St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Wesley Chapel, FL
Preacher: The Rev. Adrienne R. Hymes
Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany/Year C
February 16, 2025 ● Luke 6:17-26
In my ethics class in seminary, the professor assigned the book Virtues and Values: The African and African-American Experience, by Peter Paris (2004). I was one of only two Black students in the course. A few of my classmates expressed their disinterest in a topic that they felt had nothing to do with them; after all, they were not black. Our professor quickly responded, “Ministry is not about you; it’s about the souls that God leads to you, and who just might be embodied in skin with a hue like Jesus of Nazareth.”
Paris’ book examined the human virtue of fortitude as a means of survival, and its inextricable connection to the theological virtue of faith. Paris offered that fortitude, with the ingredient of forbearance, is patient endurance while suffering injustice. And, that fortitude functions subconsciously as a pre-seeded virtue for Africans and African-Americans reinforced by witnessing quiet strength in the face of ongoing acts of injustice. For in the face of oppression, it is only the hope that things as they are will not always be. It is this hope that enables a suffering people to hold on, to trust in, and to wait for the Lord.
In Luke’s sixth chapter, Jesus’ sermon on the plain spoke to both a current and future reality—the current reality of the humans standing before him, oppressed by the man-made unjust structures of the Roman empire, and the future reality of God’s coming kingdom for all people. Jesus said, “Blessed are you who are hungry now…Blessed are you who weep now…blessed are you when people hate you…” (vv. 20-22). Rarely are any of these forms of human suffering, from which no one is immune, considered as blessed states of being.
The declarations put forth by Jesus to the mixed crowd consisting of his 12 apostles, disciples and people who came to hear him and be healed, would have resonated with their realities of “poverty,” “sadness,” “patience under long suffering,” and “hungering and thirsting for justice.” The present tense of the verb, “to be,” paired with the word, “now,” emphasized that the hope, embedded in the kingdom of God, was a current reality into which Jesus invited all who trusted in the Lord and whose trust was the Lord (Jer 17:7).
In the person of Jesus, the kingdom of God had already come near to the people. Through Jesus’ words, the gathered crowd glimpsed, a preview, of the future coming kingdom of God. Jesus’ sermon on the plain assures a drastic transformation of the temporal reality—the reversal of the bondage of human suffering into divine liberation.
Jesus was not sent to embody the passive mindset of “whatever will be will be” or what my clergy colleague calls, “the gospel of silence.” Jesus was sent to preach the message of hope—that things as they are, will not always be. Hold on and trust in the Lord.
Jeremiah in our Old Testament reading reminds us that like trees planted by streams of water, we do not fear when the heat comes. And in the year of drought, we are not anxious.1 Our focus is on Jesus. The roots of our faith have life in the living water of Christ just as the roots of a tree reach for life by the streams of water. Things as they are will not always be. Hold on and trust in the Lord.
Founded in 1776, and stained by the sin of slavery, the infant United States served as the womb in which the Episcopal Church, was founded only 13 years later, in 1789. As our church continued to be formed in, and alongside this nation, our history shows that the Church mirrored the earthly role of oppressor to many, and not her true nature as the body of Christ, the liberator for all. Woven throughout that church history were people whose very lives embodied the hope that things as they are will not always be—people who held on and trusted in the Lord.
On February 13th, the Episcopal Church celebrates the feast day of one such person—the blessed Reverend Father Absalom Jones, the first Black priest in the Episcopal Church.2 Framed by our gospel message today, and within the context of Fr. Jones’ life and ministry of experiences, I offer this remarkable example of the human virtue of fortitude—a virtue which, for Fr. Jones, helped to bring about blessed states of being, for himself and others, in the midst of suffering injustice.
Born into slavery in Delaware in 1746, Absalom Jones was blessed with intelligence, having taught himself to read using the Bible. By the time he was 20, he had been brought to Philadelphia, by his Anglican master, had been permitted to attend night school and attended St. Peter’s Episcopal Church with his master. After years of failed attempts to purchase his own freedom, Jones was voluntarily freed by his master by manumission at the age of 38.
A holy man of great fortitude and faith, Jones was a devout Methodist, serving as lay preacher and growing the Black congregation of St. George’s Methodist in Philadelphia. Under the dynamic leadership of Jones and his lifelong friend, Richard Allen, the Black congregation increased, and so did the discrimination by church leadership.
After being forcefully removed from the place where he was praying on his knees during service, in the confrontation of 1787, known as the St. George’s incident, the entire group of black members walked out of St. George’s, and explored the Episcopal Church as a viable option for their worshipping community where they would be received without hostility.
In the face of discrimination and rejection and physical manhandling, Jones’ focused work was not about him; it was about restoring the dignity of the Black worshipping community and finding sacred space for them to worship the Lord. In 1794, co-founded by Jones and Allen, the African Church of Philadelphia’s building was dedicated. When the congregation applied for membership in the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania it was bold enough to require that their membership be contingent upon the licensing of Absalom Jones as a lay reader, and if qualified, his ordination as a minister. Jones was ordained a deacon in 1796 and was ordained priest seven years later in 1802. That historic church is now, St. Thomas’ African Episcopal Church in Philadelphia and my sister and her family have been members for more than 25 years.
God continues to send people, like Fr. Jones, whose very lives, embody fortitude tightly wrapped in unwavering faith. Their lives in Christ have forever transfigured the outward appearance of our beloved Episcopal Church and have necessarily transformed her soul.
My fellow pilgrims on the way, in this 21st century, we don’t have the luxury to adopt “Whatever will be will be” as our mantra or to preach the Gospel of Silence. In the face of man’s inhumanity to man, Jesus preached hope that rests not in man, but in God, and we have the responsibility to show up in the world doing the same. For it is God, alone, who assures us that if we hold on, trust in him and his son, things as they are will not always be.
Remember that whoever you are and wherever you are in your life’s journey with Jesus Christ, in the midst of whatever your sufferings may be, blessed are you now. And, blessed are you when Christ, our great liberator, who set us all free from the bondage of sin, returns in great glory. May it be so.
1Jeremiah 17:5-10
2“Absalom Jones,” Holy Women, Holy Men: Celebrating the Saints (Church Publishing), pp. 220-221.
