“With Paul and Silas, we came to Philippi in Macedonia, a Roman
colony, and, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who
had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by
fortune-telling. While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, "These
men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of
salvation." She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much
annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, "I order you in the name of Jesus
Christ to come out of her." And it came out that very hour. But when her
owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas
and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. When they had
brought them before the magistrates, they said, "These men are disturbing
our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us
as Romans to adopt or observe."
Before Paul could say anything to defend
himself, his senior warden said, “Now, Paul, didn’t I warn you about mixing
religion and politics. Yes, a spiritual life is important, but people have to
make a living.” And Paul’s bishop said, “Now see here, Paul, the owners, uh, I
mean the employers of that young woman are very prominent members of the
community. They may not be Episcopalians, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t
respect them.”
I’m being facetious, of course, but my
point is that the story of the slave girl in Acts 16 is about what happens when
the Christian faith comes into conflict with economic and political power. I
want to illustrate that point with a more recent and more tragic story, but
first, a word of explanation is in order. When we hear the word “slave,” we
automatically think of slavery as it existed in America before the Civil War,
usually called “chattel slavery.” But slavery in the 1rst c world was
different.
Slavery
in the ancient world was not a racial thing and it was not a hereditary
condition. People usually became slaves for two reasons: either because of
debts they could not pay or because they were prisoners of war.
The charge that the slave girl’s owners brought against Paul and
Silas – “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating
customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe” was very
similar to what people in the Deep South – my people, in other words - said
about those who came south 50 years ago to participate in the civil rights
movement. They accused them of being “outside agitators.”
Almost from the very beginning,
Southerners in general and Alabamians in particular have resented what they
have called “outside interference.” At least as far back as the Civil War,
Southerners complained that Yankees just did not get it; they did not
understand the Southern way of life. Of course, what that meant in antebellum
Alabama was that Yankees wanted to put an end to slavery but did not really
understand what a good, kind, and benevolent system slavery really was!
More recently, during the Civil Rights’
movement of the 1960s Southerners complained that Yankees (and Yankee
journalists especially) did not understand the dynamics of the relationship
between black folks and white folks in the Deep South. If they did, then they would just go back
home and leave us alone.
There may be just a little bit of truth
to the charge that Yankees don’t get the South. How can you explain sweet tea, cornbread, Hank
Williams (both junior and senior), Mardi Gras, and any number of other Southern
institutions to anyone from Massachusetts, Ohio, or California? Having spent a
good part of my life as a missionary to New England, I know what I am talking
about.
One of those “outside agitators” who just didn’t get the South,
was an Episcopal seminarian named Jonathan Myrick Daniels.
Daniels was a graduate of Virginia Military Institute who had
begun work on a PhD in English at Harvard before feeling called to the
priesthood of the Episcopal Church. While Daniels was at the Episcopal
Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., issued a
call to the clergy of all faiths to participate in the Selma to Montgomery
march for voting rights.
Initially, Daniels did not respond to Dr. King’s call. At first,
he thought that the civil rights movement was a purely political affair. But
during evening prayer, as he listened to the words of the Magnificat, Mary’s
song, he had a kind of epiphany. “God has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich empty away. He has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and lifted up the poor and lowly.” And so Daniels went to Selma.
After the march, he stayed to participate in the work of voter
registration. When he participated in a demonstration in the town of
Hayneville, the police arrested Daniels and his fellow demonstrators, including
a RC priest named Richard Morrisroe. After about a week, they were released.
They walked from the jail to a small store about a block away to buy cold
drinks. And as they left the store, a highway department employee named Thomas
Coleman aimed a shotgun at a young woman who was with Daniels, but he stepped
in front of her, took the full force of the blast and was killed. Coleman claimed
he was acting in self defense and was acquitted by a jury of white men.
The bishop of Alabama at the time of
Daniels’ murder was Charles Colcock Jones Carpenter. Carpenter deeply resented
the “outside interference” of Yankees who came to Alabama to take part in the
civil rights’ movement. I still find
this hard to believe but Bishop Carpenter’s one and only public statement about
Daniels’ murder and Coleman’s acquittal took place at the diocesan convention
that followed. Carpenter criticized
"the crowd of visitors whose presence motivated by various objectives
caused us much difficulty and brought unwarranted confusion and tragic
consequences."
I don’t know how fully Daniels, a New
Hampshire native, “got” the South, but at least he was aware that there was
something he did not quite grasp. Not
long before he was killed he wrote these words in his journal:
“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.”
I love the phrase “self-seeking
messianism of Yankee deliverance.” Every southerner has encountered it, and it
can be very annoying to say the least. But speaking only for myself, I give
thanks to God for the “Yankee messianism” that motivated people like Jonathan
Daniels and Unitarian minister James Reeb (who was also killed) and for Catholic
priest Father Richard Morrisroe who was severely wounded and others to risk and
sometimes give their lives in the struggle to secure equal rights for African
Americans.
But the Episcopal church designated
Jonathan Daniels a martyr not because of his “yankee messianism” nor because
he, like so many other young men and women from the north, came south to help
register African American voters. We honor Jonathan because he gave his life so
that another might live and because he was where he was and was doing what he
was doing for the sake of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
A martyr is a reminder. He or she is a
sign in our midst reminding us of two things: First, they remind us that grace
is costly. As Bonhoeffer said, “Grace is free but it is never cheap.” The cross
shows us just how costly grace is. Indeed, if grace were not offered to us
freely, we would be unable to afford it. But if we accept the grace offered to
us in baptism and at the Lord’s table, then we may have to pay a very high
price indeed. Daniels and other martyrs show us just how high the price might
be.
Secondly, martyrs are God’s gift to the
church to remind us that God is alive and well and active in the world. They
are also God’s gift to the world, daring the world to explain away someone who
gives her or his life for the sake of the gospel. If the crucifixion is a
bonfire, then martyrs are the sparks from the fire. For a brief, brilliant
moment, they light up the darkness. They give us just enough light to see the
outline of a better world..
For several years now Alabama
Episcopalians have sponsored a pilgrimage to Hayneville where Jonathan died and
his killer was acquitted. We march from the jail to the store where Daniels was
killed and then to the courthouse. The judge’s bench becomes the altar, and the
place where Daniels’ killer was acquitted becomes the place where our lives are
caught up in the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.
The most moving part of that event to me
takes place during the offertory.
Members of the congregation carry large photos of persons who were
killed in Alabama during the struggle for civil rights. As the names of the
persons in the photos are called, the photos are brought forward and each
simply says, “Present.”
There’s no disputing the truth of that.
The preface to the Eucharistic prayer affirms that when we sing the Sanctus we
are joined by “angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven.”
The story of the slave girl in Acts 16
and the story of Jonathan Myrick Daniels show what can happen when the gospel
of Jesus Christ comes into conflict with our economic and political interest. But
they are both Easter stories, too.
Just as the tomb could not hold Christ,
so the jail could not hold Paul and Silas. The Easter story tells us that death
and defeat do not have the last word. Light defeats darkness; justice overcomes
injustice; life conquers death. But Jonathan
stated it more eloquently:
“I lost fear in the black belt 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…. As [we] said the daily
offices day by day, we became more and more aware of the living reality of the
invisible "communion of saints"--of the beloved community in
Cambridge who were [praying], of the ones gathered around [God’s] 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.”
