The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue preached this sermon at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Brunswick, Georgia on September 25, 2022.

2 Timothy 3:14-4:5 and Matthew 11:25-30

This sermon began with Bishop Logue playing a recording of Deaconess Alexander singing “Done with the trouble of the world” in order to bring her voice back into the church she founded. You can here two recordings of her singing in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwonEAegF0M

Deaconess Anna Ellison Butler Alexander sang “I’ll be be done with the trouble of the world when the Lord has called me home.” She sang this hymn in the midst of decade after decade of persistent faithfulness to the call God placed on her life. Her voice etched the Spiritual into a cylinder on May 8, 1926. She had been serving as a Deaconess for 19 years and she would serve another 19 years before her health forced her to set aside her work in 1945, two years before she died. And she labored long before she was set aside in the Order of Deaconesses.

The troubles she persistently pushed against in a segregated south, were an immoveable obstacle, yet she remained a force for good that would not stop using the gifts God gave her to better the lives of those around her.

We get a glimpse into her life in a 1910 report she wrote to the Women’s Auxiliary Board of Missions. That is a group we now call the Episcopal Church Women’s United Thank Offering. In her report on how the grant funds were being used here Deaconess Alexander wrote,

“My life in the mission is a busy one. There are times for weeks when I have not an hour to call mine. Some days, leaving home in the morning, I go to the school-house, and, after finishing the teaching for the day, I take one of the children with me for company, guide, or protection, and walk nine or ten miles, visiting the people, before reaching home in the evening. It is not a strange thing for me to go on foot over bad roads and through swamps where are deep places sometimes only passable on foot logs. Many of these roads have fifty yards and more of logs. Here we will get poles about ten feet long to help us steady ourselves until we get over.”

After a day of teaching just over a hundred children on her own, she would make house calls on the sick and look for children everywhere she went and encourage her parents to let her teach them. We are not here church to give thanks for an ordinary, hard-working woman. We are here to remember a saint who worked a miracle by day-after-day year-after-year of hard work.

The Deaconess was not alone in the effort it took for this school to thrive. She wrote in the same report, of her students, “There are many children, large and small, who walk for miles to attend the school. They will be in time for devotions every morning.”

Capturing the satisfaction of teaching using the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, she wrote, “Just to hear them respond to the Litany on Wednesday and Friday mornings, and to see and hear them find and read the Psalter for the day, will bring tears to the eyes.”

In our Epistle reading, Paul tells Timothy, “I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching.” He concluded with, “As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.”

This text describes The Deaconess. She carried out her ministry fully, persistent when the time was decidedly unfavorable. In this ministry, she had the one critical tool for transformation. She had the Word of God.

The Bible and Prayer Book were essential to Deaconess Alexander as the world around her taught the children of Glynn County to whom she ministered that they were inherently less than the white children for whom the county provided a public-school education. It was in scripture, that the maker of heaven and earth said that the black children she sought out along pole bridges and dirt roads were fearfully and wonderfully made in the image and likeness of God, no less than any other person in the world. Deaconess Alexander wrote, “In this ‘Black Belt’ the only light is that of the cross.”

The light of the cross revealed that Jesus would stand against the injustice of this world even if the cost of that stand was suffering and death. Jesus wanted every child of God to be free. The world might call the children of Pennick names a preacher is not going to use, but Jesus loved them as much as any lamb in the flock. Anna knew this down to her marrow.

This was her purpose, her mission, to raise up the people of her community, to show them they deserved better than what the segregated south told them to expect for themselves.

She demonstrated their potential as the older children made their way to trade school and college, to lives far from this swampy ground. That same year she had 100 students in this school, she had five graduates of Good Shepherd already studying at her alma mater, St. Paul’s College in Virginia. Anyone could see and know that she was telling them straight. Like Harriet Tubman on the Underground Railroad, Deaconess Alexander too was a faithful guide on the path to a better life. A miracle was happened here. The miracle of lives transformed by the persistent work of a woman people across the Episcopal Church know as the saint she was.

A saint. One thing we don’t have to wonder about is what Deaconess Alexander would have thought about being named a saint. She would not have understood it or had patience with it. She had time to teach, time to visit the sick, time to raise money for the church and school from people far and wide. But Deaconess Alexander had no time for foolishness.

The world did not give her time for anything like that. There was a whole system set up to keep the children down. Everything was stacked against them. The scales of justice were not balanced in their favor. The odds of were long against the children of this community making their way in the world, finding a better life. The safe bet was against them. But God does not gamble. God who is faithful and true placed a call on Anna’s heart knowing she had what it took to make a lasting difference in this community.

How did Deaconess Alexander do it? The answer is in the Gospel reading for today, the Gospel selected to go with a woman who put her hand to the plow and did not look back.

Jesus said, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

We look at the life and legacy of Saint Anna Ellison Butler Alexander and we don’t see any signs of her putting her burden down. We don’t see her rest. What we see is more like a woman pulling a plow for fields that never end. But the image of a yoke reveals that we do not do the work of the Gospel alone. The yoke is Jesus’ yoke. That yoke is easy and the burden is light because our savior is pulling alongside us. She seemed to work alone and yet Anna put her whole trust in Jesus. And she knew Jesus was faithful.

She could, in time, look back at how far she had come from her early days of teaching. She was a college graduate known and respected by donors far from Glynn County. She was the only African-American woman in the Episcopal Church in the Order of Deaconess. When she walked these dirt roads, she came to be known and revered. As she was seeing Christ in all the children who would not otherwise get a proper education, you could not see her in the habit of a Deaconess ever on the road looking for those in need and fail to see the light of Christ in Anna Alexander.

She could not change the whole world, toppling the system that wanted to keep this black community down, but the Deaconess did what she could to balance the scales of justice in her own day. She could not change how the world would treat the children, but she could and did prepare them for the world around them. Deaconess Alexander is now long since done with the trouble of the world, for the Lord called her home in 1947.

We see so many ways in which the world has changed since a saint walked through swamps to tend the sick, yet the troubles of the world remain.

The work of racial healing and justice then falls to our generation too.  The work of seeking and serving those who would otherwise be lost and left out is ours as well. As baptized followers of Jesus, we can make no peace with oppression. While the work of overturning systems of injustice may not be completed in our lifetimes, we do not get to ignore the problems around us. And we do not have to accomplish this on our own. We too take on the yoke with Jesus pulling alongside us, trusting that more can and will be done than could ever be accomplished by our power alone.

One way we can all go about this task of healing and justice is to take care of the what we have inherited. We can honor the legacy right here on the grounds of Good Shepherd Episcopal Church. I would be embarrassed to have Deaconess Alexander worshipping with us today as she would see the state of her schoolhouse. She worked hard to raise the funds for the school and kept it clean, with beautiful flowers planted alongside.

I understand how the building came to its present condition and certainly do not fault this anyone. Yet I see no reason why we cannot raise the necessary funds to repair the school. And I see no reason why we can’t do so soon. We need persons with expertise in historic properties to help us plan and builders experienced in carrying out this sort of work to make those plans into reality. We do not, however, face a problem of expertise. We face a fundraising issue. Put together the funds needed and the expertise is easily arranged.

I long to see the schoolhouse ready to greet generations yet to come with the story of a remarkable woman who still challenges us all to respond with love to children who would go by the wayside without someone to look out for them. I long to see flowers blooming alongside a renovated school where the call that drove a young Anna sparks other young black girls to see their potential through a saint of the church who looks like them. I long to see all the lives of people from many backgrounds and cultures changed as they see the Good News of Jesus as it was lived through the persistent faithfulness of Deaconess Ann Ellison Butler Alexander.

Amen.