Peace Camp. You might remember hearing about Peace Camp in the church bulletin earlier this spring and summer. Peace Camp was the idea of our sister campus chaplain at Cal-State Channel Islands. Last year, while Julie was spending a week being the chaplain at the diocesan camp, she got this fantastic idea to offer middle and high school students the opportunity to come together to learn about peacemaking skills and grow in the peacemaking tradition of Jesus. And so this summer, the first ever session of Peace Camp was offered at Camp Stevens. A small but diverse group of kids attended, as did some chaplains AND several college students. Our very own Alan Mak was among one of the college students who served as a counselor and mentor to the kids. I was able to attend for the opening part of the session. Now, the kids who showed up at Peace Camp came for a variety of reasons. Their parents – who thought it would be a good idea for them to go, signed some up. Others read the description of Peace Camp and thought this was something they wished to experience. The kids came from a variety of experiences. Some kids came from foster homes. Some came from church domestic shelters. Some came from privileged families in the suburbs. And some came from violence ridden urban contexts. Whatever background these kids came from, Peace Camp was a new way of life for them. They had to check the cell phones, I Pods, mp3 players and video games at the door. AND they were also asked to check something much larger and less tangible at the door – that is – they were asked to check violence at the door.
Violence is something that pervades our lives. Whether it’s physical violence we might see on the street or in the classroom -- or violence we see on television -- or interpersonal violence that might be present in the workplace -- violence is all around us. And when that culture of violence is all around us, we usually can’t but help being absorbed into it in both small and big ways. Peace Camp was an opportunity for those gathered to recognize violence in its many forms – and to practice stepping out of a world riddled with violence by creating a new world through peacemaking skills.
In today’s lessons, we learn about God’s call to us to turn away from a world where deceit, delusion and violence is in operation and turn towards a life where we pursue peace with everyone and holiness abounds. Now, this is all well and good you might be thinking – but what about the Gospel reading from Luke, when Jesus says “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you [I’ve not come to bring peace to the earth – but rather I’ve come to bring division!” – households will be divided -- father against son…mother against daughter…and so on and so forth! “How is Jesus advocating for peace with these words?” you might ask. How does this connect to the image of Jesus that we read about in the lesson from Hebrews whom we are to regard as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith?
The peace that Jesus speaks about in Luke when he says “Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth” is not the same as the peace referred to in Hebrews that we are implored to pursue with everyone. Peacemaking, as the participants of Peace Camp learned, is not about conflict avoidance or complacency. Peacemaking is about purifying sin and ugliness in our own context – in this present time. Jesus is trying to shock people into that reality. Creating peace, seeking justice, building the Kingdom of God – all this supersedes the obligations of traditional family structure. Jesus is teaching us that the axis around which discipleship is built is often outside of what our family or friends or society may be doing or telling is most important.
This week the church celebrated and remembered the life of Jonathan Daniels. Any of your know about Jonathan Daniels? Jonathan Daniels is now known as one of the martyrs of Alabama. He was a young man from New Hampshire who led a fairly typical and quiet life. He graduated from high school, went off to military school and then enrolled in graduate school at Harvard. But in his early 20s, Jonathan found himself close to a loss of faith, wrestling with the meaning of life, death and vocation. It was through a profound conversion experience on Easter day in 1962 at Church of the Advent in Boston, that Jonathan heard the call to enter seminary. Shortly thereafter, he enrolled at Episcopal Theological School (now Episcopal Divinity School) in Cambridge, MA. Two years later, Jonathan would watch the televised appeal of Martin Luther King – in which he invited clergy and students to come to Selma, Alabama to help citizens to secure the right to vote. This at a time when the country’s racism was being systematically exposed, as was the Episcopal Church’s share in that inheritance. Jonathan did not want to uproot from Boston – and argued to him self and others that it would be a futile exercise. But as he sat through Evening Prayer that night and heard the singing of the Magnificat: “He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and the meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things.” – Jonathan knew that he must go to Selma. And so off he went – sponsored by the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity. He intended to stay just a short while, but once