Bulletin Insert prepared by Junior Warden Barbara Hays

"I wish you the decency and nobility of which you are capable." Jonathan Daniels

Today is the feast day of Jonathan Myrick Daniels, who was designated a martyr of the Episcopal Church in 1991. On this day in 1965, Jonathan was murdered by a white segregationist in Hayneville, Alabama. He stepped in front of a shotgun aimed at Ruby Sales, pushing her aside. He was killed instantly.

Jonathan was born in 1939 and grew up in Keene, New Hampshire where, influenced by the social awareness of his parents, he quickly became a defender of those in need. He enrolled at the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the fall of 1963. He followed the civil rights movement with interest and concern and on March 7, 1965 he answered Martin Luther King's call for northern clergy and students to participate in the march from Selma to Montgomery, which had been brutally stopped on that day. After the historic march was completed, Jonathan stayed on in the South, and played a central role in the integration of the Episcopal Church of Alabama, bringing blacks with him to church every Sunday. He worked with groups registering blacks to vote, joined with others to protest discriminatory treatment, and tutored black children.

His murderer was quickly acquitted by an all-white, male jury, an outrage that was used in lobbying for passage of the 1968 Federal Jury Selection Act. He had attended the Virginia Military Institute, and that school created the Jonathan Daniels Humanitarian Award in 1998, of which former President Jimmy Carter has been a recipient. Most importantly perhaps, his death helped shock his church into facing the reality of racial inequality within, and put civil rights on the map as a goal for the church as a whole, reminding many that this struggle was not as distant as they might have imagined it.

The Episcopal Diocese of Alabama and the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast, as well as churches in New Hampshire sponsor annual events and pilgrimages commemorating Jonathan along with all other martyrs of the civil rights movement.

Sermon by Jack Reiffer, Interim Organist and Choirmaster

Dear People of God,

In August of Year B in the 3-year lectionary we take a side trip from the Gospel of Mark to hear a long speech of Jesus found in John 6. After the account of the Feeding of the 5000 in Mark, we spend this month hearing Jesus say, "I am the Bread of Life...Your fathers ate manna in the wilderness...I am the bread that has come down from heaven...."

In Communion God communicates to us Christ Jesus. We drink in the life of Christ. We "taste and see that the Lord is good."