On Sunday, February 12, Episcopal Churches across the country commemorated the Feast of Absalom Jones, the first person of African descent ordained a priest in the United States.
In 2021, the Episcopal Church, under the leadership of our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, in an effort to live into its call of racial reconciliation, established the Absalom Jones Fund to provide scholarships to the only two Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the country founded by the Episcopal Church: St Augustine’s University in Raleigh, and Voorhees University in Denmark, SC. These institutions, as Bishop Curry pointed out in his pastoral letter that went out last month, are training Black leaders of the future, who will go forth and build a more just and equitable society for all of God’s children in the spirit of Absalom Jones, who understood that education was the key to empowerment.
But who was Absalom Jones? When I asked that question of my parishioners on Sunday - a church filled with white faces - I could count on one hand the number of folks who had even heard his name before. I’ll admit that I wasn’t familiar with his story until I was a seminarian, but it’s a story that highlights both the wonderful and the heartbreaking aspects of the Episcopal Church and its heritage. In observance of his feast day, my parish honored Absalom Jones by designating our offering on Sunday to go to the Absalom Jones Fund, and the Church as a whole share his story this week, let us pray that we be bold in our mission to live into those baptismal promises to seek and serve Christ in ALL persons and to proclaim by both our words and our examples the Good News of God in Christ, because Blessed Absalom did just that.
His story began in Sussex County, Delaware when he was born into slavery on November 7, 1746. It could’ve ended there, as it did for so many others who have gone nameless, but God had other plans.
He was named Absalom after King David’s most favored son from the Second Book of Samuel in the Hebrew Bible. But where the biblical Absalom’s story ended in tragedy, this Absalom persevered. He managed to learn how to read with the New Testament as his main resource. At 16 he and his mother, sister, and five brothers were sold to a farmer, who turned around and sold Absalom’s mother and siblings and promptly moved, with Absalom, to Philadelphia. Like so many other families ripped apart by American slavery, they were never reunited.
Absalom was permitted to attend a Free School; that is, a nighttime school run by Quakers, which is where he learned more fully to read and write. Once the door had been opened, Absalom proceeded to kick it down. He continued to read and to educate himself as much as possible, even when he was sold once again to a man named Wynkop – who was listed as a member of the Vestry of Christ Church, Philadelphia. Around the same time he was sold again, Absalom married a slave girl by the name of Mary King – who was owned by a neighbor of Mr. Wynkop - on January 4, 1770.
By 1778 Absalom managed to purchase his wife’s freedom during the height of the American Revolution. The law stated that children took on the status of their mother, so if a woman was enslaved, so was the child. So for the sake of his future children, Absalom made sure his wife would be free, even while he continued to be enslaved. Six years later, after Absalom wrote to him and perhaps inspired by some of the radical ideals of this new United States of America, Mr. Wynkop manumitted Absalom- which is the process of freeing enslaved people by their enslavers. Absalom then took the surname ‘Jones,’ which, according to one story from a PBS report in 2009, was as an indication of his fully American identity.
As was often the case, the Church served as the source for hope and the promise of freedom for so many enslaved peoples. Absalom had been involved in the Methodist Episcopal Church, which was founded in 1784 as a new denomination by Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke. He served as a lay minister at St. George’s in Philadelphia with his friend Richard Allen, and together they established the Free African Society to aid in the emancipation of slaves and provide education, food, and other resources for newly freed Black folks. As a result, the Black membership of St. George’s exploded.
Richard Allen, friend and colleague of Absalom Jones, who would go on to found the AME Church.
You can probably guess what happened next. The white parishioners were uncomfortable that all these new folks would upset their establishment, and so the Vestry voted in 1792 to force Black worshippers to the balcony without any prior notice; and when Absalom, Richard, and others came to worship and sat in their regular pews, they were tapped on the shoulder by the ushers and told they had to go upstairs to worship. They all promptly walked and never came back.
