Mtr Kelli Joyce

Dear friends in Christ,

Today is the feast of Jonathan Myrick Daniels, saint and martyr. He was an Episcopal seminarian when he was murdered. He was almost exactly my age when he was killed.

I have a tee shirt - some of you have seen it - that has a rough woodcut image of the Virgin Mary printed on it. Her fist is raised high, and under her foot is a skull and a serpent, symbolizing death and Satan. She is surrounded by eight words, taken directly from the first chapter of Luke: “Cast down the mighty, send the rich away.”

I mention my Magnificat shirt because it was the Magnificat that moved Jonathan Daniels to get on a bus from Massachusetts to Alabama in March of 1965. He initially intended to stay only for a single weekend. Then for a semester. And then the summer came, and he and his friends still stayed. Daniels marched and prayed and built relationships and confronted the racist police who met peaceful protest with violence. And he learned. Shortly before his death, he wrote:

“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. I began to lose self-righteousness when I discovered the extent to which my behavior was motivated by worldly desires and 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.”

In August, Jonathan was arrested for picketing a segregationist local business. He and the other activists were held for six days. The day of their release, they were confronted by a white man with a shotgun. The blast was meant for seventeen-year-old Ruby Sales. Jonathan pushed her out of the way and took the blast himself. He was killed instantly.

Not everyone who is murdered is a martyr, in the Christian understanding of that word. Martyrs are those who are killed because of their faith in Christ, and unwillingness to deny his Gospel. It was Jonathan Daniel’s faith in Jesus of Nazareth that took him from the safety of his seminary to the dangers of activism in Selma. It was his belief in God’s justice that would not let him remain neutral in the face of evil. It was his understanding of his own baptism into Christ’s death that led him to save the life of his friend at the price of his own.

He was twenty-six. It didn’t have to be his fight. He could have stayed in school and supported, whether quietly or loudly, what Dr. King was organizing “down there.” But he didn’t. He went and put in the unglamorous work and didn’t demand recognition or to have his needs centered. He tried to root out the places where the self-righteous and condescending “messianism of Yankee deliverance” had taken up lodging in his soul. He risked all, and he gave all, because he believed that God’s righteousness demands justice for all.

It’s easy to venerate him now, with the Civil Rights Movement relegated to history books. Fifty years later, we all agree that it was the right thing, and that he died in service of a noble cause. But when it was happening, what he was doing was bitterly controversial, opposed by white moderate churches as too divisive and too political. So if we are to acclaim what Jonathan Daniels did in 1965, I think we must also ask ourselves what it would truly look like to follow his example in 2018 - what it would look like to leave our comfort zone and take up a cross for love of others.

In peace,
Mtr. Kelli