Sermon – Sunday 21 February, 2016/Rev. Clarence E. Butler, Ph.D.

clarence butler

Sermon delivered on the Occasion of the Observance of Absalom Jones

The Preamble
Several years back, when my now 10 year old granddaughter was 4, I happened, as just recently was the case, to be visiting my older daughter and family in Hong Kong. While at brunch one Sunday morning after Mass, my granddaughter turned to her mother and said: “Mama, how old is Opa, a hundred?” We all chuckled. My daughter responded, ”No, Didi, not even close.” Not satisfied with that answer, my granddaughter pressed me for the answer. I told her, and she responded simply, “Oh! Okay!” And with her curiosity satisfied, she returned to eating her meal.

Why, you ask, do I begin my remarks with this short vignette into the private lives of the Butlers? It is only to say that, while I am grateful, truly honored to have been invited by your rector to address you on the occasion of your observance of Absalom Jones, a former slave and the first African American to be ordained priest into the American Episcopal Church, he lived well before my time.

Because it is my understanding from your rector that you here, at Church of the Redeemer, observe his day annually, I feel no need to instruct you as to who Absalom Jones is. Those of you who may be new to Church of the Redeemer and not familiar with Absalom Jones, you need only Google “Absalom Jones” and read his life story in Wikipedia. You will find there a tale of perseverance grace in the face of adversity every bit as compelling as that of Joseph in Egypt as told in Genesis. Moreover, now just over a week ago while sitting in Hong Kong, in anticipation of making Eucharist with you today, I acquainted myself with your various ministries as described on your webpage, and I believed to detect strong evidence that Absalom Jones is already a part of who you are.

Therefore, we honor Absalom Jones, in my opinion, not by talking about Absalom Jones, who would find it perhaps a bit odd that anyone should speak about him, because what he was all about, was not himself. He perceived himself in all likelihood simply as a messenger of the truth of the Gospel. Rather, if we are truly inclined to appreciate, and to emulate, the ministry of Absalom Jones, then we are led, as was Absalom Jones in his time, back to Jesus of Nazareth, who in his own day was deemed an Absalom Jones, for his message challenged the powers that be, a message which was the cause of his crucifixion. So, Absalom Jones is not, per se, the focus of my thoughts today, rather that which motivated him, the gospel of God’s Messiah.

Before I get to my sermon, allow me several asides. First, our new Presiding Bishop, whom, perchance, I have heard now twice, has invited us to join him in a renewal of the Jesus Movement, and that is what I intend to do in these next 45 minutes—yes! I know that we Episcopalians are programmed to tune out the preacher after 12 minutes, but you do not invite a retired professor of German who is also a priest to travel over 1400 miles to speak, for surely you are aware that one German sentence in 8 point font can cover an entire page and that priests are infatuated with their own voices.

Second, our new PB has called us to be simultaneously Episcopalians and evangelical, two words, says he, beginning in “E,” never to be found in the same sentence. That, my sisters and brothers in Christ, to understand, may take a bit more time than the usual Episcopalian twelve minutes. The Episcopal Church is, and always has been an evangelical church, if “evangelical” connotes, not a socio-political stance, but the true preaching of the good news of Christ. I maintain further that our fellow Baptist Christians have no monopoly on the word “Baptist.” There are Episcopal Baptists, Methodist Baptists, Roman Catholic Baptists and Congregational Baptists. In fact, all who have been baptized in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, are Baptists, and so good people of Church of the Redeemer, you need never deny your place as heirs to Christ’s redemptive love. Never again ought you to hang your heads in embarrassment, but let us together reclaim with fervor for ourselves the true meaning of “evangelical.”

