Luke 6:17-26
What would it take to live out in your life healing, blessing and woes? Healing came to all those and then they listened. Listened to the blessing first and then the caution given to those who have. There is someone I thought of instantly when I thought of the themes of this story. Someone whose feast day it is today. Do you know? If you are in the church you should know this story. It is the story of not being accepted because of the color of your skin. It is the story of how they went and built on their own because of it. It is the story of how they stayed and healed, comforted the first people who didn't accept or bless them.
Absalom Jones was a slave. His family, mother, brothers, sisters were sold and went elsewhere. He was left. The person he was sold to was a vestryman of Christ Church in Philadelphia. Absalom eventually bought first his wife's and then his freedom. He attended church and was not allowed to sit with all the other white worshippers. The strange thing about the church was it was supposed to be interracial. They had both members in this Methodist tradition. They could preach, teach but not sit or kneel together.
One Sunday they walked out of church as they were told to please sit at the back or the up in the gallery. Absalom and Richard Allen created another type of non-denominational called the Free African Society. Eventually they both went separate ways as Absalom Jones had been ordained an Episcopal priest at the other church and Richard Allen went on to form the African Methodist Episcopal church and become a bishop. Where is the blessing and healing, in his actions much later, but we have to know the story of rejection first because it makes the next story incredible.
When yellow fever hit the city of Philadelphia and all the white people were leaving in order not to catch it or die from it Absalom stayed. He stayed and gave care to these same people who rejected he was the same as them in church. He stayed and helped some die, die with comfort and dignity, and nursed some back to health. He didn't blame, he didn't stay angry, he used the example Jesus to heal and bring comfort to those who were deserted.
What do we do with this story? How many of you are hearing it for the first time? We as white people have kept this story from seeing the light of day. I never learned of it until I was an adult. Absalom was a man who mirrored forgiveness and brought it to this place of blessing others who were stranded by their friends and brought healing.
We don't know if he was more or less accepted by white people after this. We do know there was a white pamphlet which went around accusing the people he organized of benefiting financially from the white people they nursed. Another pamphlet created by Absalom refuted this claim and he continued to do what he did with this scorn from others.
The blessings and woes of this morning invite us to listen to our own. How are we to hear the woe, the caution we are being told when we don't know our own story as the church. On NPR I heard a story of a church in the North, Connecticut, I believe, who dug into their own history. They found a long time ago a minister had a slave in the house, they learned about it and tried to find out more of how their church participated in the slave trade. This was hundreds of years ago, but they knew finding out their own story influenced their story now. It makes a difference on how we bring blessing or woe and finally healing and health to one another.
May we find the way to do this in our lives. Living out the story of Jesus to others. Knowing we can carry blessing and health or woe and dis-ease to others. How can we find our own stories to make a healthy start of healing?
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