in Selma, he discovered a situation so deplorable that he was convinced to stay the semester and asked the seminary for permission to do so. Jonathan stayed with a local African-American family. During the next months, he devoted himself to integrating the local Episcopal church, taking groups of young African-Americans to the church, where they were usually scowled at or ignored. In May, he traveled back to school to take his semester exams, and having passed, he came back to Alabama in July to continue his work. Among his other work, Jonathan helped assemble a list of federal, state, and local agencies that could provide assistance to those in need. He also tutored children, helped poor locals apply for aid, and worked to register voters. In August of 1965, Jonathan and several of his companions were as jailed for joining a picket line. A few of them were unexpectedly released shortly thereafter. Aware of the unrest surrounding them in this small town, the four knew they were in danger. While waiting for transport out of the town they walked to a small store where blacks were allowed, to buy a cool drink. As they approached the entrance for the store, a man with a gun appeared, cursing out Jonathan’s 16-year-old colleague Ruby Sales. Jonathan pulled her to one side to shield her from the unexpected threats. As a result, he was killed by a blast from the 12-gauge gun. The gunman also shot and injured a Catholic priest, while Ruby and her other colleague managed to escape death. The all white jury convicted the gunman who was an engineer for the state highway department and unpaid special deputy of manslaughter instead of murder because he claimed that Jonathan had pulled a knife on him, despite witness testimony to the contrary and the fact that no weapon was ever found.
In the letter from Hebrews we are reminded of the great a cloud of witnesses that surrounds as we run the race that is set before us. Jonathan Daniels, along with a whole host of others, is part of that great cloud of witnesses. They are the people we can look to for guidance and comfort when all is not well in the present time. T.S. Eliot wrote: “A Christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident. Still less is a Christian martyrdom the effect of man's will to become a Saint, as a man by willing and contriving may become a ruler of men. A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men [and women], to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. It is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God.” (Murder in the Cathedral) I had a conversation with another priest this week about Jonathan Daniels. My colleague had also participated in Peace Camp and would like someday work to full time with youth in interfaith peacemaking. He told me about honoring Jonathan’s life during a mid-week Eucharist and feeling deeply moved and strengthened by his story. How beautiful those moments are when a holy witness reaches out to us and touches us in this way!
The work of the youth during Peace Camp and the work of Jonathan Daniels is all counter cultural. You have probably heard me refer to the path of Christ as counter cultural more times that you care to count by now. It’s important to remind ourselves of that, I think, because we live in a time and place where we are bombarded by well-calculated messages from the media and advertisers that the good life must look one way. When we leaf through the pages of the Bible, however, another messages strikes us. Today it’s one about being wary of the messages and dreams that false prophets peddle to us – remembering that discipleship and peacemaking involves discipline and work – and that seeing the world through a lens of the Gospel may make our existing relationships with other people or things more uncomfortable than we would like.
And why? Why should we be compelled to run this hard race? The answer I suspect is for each of us to answer. Being a committed teenaged peacemaker in the hallways of an American high school, where physical and psychological violence is a norm, isn’t particularly comfortable. Giving up your life to shield another from a bullet shot in hatred is even less comfortable. But it is done. It is done for Jesus. And when it is done, we meet freedom in God anew. As Jonathan wrote in his reflections on the profound effect Selma had upon him: “The faith with which I went to Selma has not changed: it has grown. . . . 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 [Judy and] I (have) said the daily offices day by day, [we became] (I become) more and more aware of the living reality of the invisible "communion of saints"--of the beloved community in Cambridge who were saying the offices too, of 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 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.”
Amen.
Prayer:
O God of justice and compassion, who put down the proud and the mighty from their place, and lift up the poor and afflicted: We give you thanks for your faithful witness Jonathan Myrick Daniels, who, in the midst of injustice and violence, risked and gave his life for another; and we pray that we, following his example, may make no peace with oppression; through Jesus Christ the just one: who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
The Rev. Nicole Janelle
St. Michael’s, Isla Vista
19 August 2007