On a Sunday morning in 1784, a group of black members of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia walked out en masse. The number of black members of the parish had grown, due to the evangelistic endeavors of existing members, such as Absalom Jones and his friend Richard Allen. This disturbed the vestry, and so they decided to segregate the black members in a separate gallery in the church.
But the black members of the church were not going to settle for this. The walkout of Absalom Jones and other black parishioners at St. George’s Church in 1784 eventually led to Absalom Jones being ordained as the first African-American priest in the Episcopal Church. And the rest is history.
Today, one day after Absalom Jones’s name appears in the Episcopal Church’s calendar of feast days, our bishop has asked that parishes in the diocese commemorate Blessed Absalom Jones. After all, this was his diocese, where he served as priest and founder of St. Thomas African Episcopal Church, now in Overbrook in West Philadelphia.
Try to imagine with me the courage of Absalom Jones and his fellow Christians. Many of them, like Jones, had perhaps bought their freedom from slavery. But as they tried to make their way into the ordinary rank and file of society, even in the North, they found themselves in a liminal place: neither having real rights and yet legally free in some respects.
Imagine their tenacity as they clung to their heartfelt belief in God’s natural disposition towards the oppressed and forsaken. Imagine knowing the very real truth of God’s gracious care of the lowly that is evidenced time and again in holy Scripture, and yet not witnessing its manifestation in the Church. And imagine their heartbreak and sorrow as they had to walk away from their own church to claim their dignity. They stuck with God even when the Church turned its back on them.
Now, examine with me, the witness of the prophet Elijah. Throughout the First Book of Kings, Elijah clung fast to God’s holy word, revealed to him. As a prophet, it is to this word alone that he would cling, no matter the cost. In his prophetic zeal, Elijah faced formidable adversaries as he cried out against Baal. He ran from the dreaded Jezebel and heard God’s still small voice speaking to him in isolation. He raised a widow’s son from the dead, and he was ministered to by angels in his forty-day sojourn to Mount Horeb. And these among other things. But through it all, Elijah knew that he must hold fast to one thing: God’s word of truth.
His successor, the younger Elisha, went from being a farmer to following Elijah. And when we encounter Elisha today, he knows that, even though he has clung to Elijah in pursuit of God’s word, Elijah will soon be taken from him.
Elisha knows this, even though the sons of the prophets twice tell him that Elijah will leave him. Elisha knows that he will soon be bereft of his mentor, but he is more concerned about following Elijah than in beginning to separate himself from him. Elisha clings to Elijah out of zeal for God.
Even Elijah himself encourages Elisha to stay behind as he makes his way successively to Gilgal, Bethel, and then Jericho. But Elisha repeats his mantra of dedication each time: “I will not leave you.”
It might seem that Elisha is clinging in an unhealthy way to Elijah. Elijah is merely a human after all, even if he is a prophet. He will soon be mysteriously taken up by God. Where is Elisha’s sense of self-differentiation? But perhaps it is more complex than Elisha being a fanatical devotee of Elijah. What if Elisha is really sticking with God’s word and God’s voice of justice spoken by the prophets through the ages? Elisha knows that in following Elijah, by never leaving him, he is somehow following God’s truth. And yet, ultimately, he will have to let go of Elijah to follow God.
Elisha may be something of a zealot, but he knows what is proper and good in God’s eyes when he sees it, and he will do anything possible to follow that righteousness. So, too, with Elijah. With Jezebel’s forces hounding him, he ran in fear, but he nevertheless was not afraid to speak the challenging word to godless power.
Elijah and Elisha seem to understand something that not even Jesus’ own disciples would at first understand. In Jesus’ transfiguration before Peter, James, and John, the disciples are seeing a foreshadowing of glory to come. But they do not yet see that the road to glory is paved with suffering.
The disciples instinctively want to preserve glory in amber. But their suggestion to create three booths is not heeded. And Jesus forbids them from telling anyone what they have seen. Jesus knows that the disciples and most of his own followers are still clinging to all the wrong things.
Maybe it’s the same with us. We are poised today at the top of a mountain with Jesus. We have been shining with the light of Christ, basking with his revelation to the magi at Epiphany. But now we are looking on the other side of the mountain to the long season of Lent, where we are vividly confronted by our own mortality. We might wish to jump ahead to Easter or to cling only to glory.
But Lent will reveal the unhealthy things to which we hold fast. Lent will unearth our own pride, our conceited projects, our desire to be in control, our tribalism, and those things that comfort us the most. Lent will dredge them up to the surface and expose them to God’s cleansing light. And if our wilderness journey in Lent has any effect, we will emerge at Easter knowing exactly what it is we should really be clinging to, perhaps having let go of the rest of it.
It is clear that Elisha was perturbed by the impending departure of Elijah. He was experiencing beforehand the loss and pain he would eventually feel, plunged into a solo career or prophetic ministry without his mentor. And Jesus’s disciples clung to their own preservation as Jesus approached the cross. As they did so, they began to let go of Jesus until he was the only one awake in the Garden of Gethsemane in anguished prayer.
We, too, know the discomfort that comes with letting go of our own idols and attachments. And as we fear losing our security, we cling more closely to those things that do nothing but make us more dependent on them. At the end of the day, we might even sacrifice the truth for our own pleasure, because we can only find reassurance in the idols of our own making. Sometimes an idol is our very own image of God, made in our own image.
But now imagine with me if we placed Elisha’s words to Elijah in the mouth of God. What if we heard God saying what is easily doubted from time to time: “I will not leave you.” Elisha stuck with God by sticking with Elijah because he knew that he was following God’s holy word, even if it meant the loss of his mentor. Elisha seemed to sense that God would, in fact, not leave him.
And Jesus’ disciples eventually learned that God would not leave them comfortless. The end of Jesus’ earthly ministry was not the end of his presence with them. And so, too, Absalom Jones and his fellow Christians knew that by letting go of their church and even something of their past, they were sticking with God. By walking out of their church in the face of injustice and disrespect, they were saying that God would not leave them. They knew that God’s words to us are always, “I will not leave you.”
We still hover in the midst of a pandemic on the precipice of Lent. The snow still falls, and spring might seem a long way off. And Lent calls to us from the valley below and beckons us to let go—to let go of those things that have consumed our lives, to let go of our resentments, our envy, our individualism, and our antagonism. Lent calls us to stay only with God’s holy word and to walk into his open arms.
The degree to which we stick with God may vary, but the degree to which God stays with us, loves us, and cares for us does not. Imagine if we stop talking at God, stop even trying to cling to him in a possessive way, and instead listen to his still, small voice, as Elijah once heard it. If we could but quiet the raging weather around us, we might hear his beautiful voice saying, “I will not leave you.” I never have. I will not now. And I never will.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Last Sunday after the Epiphany
February 14, 2021