Third, we Episcopalians lack what is called in some Christian churches “the amen corner,” so that we are often portrayed, and sometimes take pride even in being described, as “God’s frozen chosen.” But that is also not so. At least after today, that will no longer be so here at Redeemer. Now in the spirit of Absalom Jones, let us get on with some biblical fact-checking. In the next 12 minutes, let us see how we fare in a review of our deliverance of the Good News. [And herewith begins my sermon.]
The Sermon: Routine: A Serious Hindrance to Knowing God’s Creative Amazing Grace
I want you to turn in your Bibles to Matthew 6:9-13, and for those of you, who left your Bible on the night stand at home, take out the Book of Common Prayer in front of you and turn to page 364. What you have in front of you is “The Lord’s Prayer,” the prayer which you and I will recite at the end of the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, or the Prayer of Consecration. This is a prayer which Absalom Jones recited, as do you and I. I know not what Absalom Jones thought of The Lord’s Prayer, for that is not recorded in Wikipedia. However, I suggest to you that what you have in front of you, is none other than a creed, in very simple, succinct language, a creed nonetheless that is older and more powerful than the Apostle Creed, than the Nicene Creed, than the Athanasius Creed, and all the other attempts at creeds and mission statements which we Christians write in order to define ourselves for ourselves and others, how we as Christians are to live. The Lord’s Prayer is a creed, given us by none other than Jesus himself. It is both a creed and a mission statement, by which you here at Redeemer, as well as we Christians everywhere, declare that we are followers of God’s Messiah, a creed that defines all missionary and evangelical outreach.

So often have we recited this creed that we need not our Bibles or the BCP; a prayer recited so often by us, that even non-Christians are familiar with it. It is part of our religious psyche. It has become second nature. It has become routine, ordinary, commonplace, flat perhaps? But today, I want us to think about what we say, for I contend, we Evangelical Episcopal Baptists need to be reminded from time to time, under just what creed Jesus himself lived and laid out for his followers!

When the disciples of Jesus asked him to teach them how to pray, it was not because they had never before prayed or heard prayers in their synagogues or in the Temple in Jerusalem. Indeed, religious law required them to pray all the time: upon rising, at each meal, at noonday, at day’s end, and at night before reclining. A rather dull, familiar routine had taken hold of their lives. They felt a need for simple direction and clarity. So you and I will do what I often did with my students in my senior seminars, namely undertake a close reading of what Jesus taught them and what we have inherited.

The Invocation: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” “Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai ecad.” ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.’ Jesus begins his prayer with a creedal invocation which is used to this day by all denominations of Judaism, and are the words that open what we Evangelical Episcopal Baptists know in our Mass as “The Summary of the Law.” How often have you and I, never quite intentionally, forgotten that it is God who has made us and not we ourselves, to borrow from the psalmist! The Summary of the Law continues: “And you shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.”

Petition I: “Thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth, as in heaven.” It has longed puzzled me how readily we glide over this petition. Let me put this another way. Why do we place the emphasis on those last three words “as in heaven”? Jesus states clearly, time and time again, in all four gospels and in various ways, that our concern, our primary concern should not be to make sure that we “are saved” and can get into heaven, to the neglect of living on this earth. The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus the Christ and our baptism into his movement have already “saved us.” Rather, our task as followers of Christ, as heirs to God’s amazing grace through the Redeemer, is, with every fiber of our saved being, to make this place where we live, move, and have our being, as much like the heavenly realm as humanly possible.

Absalom Jones, so I would imagine, would inform us, that our problem in establishing the reign of God on earth is that we have forgotten rule number one, that God is God and not we ourselves. We have taken unto ourselves the right to determine who might own and serve whom, or who should be saved and enter into our imagined version of God’s kingdom. However, if we go from the assumption out that God, not we, created and continues to create all things, that humankind was created in God’s image, and go then out from the further assumption that all which God has created is good and that God does not make a mistake, does that not mean that everyone, not simply those whom we like or who look like us or whose educational credentials, acquired of course at the right schools, are equivalent to our own, or that those with whom we might disagree—that everyone is to be accorded the respect due to one created in God’s image, on earth as in heaven? “And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Petition II: “Give us today our daily bread.” This petition we can toss, those of us who, as my late German philosopher father-in-law would say, had the good fortune to be born in a land of plenty and into families where there was never a question about our daily bread. Accident of birth, he called it. I do not recall ever having gone to bed hungry, but I am sure that I did, and if so, it was because I chose not to eat what my mother or my father who, in his own rights, was a good cook, had prepared for dinner. It may well be, that we, you and I, do not identify personally with the rich young man who went away sorrowing, or with the wealthy landowner who caused, vainly, even larger silos to be built for his grain. Rather, you and I are basically good people, but who are, almost without exception, comfortable beyond all imagination. Routine causes us not to see, or to forget. We do well to remember, we are still only stewards of our God’s wealth, which we mistakenly think of as our own. And while it may well be true, that one does not live by bread alone, bread, sustenance is essential to the physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being of every human being, who, let us not forget, is made in the image of God. When was the last time that a child of ours, one of our grandchildren, one of our cousins, nieces or nephews could not concentrate in school, due to nagging hunger pangs? And, yet there are those who do, simply because of accident of birth. And can we really toss this petition. Yes, if we limit our thinking to tangible, consumable bread, but No, if we think creatively, if we go beyond our routine, if we acknowledge our own need and the needs of others to be sustained, to be affirmed psychologically and emotionally and spiritually. “And the king shall say unto them…”

