A New World and the Vision to See It

Sunday, April 6, 2025

Fifth Sunday of Lent

John Gilmer (he/him)

Nominee for Holy Orders, Episcopal Diocese of Alabama

Allied Christian

I am about to do a new thing;

now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43:19)

In a letter, Bishop Glenda Curry of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama shared with our community that “there is something transformational that happens when we go on pilgrimage. Exploring and entering into a story that’s already been lived once, moves us and shapes us. We believe that pilgrimage is part of who we are as Christians. It also serves to tune our hearts and remind us that there is nowhere that God has not already been and indeed already is – life, death, and new life.”

I heard Bishop Curry’s encouragement and, with many others, took it to heart this past August for the 26th annual Jonathan Daniels and the Martyrs of Alabama pilgrimage. Down in tiny Hayneville, Alabama hundreds of wonderful folks across several Episcopal dioceses and other churches joined to honor and remember those who suffered and died in the Civil Rights Movement.

The Jonathan Daniels and the Martyrs of Alabama pilgrimage honors the life and martyrdom of Jonathan Myrick Daniels and others murdered in Alabama during the civil rights movement. A Virginia Military Institute valedictorian and seminarian at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, MA, Jon heard MLK’s call to clergy and students to rally in Selma to prepare for their march to Montgomery in March of 1965. Jon was 26.

On August 14, 1965, Jon was arrested in Lowndes County at Fort Deposit with many others while helping register Black Alabamians to vote, providing critical social services, working to integrate congregations, and actively protesting segregation by picketing businesses practicing it.

The group, including members of The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was released after almost a week in Hayneville’s dilapidated sweltering jail. Several of them went to Varner’s Cash Store to buy something cold to drink in the Alabama heat. There, acting under color of law, a special deputy, Tom Coleman, stood on the porch and pointed a shotgun at a seventeen-year-old girl, Ruby Sales, and screamed a hateful threat. An instant later, as Coleman pulled the trigger, Jon threw Ruby down behind him and stepped in front of the barrel of Coleman’s shotgun. He died almost instantly. As the group fled, Coleman fired again into the back of a Catholic priest in their group, the Rev. Richard Morrisroe, grievously wounding him. As pilgrims, we, knelt in prayer on the pavement where Jon died and Richard, almost bleeding to death, gasped for air and water.

Coleman would never be convicted of a crime in the Hayneville courthouse where we celebrated a Eucharist, but Jon’s final sacrifice and the work of his life was not in vain.

Our vibrant, diverse churches are a living testament to the world he died working to build. A world we see too in Ruby Sales’ transformative service as a professor and lifelong advocate for the welfare and wellbeing of others, especially our LGBTQIA+ siblings.

We remember the horror of Jon’s death, but I want to share a vision of his joy and love for others, of his life, something no weapon could ever destroy. In his valedictory speech, Jon called out to his classmates in his last lines:

My colleagues and friends, I wish you the joy of a purposeful life. I wish you new worlds and the vision to see them. I wish you the decency and the nobility of which you are capable. These will come with the maturity that it is now our job to acquire in far-flung fields.

Jon saw and shared a glimpse of a new world, and to build a new world requires our wrestling with our own destructive tendency to otherize, to alienate. To treat others as anything other than beloved by God.

With that in mind, Bishop Curry shared the words of theologian, civil rights leader, and a mentor to MLK, Howard Thurman: “Community cannot for long feed on itself. It can only flourish with the coming of others from beyond, their unknown brothers and sisters [their unknown siblings].”

Each of us others somebody, and to see Christ in everyone takes a special courage, the same strength that animated Jon Daniels and the civil rights champions he served alongside. God made a way in the wilderness through the faith, services, and sacrifice of so many, and that work continues still through us.

Reflection

Why do we and our systems of power “otherize?”

What are concrete steps we can take in our daily lives together and as citizens to combat the dehumanization of others?