You might wish this was a kind of one-off situation, especially since it was a northern church, but the truth is that tensions were high around that time after the first General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 1789, where Methodists and Black Episcopalians were each hoping to have seat, voice, and vote at the Church’s governing body, but both were turned away. The result was that the Methodist Church became its own full-fledged denomination – and the largest in the country – and many Black folks decided the Episcopal Church was not for them.
Absalom and Richard wanted to found a church for Black folks where they wouldn’t have to acquiesce to racist conditions. The result was First African Church in Philly, which they founded in 1792, the same year they walked out of St. George’s. While Richard wanted it to be a Methodist congregation, Absalom sought approval from William White, the Bishop of Pennsylvania and first Presiding Bishop, to admit them into the Episcopal Church. It was and became known as the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, with Absalom serving as lay leader while he studied for ordination to become the church’s rector. Richard Allen, meanwhile, founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church that same year and became its first bishop in 1816. The two of them remained lifelong friends and collaborators.
In 1802 Absalom became the first African American to be ordained a priest in the United States. As rector of St. Thomas he was known as a great preacher, and some white folks even said he had hypnotic powers over his congregation. He started a tradition of preaching an anti-slavery sermon on New Year’s Day, and when the Constitutionally-mandated end of the African slave trade occurred on New Year’s Day, 1808, he preached what he called a ‘Thanksgiving Sermon,’ which was published and brought him renown throughout the country. He took part in petitioning Congress on multiple occasions to end the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which not only forced runaway slaves back into bondage but often resulted in free men and women being kidnapped and sold into bondage in slave states – think of the film 12 Years a Slave. He decried the legislation and called for “some remedy for an evil of such magnitude.” Despite his pleas on the moral and ethical ground that God abhorred such an institution, each of his petitions failed.
Absalom continued to be an outspoken advocate for the abolition of slavery as a whole for the remainder of his life and a fixture in Philadelphia, helping to found day schools for Black children because they weren’t permitted to go to public school with white kids. He never stopped dreaming, praying, and working for the Beloved Community that he heard Jesus call people to build, all the way to his death on February 13, 1818. He is interned at the current edition of St. Thomas Church.
In the section of the Sermon on the Mount that we heard in church on Sunday, Jesus reminds the people that it is not enough to simply follow the letter of the Law, especially if the spirit of the Law is neglected. White folks in Absalom Jones’ time followed the letter of their own Law, both when they enslaved his family and when they forced him and others to worship in their church balconies. It is not enough for us to simply look at the way things are and say, “Well, that’s just the way it is and nothing can be done.” Absalom Jones didn’t do that. He may not have lived to see the full abolition of his people, but he never stopped working toward that goal. He didn’t look at the way things were and said it was fine, instead he looked at it all through the lens of the Gospel of Jesus, which called him then, calls us now, called those folks on the mount who listened to Jesus, to dream of something different, to lives of transformation and reconciliation. To do that means to tread through troublesome waters, to tell hard truths, to be hurt by folks you thought cared. It is no easy task, which is why nearly everyone eventually abandoned Jesus. But blessedly, Jesus never abandons us. He never abandoned Absalom Jones, or Richard Allen, or Martin Luther King, or anyone else who has stood up for full rights and privileges and freedoms of all God’s children.
I may look out in my own congregation and see a church full of white folks, but that doesn’t mean this feast day shouldn't matter; in fact, I’d say we white folks desperately need to take part in it. We need to hear Absalom’s story and those of all of our Black siblings who have been wounded by the Church but whose love for Jesus has endured. We need to admit our own blindspots, especially in times when we’ve just been following the rules instead of embracing one another. We need to hope and work for a time when Sunday mornings are not the most segregated hour in America. This day is for all of us, in the sure and certain hope that the dream of Jesus, the dream of shalom for all God’s people, can and will be achieved. We will do it, with God’s help. Blessed Absalom Jones, pray for us.
