“A Reminiscence”

A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. James W. Jones

On the 40th Anniversary of his ordination, 3/30/08

            As you all know, this is a special occasion for me; this week is the 40th anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. And I have been pleased and privileged to spend a quarter of that time here as a priest associate at St. Peters. My priesthood did not have an auspicious beginning. I had only been baptized and confirmed a few weeks when I came before the Bishop of Michigan to ask him (rather foolishly) if I could prepare for ordination. And when I stood before the Bishop and the standing committee I still bore the scars and the stains of the tortuous path that led me there.

            I was not brought up in the church. I was raised in a totally non-religious milieu. I was a high school drop-out having spent two years racing cars and getting into trouble with school authorities and the police instead of studying. Starting at 17 I lived on my own. Later I was a college drop-out as well, and had been in trouble with the law in various parts of the country for political agitation. I was there at the beginning of the student movements of the 60’s, having marched for civil rights in the south, campaigned against nuclear weapons in Washington, and done community organization and political agitation against racism in Detroit.

            Our current era of cynicism and materialism makes it impossible to imagine that furious time forty years ago when injustice and the degradation of the poor were causes for outrage and strong emotions married intellectual intensity and brought forth direct action. I am not one of those who look back on the sixties as a mistake. Just the reverse. I remember it as a time of an exemplary moral seriousness about justice and equality that we could use more of today.

            All of this, as I said, did not give my Priesthood an auspicious beginning. The Bishop of Michigan, himself a former professor and a man very involved in the urban life of Detroit, welcomed me in a way unthinkable in the church today. But when the time came to be ordained a priest, I was a graduate student at Brown University, living in the Diocese of Rhode Island. The Bishop of Rhode Island smelled trouble—I was a Midwesterner, not from Rhode Island, an academic, with a questionable history. His advisors took one look at me and recommended against it. He refused outright to ordain me. Requests from the Bishop of Michigan had no effect. It was only when a friend of mine, a priest in the diocese, threatened to embarrass the Bishop that he grudgingly consented to ordain me in a secret ceremony on the Brown University Campus. And that’s when the ordination process was much friendlier then it is now. It is clear to me that were I trying to be ordained today, as I was 40 years ago, I would not be a priest in the church of God.

When I was ordained in 1968 the idea of women being ordained to the priesthood was only an outlandish fantasy. A seminary classmate had been killed in the south working for civil rights and others were (or had been) in jail there. A high school classmate had been killed in Vietnam and two of my students from Brown where I was teaching at the time disappeared from class in the middle of the semester and fled to Canada. One of my closest friends at Brown was an ardent pacifist, another was a reserve army officer.

            The church was not exempt from these strains. I knew more than one priest back then at odds with his congregation over the war in Vietnam and others who had left their congregations to march with Martin Luther King. It was also during this time that biblical criticism, the search for the historical Jesus, as well as movements like feminist theology, liberation theology, and theological modernism moved out of seminary libraries and classrooms and onto the front pages of popular magazines and into parish pulpits. These were followed by various charismatic, Pentecostal, and evangelical movements claiming to renew a church in need of reform.

            So the 40 years I have spent as a priest have been years marked by almost continual controversies within the church most of which I have witnessed first hand: marching for civil rights in the south, visiting student refugees in Canada and conscientious objectors in prison, working with returning Vietnam veterans, teaching courses in modern religious thought and feminist theology, speaking at conferences of what would become the charismatic renewal in the Episcopal Church. I served parishes in impoverished rural communities and devastated inner cities. And one of the bitterest and most contentious meetings I have ever witnessed was the annual convention of the diocese of New Jersey that considered censoring the bishop because of his vote in favor of the ordination of women at the general convention that year. And I was one of only a handful of clergy who spoke in his defense and we were all continuously booed by our brother priests. And, as many of you know, my research, writing, and speaking now has come to focus on one of today’s most contested issues—religiously motivated terrorism and the connections between religion and violence.

            The present moment is frighteningly similar to the time forty years ago when I knelt before the reluctant bishop for ordination. Racism of a more subtler kind still stains the land, the country is once again torn apart by war, an inequality unimaginable forty years ago fractures our contemporary society, and we still debate what groups can and cannot be ordained. Much of the current scene feels to me like de’ja vu all over again. But the difference is that 40 years ago the church was in the forefront of these issues of poverty and justice, the equality of blacks and whites, women and men, the moralities of war and peace.

            In the private realm the church is exemplary today, especially the Episcopal Church and more especially St. Peters. Churches up and down the land, like St. Peters, are running the soup kitchens, homeless shelters, drop-in centers that are keeping hundreds upon hundreds of children and families from utter starvation. We can be justly proud of the Episcopal Church and St. Peters and other churches in this regard.

            But in the public realm it is a different matter. Where are the likes of the people I knew 40 years ago? Where is the brilliant Jesuit Fr. Robert Drinan and the fiery pastor William Sloan Coffin and the wise Rabbi Abraham Heschel on the immorality of an unjust war? Where is the prophetic Martin Luther King on justice and reconciliation between the races? Where are the contemporary descendents of the prophet Amos who cried out “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream,” and “Woe to those who sell the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes” or we as we might say today, “Woe to those who sell the poor for a bigger rate of return and the needy for a lower marginal tax rate.”

            What have I learned from these 40 years that might be of use to you, my dear friends? First, I have learned that there always has been and always will be conflict in the church. Controversy is not new to the Christian community or the Anglican Church. Christianity’s founder and all of its early leaders were executed by the state. We would not have any of St. Paul’s Letters if it were not for conflict in the early church. All of his letters were written to deal with disputes among the first Christians. And the Anglican Church was born in the warfare of the reformation. The body of Christ is not a refuge from disagreement; it never was and never will be. Christian unity is not uniformity. The only question is, can we commit ourselves to working together to find a way to live together in compassion and fellowship in the midst of difference?

            And I can confidently say, based on having lived through the last 40 years and studying the last two millennia of church history that the Body of Christ, and the Episcopal Church and St. Peter’s will not just survive but can continue to deepen and renew themselves.

            A second thing I learned from those days is that social and political change—as crucial as it is to a just and fair society—only goes so deep. And that such activity, no matter how passionately committed a person is, can easily lead to burn-out and then to cynicism and bitterness if it is not supported at a deeper level within the person. It was this realization and the search for a deeper level of transformation that led me out of the politics of the 60’s and into my interest in religion and eventually into the church. And that is why I have spent the last fifteen years of my writing and speaking—until I got immersed in the world of terrorism and counter-terrorism—on issues of disciplined spiritual practice and renewal. Unless we are continually deepening and renewing our life in the life of God, the well will run dry, the vision will grow stale, and we will be at best a weak and pale reflection of the world around us.

            As we face the changes soon to come, we must do so by undertaking a more profound and disciplined spiritual practice as individuals and as a community. Our prayer life must become deeper, our worship must become even more vibrant, our self-examination must become even more honest and searching, our service of others even more impassioned. Then as individuals and as a parish we will point beyond ourselves to the time foretold by the prophet Isaiah when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters fill up the sea. Amen my friends, amen.     

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