Petition III: “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” This third petition is the one with which many of us have had, and continue to have, the most difficulty. I dare not ask for a show of hands for those among us who have not only undergraduate degrees, but several post graduate degrees. This credentialing is beguiling. For it gives us, so we would believe, the right to be shown to the seat of honor. Given the educational advantages which we have enjoyed in our lifetime and the positions of responsibility, and hence power, held, we are tempted not to see ourselves as the offender. We sense often no need to ask for forgiveness, because by definition our rank or position tells us that our opinions, our decisions, our actions are the correct ones, even when they were or are, to use the vernacular, dead wrong, stupid, short-sighted, and sinful. I suspect that Absalom Jones would decry the times we use our positions for our own aggrandizement and to the detriment of our fellow human beings.

Jesus touched a nerve when he told the tax collector to collect no more than what was required by law and not to enrich his own coffers at the expense of those from whom he collected. Christ, God’s Messiah, knew that human beings are more than mere collateral damage in times of war, and thus he admonished the soldiers not to disregard the humanity of those innocents affected by strife which, if leaders of the world were but to harken to God’s word, would not occur in the first place.

Petition IV: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Jesus the Christ knew first hand that which we call “human nature.” Being very much aware of the story of Job’s trials and tribulations that were put before Job, in order to tempt Job to denounce God, Jesus instructed his followers, and that now includes you and me, to implore God not to put us to that test, especially so profound a test as Absalom Jones faced. But deliver us from evil: That evil has little or nothing to do with the number of cocktails we consume or the number of times we will secretly break our no-chocolate-during-Lent rule, but rather that we should be delivered from the evil of presuming that we are God.

The Conclusion: “for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory.” “Barukh sheim k’vod malkhuto l’olam va’ed.” ‘Blessed be the Name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever.’ With this doxology, Jesus brings us back to his point of departure. God is God and there is none other; God is the Alpha and the Omega. We do these things and make our petitions, for at the core of our being is the divine spirit and our desire to return to that spirit from which our own spirit comes. And so, my sisters and brothers in Christ, when you ask yourselves in the privacy of your own chamber or in public, what makes you a Christian, an Evangelical Episcopalian Baptist Christian, and why you gather each week here in this holy place, in order to go forth in the name of Christ, look no further than to the first creed of the church, The Lord’s Prayer. For, it is your baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection and your acceptance of Christ’s creed that determine your salvation and inform your response to Christ’s teaching.

Now one last thing! I gave always my students homework. They expected it, and I never disappointed. So, here is yours. Only you will know if you get the correct answer. When you next come into this sacred space, go not to the seat where you routinely sit. Rather, try another location. Do something very non-Episcopalian, like sitting up front, and see, whether you may not just experience God differently. And my prayer for you, my sisters and brothers in Christ Jesus, and for me, as we continue our participation in this Jesus Movement, a movement in which Absalom Jones was an exceptional foot soldier, is that our routine may never blind us to God’s Amazing Creative and Inclusive Grace. Amen

Sermon preached by the Rev. Clarence Elliot Butler, Ph.D.
The Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
Second Sunday of Lent
21 February 2016