First First
6th Sunday after the Epiphany (RCL A) and Celebration of Absalom Jones, February 12, 2023
First, first, first be reconciled. Is that the little ones? The slights and left undones that we don’t even know we did? Is it the ones that lurk in your dreams: the girl whose name you never knew, who sat in front of you, who you didn’t befriend or more hauntingly, never did defend? Is it the large ones? The terrible poisonous ones, the mean things you were taught that have not a leg to stand on? Is it the thefts of the past, the ones that we know very well, I see my footprints there in the blood in the soil but I am just me. Blind at times and powerless over all that came before me. Does it all all all have to be reconciled? Before we reach this table, or the one or the further shore?
Reconciliation is the entire process of making and becoming peace, it is a seeking of a kind of Eden, it is forgiveness of sin. Life itself is an ongoing cycle of redemption, human community is founded on reconciliation. You cannot have a village where people thrive if everyone is thieving and lying and disrespecting and scapegoating. There is no healthy community without reconciliation. First, because I am forgiven, which frees from guilt and rivalry which tends to lead to the things that create harm; And being forgiven I am better prepared to offer generosity and mercy. Secondly – There is no lifegiving community without reconciliation because when I forgive, I am released from anger and greed and hostility and lifted into healing. Without truth and without reconciliation wee cannot live together in peace. First he says, first be reconciled.
Today we honor the witness and life of the Reverend Absalom Jones, the first black priest in the Episcopal Church, ordained to the priesthood in 1802 in Philadelphia. Which is in many ways, infinitely extraordinary. Ordained at the same time that our churches and church leaders were profiting from slavery. By a bishop who also ordained slavery advocates. 61 years before the Emancipation Proclamation! He is our saint, a saint of our bloody and complicated history. In this tradition there are no stages of beatification, we don’t have miracles to prove, but perhaps ordained in this church in 1802 is a miracle. We don’t title our modern holy ones with saint, but they are blessed. People through whom God’s glory and love and tenacity and redemptive transformation shines through.
I hope you will take the time to learn more about Blessed Absalom Jones about his life, his struggles, and his love for Jesus and neighbor. There are mostly other readings for HIS day than what we just heard – we only used the appointed Psalm. Because as I looked at the lectionary choices for whatever Sunday after Epiphany it is, as I meditated with those lessons they lingered forcefully with words about realities that shaped Blessed Absalom’s story. From Deuteronomy: hearts turned away from loving God and failing to walk in righteousness. Bowing down to other idols – adoring selfish wealth and falsehoods. From Corinthians: b eing still of the flesh, of behaving by inclinations of the worst of us, not embracing that we are all merely human: and it was God who gave Absalom’s church the growth. And from the Gospel: murder and insult and anger and discord between the children of God; how we fail in human fidelity, we say one thing and do another. And of course, the sacred call of reconciliation. Not after this or that, but first.
One piece of Reverend Jones’ story that sticks with me was his wait for ordination. After a decade of lay leadership, including the founding of a congregation, and a decade as a ‘transitional deacon’, which is usually either a year or 6 months, he was finally made a priest in Christ’s church. Nearly 20 years of waiting, when life expectancy in his lifetime was 61 – a statistic that I am not sure includes residents of indigenous or African descent. 20 years of waiting, not of wondering or thinking or curiosity, but of deep call and of sacred service. For comparison, except for the Revolution, Jones would have been a colleague of any of the across the pond real clergy that Jane Austen’s fictional ones were based on. If you know those at all, can you imagine any one of those men, the fools or the wise ones, going through that? They didn’t, and they likey wouldn’t. Loving Jesus and God and neighbor – loving a system that spews hatred and vile insult at you, that makes you wait and wait? First be reconciled our Savior calls, Where does he even begin?
Perhaps with this Sermon on the Mount. With the beatitudes and these do not’s. Grounding oneself in community and study and prayer of these directives. Continuing in a life that follows, serves, year after year, terrible after terrible, beauty after beauty. Jesus doesn’t say that we cannot ever be angry or at the end of our rope. He doesn’t say that repentance and change are easy or straightforward. He says to be an embodied friend of God. He does say first be reconciled – giving all of God’s creation a place of honor. If we aspire to a village and a world of life, liberty, and happiness for all, then we have to keep wrestling with the idolatry, greed, violence and stubbornness on which our lives are built. If we are with him, we are committed to risk becoming a beloved community, to wrestle through complicated history, to choose truth, and therefore put God first. This is how we put ourselves at Jesus’ feet – lay down our lives.
Maybe choosing love, fidelity, duty to the beauty of God’s diversity and the way of Jesus is as easy for you as breathing. Or maybe it is day by day, and hard as heck to even start to acknowledge the wrongs to turn from the nonsense of evil that works to silence the sacred all the time. Maybe you have never waited or struggled for anything integral or prophetic, or maybe you still are. All of us have something to learn from Blessed Absalom’s witness, I hope you will take the time to find yours – and to pray and act accordingly. May we as Jesus says, first, first be reconciled – attend to the past so we can attend to the future: Spiritually, ethically, and truthfully. And that by God’s grace, may we not be forever crushed by the insidous forces of evil. May we by Jesus’ reconciling presence, be people through whom God’s beauty, peace, and love are revealed in villages like ours, and throughout the whole wide earth.