Commontide
Proper 15
Liturgical Color: Red
The 9th Sunday after Trinity
Keep your Church, O Lord, by your perpetual mercy; and because without you the frailty of our nature causes us to fall, keep us from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable for our salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Most liturgical texts are from the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America.
The New Coverdale Psalter, © 2019 by the Anglican Church in North America. Used by permission.
Seminarian and Martyr
Anglican Commemoration
Jonathan Myrick Daniels (1939-1965) was an Episcopal seminarian who went to Selma, Alabama, in answer to Martin Luther King's call, moved by the words of the Magnificat at Evening Prayer. On 20 August 1965, freshly released from a county jail, he stepped in front of a shotgun aimed at a young Black woman, Ruby Sales, and took the blast into his own body. The Episcopal Church counts him among its martyrs, a witness to costly discipleship and to the gospel's claim on the cause of justice.
Jonathan Myrick Daniels was born February 11, 1939. A native of Keene, New Hampshire, he entered the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a seminarian. During the civil rights era, Daniels responded to Martin Luther King Jr.'s call for supporters to come to Selma, Alabama following the Voting Rights Act marches of March 1965. While working with civil rights activists in Lowndes County, Daniels and Ruby Sales were confronted by Tom Coleman, a local white man, who fired a shotgun at close range. Daniels deliberately shielded the young Black woman with his own body, absorbing the fatal blast. Coleman was tried but acquitted by an all-white jury. Daniels' death became a symbol of costly Christian discipleship and prophetic witness against racism in the American South.
American civil rights martyr; prophetic witness to Christian solidarity with the oppressed and nonviolent resistance; example of costly discipleship and racial justice advocacy within the Anglican tradition.