May 31, 2009
(The Day of Pentecost: Whitsunday)

The Bed is on Fire

Photo of The Very Rev. Dean Terry White By The Very Rev. Terry White, Dean

Alleluia!  Christ is risen!

A tabloid newspaper at the grocery store checkout placed the following story on the front page:  An emergency rescue squad was summoned to a house where smoke was pouring from an upstairs window.  The crew broke through the locked front door and found a man in a smoldering bed.  The first responders quickly picked him up and carried him out of the house even as the mattress was doused with water.  Once rescuers ascertained he was fine and could speak without effort, the obvious question was: How did your mattress catch on fire?  The man responded:  I don’t know how it caught on fire.  It was on fire when I lay down on it.”

That was it, the end of the story. A man had gotten into bed when the bed was on fire. As he said, “It was on fire when I lay down on it.”

Author Robert Fulghum chose this line as the title for his second book, following his best-seller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, and he writes that a lot of us could settle for that sentence on our tombstone. “It was on fire when I lay down on it.” A life-story in a sentence.  By that I mean that you and I often jump from the frying pan into the fire, and at other times, we find we must lie in the beds we make.

All that cliché-talk aside, life is filled with choices that are just as counter-intuitive as climbing into a bed that is one fire.  And I do not for moment mean to imply that such choices are wrong, silly or the result of careless behavior or naïveté.  In fact, quite the opposite. Many a saint has climbed into a bed already on fire (maybe that is not the best phraseology to use in conjunction with saints.) But the journey of faith is filled with moments of decision leading to actions that place us amidst flames. The flames of Pentecost. And curiously, it is the water of Baptism that sends us into the midst of Pentecostal fire.  Here is one such story.

At the age of 24, Jonathan Myrick Daniels enrolled at Episcopal  Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1963, expecting to graduate in the spring of 1966 and be ordained a deacon and priest.

In March 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., asked college and graduate students to join him in Selma, Alabama, for a march to the state capital in Montgomery demonstrating support for civil rights. Jon Daniels decided that he ought to go.

He and others intended to stay only that weekend of the march; but he and a friend missed the bus back, and decided that they must stay longer. They returned to Cambridge to request permission to spend the rest of the term in Selma, studying on their own and returning to take final exams.

Jon devoted many of his Sundays in Selma to bringing small groups of blacks, mostly high school students, to church with him in an effort to integrate the local Episcopal church. They were seated but scowled at. Many parishioners openly resented their presence, and these actions put parish priest squarely in the middle.

In May, Jon went back to ETS to take examinations and complete other requirements, and in July he returned to Alabama, where he helped to produce a listing of resources legally available to persons in need of assistance. On Friday 13 August, Jon and others went to the town of Fort Deposit to join in picketing three local businesses who would not serve blacks. On Saturday they were arrested and held in the county jail in Hayneville for six days until they were bailed out. After their release on Friday 20 August, four of them undertook to enter a local shop, and were met at the door by a man with a shotgun who told them to leave or be shot. After a brief confrontation, the man aimed his gun at a young black girl in the party, and Jon pushed her out of the way as the man fired. Jonathan Daniels took the shotgun blast himself. He was killed instantly.

Not long before his death he wrote:

[Here in Alabama] “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.   I began to lose self-righteousness when I discovered the extent to which my behavior was motivated by worldly desires and by the self-seeking messianism of Yankee deliverance!

“The point is simply, of course, that one's motives are usually mixed, and one had better know it. As Judy and I said Morning and Evening Prayer day by day, we became 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 fulfils and "ends" all songs, we are indelibly, unspeakably ONE.”

Jonathan Daniels chose to lay down on a bed already on fire. He made such a choice when he decided to march in Selma, and worked to integrate the local parish, register voters, and protest in front of stores that would not serve all races.  But even before all of that, he got into a bed already on fire when he was baptized. In fact, when you and I choose to do what we are doing now, attend a celebration of the Eucharist, when we hear the Word of God and come to the Lord’s Altar, when we open our hearts to receive the Sacrament of His Body and Blood, we commit ourselves to a lifetime of being surrounded by the fire of Pentecost.

Molly and Jeremy, know this is the choice you make today in presenting your children for Holy Baptism. You are sending them into the flames of Pentecost.

By virtue of our Baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we know that the sorrow of the Passion and the joy of Easter lead us to repeated experiences of Pentecost, when the violent wind of God’s Holy Spirit transforms us into agents of change, change which can be radical and violent in that the landscape around us is changed as if a holy twister has demolished every sign of injustice and indifferent so that a new life might emerge.

The water of Baptism stirs up in Gods people the holy obsession to eradicate hunger, prejudice, and indifference, and in this font we are made servants endowed with a single purpose: to seek and serve Christ in all people, loving our neighbors as ourselves.  The fire of Pentecost does not destroy us, but purifies us as a refiner’s fire, making us strong, and enkindling in us that Light of Light which no darkness, no doubt, no apathy, and no evil can ever overcome.

The new tongues of Pentecost compel us to find new ways to express the unconditional love of God that the Body of Christ might speak to the plagues of our day which divide, enslave, and diminish the dignity of any human being.

Jonathan Daniels’ story is but one example of how the Day of Pentecost occurs every day.  This cathedral is filled with such stories, and more will be written by each of us in the days ahead.  As we renew our Baptismal Covenant, as we are sprinkled with the water of Baptism, and we receive the precious Body and Blood of Christ, let us be clear: these are not empty rituals – they convey the sanctifying grace of Almighty God that converts us into people of action. Despite the perceived obstacles, despite our doubts, despite the literal and figurative shot gun blasts that threaten us, Christ is calling. The Risen Lord gives us own life and his Father’s Spirit to be with us always. As on the first Day of Pentecost, today, Christ Jesus calls you and me to turn the world upside down.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!  The Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

The bed is on fire.  Climb on in.