Join us as choir rehearsals resume on Wednesday, September 3, 2025 from 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM in the sanctuary. This is a great opportunity for singers of all skill levels to prepare for upcoming worship services and fellowship together. All are welcome!
Live by faith, grow in grace, and walk in love with St. Martin's this coming Sunday as we come together, in person as well as online, for worship, thanksgiving, and praise. Wherever you are on your journey of faith, allow us to walk alongside you.
Please click here to download the service bulletin:
by the Rev. Leslie Barnes Scoopmire
Readings:
In 1965, the world was changing. A decade of organized protest and advocacy known as the Civil Rights Movement had slowly been chipping away at laws and customs that treated African Americans as not just full citizens but also as not fully human. This system of oppression of African Americans and other people of color was a legacy of 400 years of law and custom rigidly enforced across much of the United States, but especially in the Southern states of the old Confederacy.
That system of dehumanization and oppression of an entire race of people was claimed, by its segregationist proponents, to be rooted and grounded in Christianity. They had long insisted that Christianity not just allowed but demanded the oppression of African Americans and denial of their basic rights of citizenship and humanity. They used scattered verses from epistles in the New Testament that ordered slaves to obey their masters. They invented stories about "the mark of Ham"-- a biblical curse-- being signified by having black skin. The Ku Klux Klan called itself "Christian Knights" and used a burning cross as one of its most feared symbols of terror.
Many Americans, then and now, were unaware of the specific religious justifications that racists made. But other Christians rejected this hellish ideology of racism, especially in the Black Church-- the mere name of which should have awakened people to the fact that segregation was not just a Southern problem but an American problem and also a Christian problem.
When Martin Luther King was jailed in Montgomery during the Bus Boycotts, a group of religious leaders published an open appeal, claiming to be moderates, asking King and his movement to stop protesting and engaging in civil disobedience-- and among the signers were two Episcopal bishops. It is in answer to their appeal that Dr. King wrote his famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."
Indeed many of the greatest leaders of the America civil rights movement were devout Christians. Many of them we know by name: The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., of course, but the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and of course the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that grew out of the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, just to name a few. But there were also Christians and Jews from all over the country who, inspired by their own devotion to the actual life and ministry of Jesus, answered the call to fight against the denial of basic freedom to an entire race of people based on the false, demonic gospel of racism. And one of them was a young Episcopal seminarian named Jonathan Myrick Daniels, who is recognized as a saint, as a member of the cloud of witnesses in the Episcopal Church.
Jonathan Daniels had been born in New Hampshire, where the issue of segregation had probably rarely been present in the daily lives of his family or neighbors. But he had chosen to go to college at Virginia Military Institute. Perhaps that was when he was first introduced to the issue of racial oppression on a personal level. From VMI, where he was valedictorian, Daniels enrolled at Harvard, but after a year felt the call to the ministry and enrolled at Episcopal Divinity School in Boston.
It was from there that, in March of 1965, Daniels and others answered the call of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for young people to come to Alabama and join the marches for voting rights from Montgomery to Selma. He came expecting to stay a weekend. But after seeing the work that needed to be done, he returned to Boston only long enough to get permission to continue his classes via independent study. He then came back to Selma, lived with an African American family, and engaged in the daily, grinding work, tutoring young children, working to desegregate the local Episcopal Church, working to register African Americans to vote.
On August 7, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into Law, which was meant to enforce the promises of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed freedmen and their descendants the right to vote. requiring states with histories of disenfranchisement of people of color to end the practice of racial gerrymandering at the state and local level and empowering federal officials to oversee the registration of voters of color. Tensions in Southern states were high.
Seven days later, Jonathan Daniels joined an interracial group of about 30 young people protesting whites-only stores in the town of Fort Deposit. They were arrested, and contemptuously loaded into a garbage truck to be taken to the nearest jail in Haynesville. There they were held for 6 days in unairconditioned cells without bail, much less access to much food or water. Released on August 20 with no way back home, some went to try to arrange transportation. Jonathan Daniels and a Catholic priest named Richard Morrisroe accompanied 2 young teenaged African American women, Ruby Sales and Joyce Bailey, to the one store in Haynesville that would serve African Americans, hoping to get a cool drink after their long ordeal.
Barring their way was a construction worker who claimed to be a volunteer deputy-- a man named Tom Coleman. Coleman had a shotgun and a pistol at the ready. He aimed the shotgun at Ruby Sales, but Jonathan Daniels pushed her down before Coleman could fire. Daniels received the shotgun blast directly to the chest, and fell back, his body nearly torn in two. The Rev. Morrisroe grabbed Joyce Bailey by the arm and began running for their lives. Coleman shot Morrisroe in the back with the second shell in his shotgun. Coleman was later acquitted by an all white jury on a single count of manslaughter. Yet the gospel for which Jonathan Daniels gave his life-- a gospel of freedom, and justice for all-- lives on.
Eleven years ago I was privileged to hear Ruby Sales speak at my own matriculation at Eden seminary-- just seven days after the killing of Michael brown in Ferguson. Ruby Sales continues to be a powerful activist for peace, civil rights, and justice. Jonathan Daniels is now acclaimed a saint in the Episcopal Church, and whose feast day was just a few days ago on August 14. But sixty years after his death, we still are confronted by a renewed rise in hatred and prejudice-- a world in which people claim to be empowered to hate, to oppress, and to divide-- often also claiming to live as Christians under the banner of Jesus.
