of black students to church with him in an effort to integrate the local Episcopal congregation, where their presence was barely tolerated and heavily resented. After exams at ETS, he returned again to Selma where he helped produce a listing of local, state, and federal agencies and other resources to persons in need of assistance.

That Summer he joined in several pickets and protests against local discriminating businesses. He was thrown in jail once. After his release, he and three other friends attempted to enter a local shop, and they were met at the door by a man with a gun, who told them to leave or be shot. After a brief confrontation, the man aimed the gun at a young girl in the party, and Jon pushed her out of the way, taking the bullet himself. He was killed instantly.

There are, in Jonathan’s life, many inspiring stories, about the way he shaped his life in response to the call he heard, about the work he did to bring about the justice of God’s kingdom on Earth, about the manner in which he laid down his life for another. I sat down with his stories with today's Gospel reading in mind, and found one that seemed particularly resonant, which I would like to share with you now. The following passage is taken from his journal. The episode described was a common one- in which a proposed march would get blocked by rows of policemen:

"After a week-long, rain-soaked vigil, we still stood face to face with the Selma police. I stood, for a change, in the front rank, ankle-deep in an enormous puddle. To my immediate right were high school students, for the most part, and further to the right were a swarm of clergymen. My end of the line surged forward at one point, led by a militant Episcopal priest whose temper (as usual) was at combustion-point. Thus I found myself only inches from a young policeman. The air crackled with tension and open hostility. Emma Jean, a sophomore in the Negro high school, called my name from behind. I reached back for her hand to bring her up to the front rank, but she did not see. Again she asked me to come back. My determination had become infectiously savage, and I insisted that she come forward--I would not retreat! Again I reached for her hand and pulled her forward. The young policeman spoke: "You're dragging her through the puddle. You ought to be ashamed for treating a girl like that." Flushing--I had forgotten the puddle--I snarled something at him about whose-fault-it-really-was, that managed to be both defensive and self-righteous. We matched baleful glances and then both looked away. And then came a moment of shattering internal quiet, in which I felt shame, indeed, and a kind of reluctant love for the young policeman. I apologized to Emma Jean. And then it occurred to me to apologize to him and to thank him. Though he looked away in contempt--I was not altogether sure I blamed him--I had received a blessing I would not forget. Before long the kids were singing, "I love ---." One of my friends asked [the young policeman] for his name. His name was Charlie. When we sang for him, he blushed and then smiled in a truly sacramental mixture of embarrassment and pleasure and shyness. Soon the young policeman looked relaxed, we all lit cigarettes (in a couple of instances, from a common match, and small groups of kids and policemen clustered to joke or talk cautiously about the situation. It was thus a shock later to look across the rank at the clergymen and their opposites, who glared across a still unbroken "Wall" in what appeared to be silent hatred. Had I been freely arranging the order for Evening Prayer that night, I think I might have followed the General Confession directly with the General Thanksgiving--or perhaps the Te Deum. "

In the Gospel today the Kingdom of God is like a Master coming home to find his servants have put all their busy work and rest and lives away just for the sake of greeting him at the door. The Kingdom of God is like a thief in the night that we were unprepared for, unsettling all of the possessions that might stand between us and our reception of it. In Jonathan’s story, the Kingdom of God is like two enemies on a picket line, who for a moment forget their own agendas to be captured by the love of God.

Jesus tells us today that we don’t need to worry- that it is God’s good pleasure to give us the Kingdom, all we have to do is sell our possessions, let go of the things we’ve worked so hard for in this life, and we’ll be ready for it. How willing are we to really do this, especially when we have come to possess so much. Not just cars and clothes and houses and other material wealth, but ideologies, ways of doing things, habits of practice. We have jobs to do, responsibilities to fill, most of them initiated because we feel in our small way that we are fulfilling a part of God’s work with our own. I’m sure that the young police man in Jon’s story felt that way. I am sure that the policeman in Jon’s story could have stuck to his guns and made himself invulnerable- confident that he was there for the right reasons, unwilling to let a small group of students show him love with their song. I’m sure that Jonathan could have stuck to his guns too- could have kept that policeman as the clear enemy in his mind, a subject at whom only fierce righteousness could be directed. But somehow, in a moment on a picket line in the rain in Selma, these two men put their guards down, they stepped outside of their expectations and the responsibilities they had assumed, and they entered into God’s love for both of them with one another: against all odds, against all roles, against all circumstance. But the thing about it is that they were not waiting for that moment- that was not the object of either of their days- they were not servants waiting at the door of their Lord, anticipating with each moment that the Spirit would come knocking. They were more like the house that gets broken into. They had other things on their mind, other agendas planned for the day ahead. The hour was unexpected. But rather than treat that moment like a thief, rather than lock the doors and hold fast against the unexpected, they allowed themselves to be broken into, and there, in that suddenly open place, God rushed in to serve them with his love.

Such a brief, beautiful glimpse of the Kingdom can give us hope, and it can also give us questions about the houses of work and livelihood that we prepare for ourselves now: how willing we are to let the things we’ve come to be so sure of get broken into by the work of God? At what point does our work for God become a possession? At what point do we get so caught up in the work we have designed for ourselves that God’s Grace becomes an interruption to it? An interruption that we are too stubborn to acknowledge? How often do we plow forward with blinders on, unwilling to see the Kingdom of God if it looks different from what we expected, if it doesn’t fit in with what we do. What will it take for us to throw the baggage out the door when the Kingdom comes knocking, what will we have to let go of in order to participate in Grace?

These are not easy questions for us to answer. Imagine, for example, being among the religious minds of Judah when Isaiah comes to tell them: You’ve got it all wrong! your heart is in the wrong place, your ceremony automatic and insincere. You’ve gotten so caught up in your traditions that you have presumed you are honoring God while the real work of God is going on without you. God has come to see your ceremonies, your convocations, and your solemn assemblies as a burden because there is justice to do! Oppressed to be rescued, orphans and widows to defend: that’s where God is- not where you’ve been looking. What would it take for us to hear words like that today if we’ve spent so much of our lives crafting ceremonies, convocations, and solemn assemblies? Are we sure that we would not be too outraged to listen?

Perhaps we don’t have to know what it will take, perhaps we just have to be willing. Whatever our answers now, the good news is that it is God’s good pleasure to give us the Kingdom, and God will have what is God’s good pleasure to have- and that, quite simply, is us. In fact, it is such a sheer delight for God to have us in the fullness of his Grace, in the swell of his complete love, knowing and all-forgiving embrace- that God doesn’t turn away when we’re too busy to take it- when we look at God as if God were interrupting something much more important than all that. And he’s going to keep coming back to give it to us day after day, whether we miss it the time before or not.

“All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.”

In his life, I think that Jonathan, along with the myriad souls of communion who moved Civil Rights forward in their time, received many promises that were made, even as they died in faith on their journey to a better country. As for us, as for Jonathan, a distance divides us from our brothers and sisters in this world and it is as thin at times as two sides of a picket line. The time will come when we are so full of God’s presence that we won’t know the difference in that distance any longer; and until we can realize that Kingdom in its fullness, we will look over the divide, we will greet those from whom we are separated with unabashed song, and step across from time to time as our unguarded moments will allow. AMEN.


Referenced

Eagles, Charles W. Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Kiefer, James. “Jonathan Daniels.” July 1, 1006, Accessed August 11, 2007, http://satucket.com/lectionary/Jonathan_Daniels.htm

Schneider, William J. ed. The Jon Daniels Story Morehouse, 1992.