When I first looked at the Gospel lesson for this week, I was drawn to the part where it says how Jesus and his disciples came down (from the mountain) to "the level place." I had all kinds of thoughts on that idea. And then, as I was walking with my spouse to her job, I remembered that February 13th is Absalom Jones Day in the Episcopal Calendar. His story had captured my imagination from the first time I heard it when Fr. Lee Graham preached about him at 12:10 service at St. John's. I thought about his bold move to walk out of St. George's when he was being told, for no reason besides racial prejudice, that he needed to sit in the balcony. Everything clicked in my head...and this is the sermon that came out through my fingers.
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Prayer: O God of love and liberty, may what I say today reflect your will…may our ears be open to your Word and may our hearts be on fire for love of you. Amen.
Believe it or not, today is a saint day in our Episcopal calendar.
Not one of the major feasts, and not one we recognize to be celebrated on a Sunday…which is why we are sticking with the usual lectionary readings.
But as I was reading through our Gospel lesson of Luke’s beatitudes…and looking at this day of February 13th…it seemed only fitting to share the story of our “saint of the day” in our calendar…a priest by the name of Absalom Jones.
Who is Absalom Jones?
He was an African-American…born into slavery in Delaware in 1746. He was owned by an Anglican planter named Abraham Wynkoop.
Wynkoop recognized that the young Absalom was an intelligent child and so he moved him from working in the field to being a house slave.
When the elder Wynkoop died, Absalom became the property of a son. That son moved Jones and his mother and siblings to Philadelphia. That’s where he granted Absalom Jones the right to attend night school with the Quakers and kept him working in a store during the day.
As a young adult, Jones met and married another slave, Mary Thomas. He used the money he’d been saving to buy her freedom, and would eventually he would buy his own.
Absalom and Mary started attending St. George’s Methodist Church where another free African-American, Richard Allen, was a lay preacher. Jones and Allen became good friends. They started the Free African Society, which provided aid to people in need and would hold additional religious services during the week.
Jones and Allen became great evangelists for St. George’s, helping to attract more black members to join the congregation.
But then… in a surprise move…the white vestry of St. George’s decided that the black parishioners should be moved to the balcony.
There came a Sunday…during the middle of the prayers…that the ushers tried to forcibly move Absalom Jones from his seat and ordered him to go to the balcony.
Instead…Jones led a walk out with Richard Allen and all the other African-Americans. They marched out of the church never to come back again.
The Free African Society went on conducting services on their own with the help of a priest from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Eventually, the group decided it wanted to affiliate with the Episcopal Church on three conditions:
1. They would be recognized as an organized body;
2. They would have control over their local affairs and
3. That Absalom Jones would be recognized as their lay leader and, if he qualified, would be ordained a priest.
Bishop William White of Pennsylvania received this new church…called the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas…and Jones became the first African-American Episcopal priest in 1802. That church…by the way… is still active and meeting to this day.
Meanwhile…Absalom’s friend…Richard Allen…didn’t want to be an Episcopalian and instead he began the African Methodist Episcopal or AME Church.
Blessed are those who are ordered upstairs. Woe to those who let their prejudices rule their hearts.
Jones and Allen knew that their rightful place at St. George’s was not up in some balcony separated from the rest of the congregation. And Luke’s version of the beatitudes envisions Jesus also at the ground level.
Unlike Matthew’s version, where Jesus is preaching his Sermon on the Mount, here Jesus has been up on the mountain and now is coming down to “a level place.”
This is the vision of God meeting with us on equal ground. No person…not even Jesus…is elevated over another. And all these people…with their hurts…their doubts…their desires…they’re reaching out to touch Jesus.
Instead of running away from them…he has come to them. And more than that…he’s blessing them.
You who are poor.
You who are hungry.
You who weep.
You who are being excluded and hated.
Blessed are you! You are exactly the ones for whom the psalmist says will “bear fruit in due season.” All those qualities that the world will count as weakness and will use as a reason to discount you…God rejoices and lifts up as fulfilling the promise that nobody is seen as a less-than.
Think about what happened to Absalom Jones. A man who started out his life being told by an unjust system that he was only three-fifths of a person. As a fully whole person… he showed how much he could contribute to the life of his church. And then the church told him to get upstairs to the nosebleed section…tried to reduce his worth. But he stood up…moved on…and achieved a place of honor in the history of the Episcopal Church.
What others had intended for evil…God made sure something good happened instead.
God’s abundant love and deep desire to meet us in that level place should be an inspiration for all of us.
I imagine any one of us at some point in time has experienced what it means to be poor…or in mourning over a loss. Maybe we’ve even known the pain of being hated or rejected…told to get out or go up to some balcony where we can be ignored.
I know the Georgia Assembly is in session as is the Florida legislature. One of my friends in Florida recently posted on Facebook how tough it is for her to go before the elected leaders only to have them ignore or even ridicule her advocacy on behalf of marginalized groups. She attempts to put a human face on whatever lawmakers are debating as an “issue.”
Too often…she leaves having seen those human faces reduced to specimens in a petri dish…problems that need to be solved.
I know public school teachers who have felt similarly frustrated as politicians who have no connection to the classroom make laws that add more burdens to their workload…while administrators do nothing to support them in their efforts to teach.
The Gospel addresses those concerns: “Woe to those who speak well of you for that is what they did to their false prophets!”
Jesus is harkening back to the days of the prophet Jeremiah who was ignored and even beaten for his efforts to warn about the coming destruction of Jerusalem. The powerful didn’t want to hear it…and neither did the general public for that matter. The leaders…the false prophets and priests…drowned out Jeremiah’s voice and repeated platitudes that made the people happy and kept them blissfully unaware of the trouble that was brewing on their doorstep.
Jerusalem learned the hard and very traumatic way what happens when you ignore the prophets.
Woe to them and blessed are those who tell the hard truths, those who advocate for the underdogs, and dare to stand up to the powerful when justice demands it.
Those are the people who are walking in the way of an Absalom Jones…which is nothing less than walking in the way of Jesus. May God grant us all that strength and courage to follow in those footsteps leading to the cross.
