Called to Sainthood

Luke 6:17-26

This sermon was written for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, Year C, which in 2022 falls on the feast day of Absalom Jones, Priest. For the readings and collects assigned to Rev. Jones’ feast day, click here. The biographical information included here comes primarily from Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2018 beginning on page 124, and from the Delaware Art Museum. For a good starting place for further reading, check out the bibliography of Absalom Jones’ Wikipedia page. To read a bit about Absalom in his own words, and to learn about the ongoing work in his name, spend some time on the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing’s website. If you are using this sermon in a worship setting, please encourage listeners to find their way to this blog for access to these links.

In our local contexts, we are good at remembering our parish saints, the holy men and women who founded and sustained and served our communities and ensured that our buildings and our resources would be here to hand down to future generations. We put their names on plaques and pray for them on All Saints Day and remember them when we tell our stories and look back at photos. They matter to us, even if we didn’t all know them personally, because they are the reason we are here. They are the people who prayed for a future that has become our present, and their gifts continue to shape and sustain us. As Episcopalians, this is at the core of our understanding of what makes a saint. Not perfection, not miracles, not a strict set of rubrics. A saint is someone who has joined the Church Triumphant, someone who has died but whose earthly life continues to carry for us a lesson in Christian living. To be a saint is to continue to point toward Christ through your life beyond death. It doesn’t take fame, or even official recognition, for someone to be named as a saint. All it takes is being remembered, being lifted up in community as someone from whom we can learn how to be more like Christ. We are really good at that, when it’s someone we knew in our lifetime. And so it can be helpful, I believe, to keep in mind that the saints in our church calendar were known and loved by people like us. The holy women and holy men who have been lifted up as examples by the church were first examples to their friends, their families, their neighbors. They were local saints, matriarchs and patriarchs of their own communities just like those we hold in blessed memory here. Today, we are going to spend some time with one of those saints. On this date, February 13^th, the Episcopal Church commemorates the Reverend Absalom Jones. As I share with you a little of Absalom’s story, I think you’ll see why he is included among our celebrated saints.

Absalom Jones was born in Delaware in 1746 to an enslaved mother. When he was sixteen years old, Absalom was separated from his mother and siblings when their captor sold them and took Absalom with him to Philadelphia. There, Absalom attended a night school run by Quakers, where he learned to read and write. He met and married another enslaved person of a neighboring estate, Mary King, and worked for eight long years to collect donations and loans from Quakers and free individuals to purchase her freedom. This ensured that their children would be born free. It would take another six years for Absalom to pay back those loans and for his captor to grant him his own freedom. After the abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania, Absalom stepped into a lay ministerial role at the parish he and his family attended. His evangelism in the Black community was so effective that the white members of the interracial Methodist parish began enforcing segregated seating, forcing the Black congregants to sit out of sight in a balcony with no advanced warning. After completing their prayers, the majority of the Black congregants walked out, including Absalom. This incident ultimately led him to partner with other community members to found a mutual aid society and worshiping community for newly freed people. The Free African Society, as it was first known, would eventually become the first Black church in Philadelphia, the African Episcopal Church of St Thomas. Absalom Jones was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church in 1795, and ordained a priest in 1802, making him the first African American priest in our denomination.

In addition to providing support and mutual aid to communities of freed Africans and African Americans, Absalom gained a reputation for both his preaching and his advocacy. His sermon on January 1^st, 1808, the date that the mandate to end the African slave trade went into effect, became famous in its time in pamphlet form and continues to be read and studied today as a foundational text of the abolitionist movement. Reverend Jones was also part of the first group of African Americans to petition the U.S. Congress in opposition to the cruelties of the Fugitive Slave Act. And in an act that brings us closer to him than ever in our present day, Absalom Jones was one of many Black citizens of Philadelphia to nurse and bury those afflicted by the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793.

Today, Absalom Jones is understood to be one of the fathers of our tradition, a servant of God who denounced slavery, called upon oppressors to repent, and used his own hands, his own voice, and his own life to model Christ’s reconciling love. He was a beloved pastor, a relational person, and an active participant in the life of his community. His parish grew to over 500 members in its first year, a testament to both his leadership and the way the Gospel speaks particularly and specifically to those on the margins of society.

That is the sermon I hope to leave you with today, my friends and siblings in Christ. Not one in which we observe from a distance the communion of saints as a small number of supernaturally good and holy people. Not one in which we pay lip service to Black History Month and move on with our days as if it has nothing to do with us. I hope, God willing, that sharing the story of one of many exceptional people in the history of God’s church, will remind you of your own stories, your own saints and heroes of history. Because while this may have felt more like a history lesson than a typical sermon, it is as much a part of our present as the Gospel itself. Absalom Jones is closer to us in time and place than Peter or Paul or Luke. Absalom Jones worshipped and worked alongside our ancestors, and for many of us that also means he stood on the other side of the debate on abolition from our forebears. Absalom worshipped in a church like ours, said strikingly similar prayers and sang some of the same familiar hymns. The things that Absalom did in his life were extraordinary, and holy, and righteous, but they were not miracles. They were not otherworldly, and they were not safe. They were things we are perfectly capable of doing. They were acts of love that are not just available to us, but required of us. Absalom worshipped God, and when sin began to direct the manner of worship, Absalom walked away and found a community that spoke the language of the Good News. Absalom redistributed money and resources to ensure that freedom and access were available to everyone in his community. Absalom wrote and spoke out against injustices, although his audience at the time was much smaller than the average Facebook friends list today. Absalom participated in politics and governance, despite having none of the rights we enjoy. Absalom participated in the health and safety of his community in a crisis, even when it meant privileging the needs of others over his own comfort. Absalom did what Christ commanded him, and that is the same commandment that we are baptized into today. The love of Christ is action, a way of life and an embodied identity. This is what sainthood looks like. We are called to nothing less.