Here we are in 2025.... and I don't know about you, but I can no longer look away from the truth of what Jesus is saying in our gospel this coming weekend. At first glance we think we see what could be termed “the Rebel Jesus”—Jesus the zealot, Jesus of the overturned money-changers’ tables in the Temple, Jesus who underwent the Baptism of John the Baptist, who also preached in a similar prophetic vein. Even more important, here we see the HUMAN Jesus. Jesus who isn’t a sanguine, enlightened being—but Jesus who is frustrated and who sees so much that needs to be changed, who is determined to carry out the task set before him that will lead to Jerusalem and the cross.
Jesus, the Prince of Peace, is a flashpoint of division. Too many of us live amidst the very division Jesus describes. And Jesus is in the center of it.
I am in no way convinced Jesus should actually take the blame, however, nor that this was his design. Jesus saw in his own lifetime that his good news was often received as a threat to the powerful. Over and over we have seen that those who preach peace often are met with division and enmity, instead.
And the division is not merely between those who claim the name of Jesus and those who do not. Those are almost understandable. They are understandable due to the more virulent divisions between those who claim Jesus in the name of nationalism and those who understand Jesus as superseding national boundaries.
Between those who use the name of Jesus to divide, and those who hope to unite by our witness to and emulation of Jesus's life and ministry.
Between those who believe Jesus hates all the same people they do, and those who struggle to love our enemies and pray for them in the name of Jesus.
Between those who limit Jesus to being a "personal savior," and those who understand Jesus as the one who lays down his life for us-- and for everyone around us.
The Jesus of scripture and our own encounters, who calls us to viscerally and bravely love and care for our neighbors as they are dragged off our streets or denied the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Our gospel passage contains, on its face, a difficult message: Jesus claims he does not come to bring peace but division. The gospel of Jesus has always been divisive. It was divisive even as he walked the dusty byways of Galilee-- so divisive it led to his death on a cross. But the division does not come from Jesus. It comes from us-- when we fail to have the courage to stand for the gospel when it costs us anything.
Yes, the gospel of Jesus is divisive-- but it is divisive because of its potential power. Even leading a ragtag group of maybe a thousand followers in his lifetime, Jesus was deemed so politically dangerous that he was executed by the Roman Empire-- all for preaching justice for the poor, and equality before God. His message was dangerous to a world that ran on violence, fear, racial division and oppression. The same issue we confront right now, at this very moment, in our nation and in our communities.
Jesus is divisive because the peace that he preaches is insanely counter-cultural, two millennia after he first preached it, even as we live in a part of the world which claims to have been "Christendom" in the not-too-distant past.
Jesus preaches a peace that is not merely the silence of the oppressed and the muffling of the groans of the suffering. Jesus preaches a peace that disturbs the status quo. Jesus preaches a peace that, as his mother predicted before his birth, brings down the mighty and lifts up the lowly; that satisfies the hungry and sends the rich away empty.
How can we proclaim and reclaim the Jesus of mercy, the Jesus of true peace, the Jesus who calls us to live outside our own petty interests for the life of the world?
I suggest we start with reading Jesus's claim that he has come to bring division as coming out of that exhaustion and frustration-- a frustration many of us feel as Jesus's message gets misaapropriated all too often in the public arena. This frustration comes out of the reality that so far in the gospel and in the life of Luke's audience and our own, Jesus's message has caused EXACTLY argument and division, as people were threatened by his radical love. And in our own time, we see, and the world sees, the name of Jesus being used by some in our time to justify cruelty, warfare against migrants and refugees, aggression, oppression of the poor, and ignorance, among other sins. The Son of God who embodied in human flesh the good news message of justice, reconciliation, mercy, and grace has been appropriated by those who, in his actual lifetime, would have opposed him with every fiber of their beings.
Where can we turn for encouragement in times such as these? The letter to the Hebrews provides us with another resource: the "great cloud of witnesses--" those people who, throughout history, have overcome times such as these and worse. People in recent memory, such as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (born Edith Stein), or Sophie Scholl, or Jonathan Daniels.
We can draw upon the courage of those in that great cloud of witnesses, and we can follow in their footsteps-- refusing to be silent before the sins of hatred, racism, cruelty and evil. Dedicating our lives to proclaiming the true gospel of Christ-- which is based on peace rooted in justice. not the false peace of silence and appeasement before unholy power to dominate and exploit others. That's no real peace, but the papering over of tension.
The revolutionary peace that comes from the gospel of Jesus calls those who have privilege to, if not lay it aside, then to use it in lifting those around them up, just as Jesus himself did. Not out of a sense of noblesse oblige, but out of working to bring about true justice founded on mercy and reconciliation. Living under the obedience of Christ means not turning that name from a blessing into a curse. Living under the obedience of Christ means choosing to follow Jesus as he himself lived in solidarity and humility alongside the humble and the scorned. The time to proclaim the gospel, and share in being in that great cloud of witnesses, is now.
Amen.