St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Owings Mills MD
January 31, 2022
The Feast of Samuel Shoemaker, Priest
Isaiah 51:17-52:1
Psalm 130
1 Corinthians 5:6-8
Luke 4:40-40
Our Brother Sam
Although our celebration is not as grand as I had hoped, I’m glad that we can be together to honor our own local Episcopal “saint,” Samuel Shoemaker.
As you all know only too well, I’ve gotten very interested in Shoemaker – both because of his deep connections to our church and also because I think of him as a prophet, one who has a lot to say about the challenges and opportunities of today.
Shoemaker was born on December 27, 1893 in a rented house in Baltimore City.
He was baptized here at St. Thomas’ on February 25, 1894.
When he was two years old, his family moved from the city to the Shoemaker estate, Burnside, not far from here.
He enjoyed a privileged upbringing in that beautiful setting.
When he was 14 years old he was uprooted from that rather sheltered life and sent to St. George’s School in Newport RI, which was challenging for him, culturally and socially.
Later, he followed in his father’s footsteps to Princeton.
It was while he was at Princeton that Shoemaker met Helen Smith, who became his wife and partner in ministry, and is also an important figure in her own right.
It was also at Princeton where Shoemaker became interested in the topics that would shape the rest of his life and ministry:
Personal evangelism: bringing the Good News to the world, one person at a time.
Missionary work: bringing the Good News both to faraway places and also to our own neighborhood.
And, ecumenicalism: working to minimize differences among Christian denominations, moving toward Christian unity that would help us share the Good News more convincingly and effectively.
After Princeton, Shoemaker went to China where he started a branch of the YMCA and taught in the “Princeton-in China” program. It was in China that he met Frank Buchman, founder of the “First Century Christian Fellowship,” later known as the Oxford Group.
As you can tell by its name, Buchman and his followers wanted and worked for a spiritual reawakening, a return to the fervor of the early Church, focusing on passionate evangelism and small group ministry.
Buchman taught what he called the “Four Absolutes” – absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love.
Those “absolutes” would become a theme that ran through Shoemaker’s entire ministry – and would help shape AA.
After returning from China, Shoemaker attended the General Theological Seminary in New York City. (He deliberately chose General because its Anglo-Catholicism was quite different from his own evangelical “Low Church” sensibility.) He was ordained a priest on June 11, 1921 and celebrated his first Service of Holy Communion the following day, right here at St Thomas’.
Not long after, with only brief ordained experience, he was called to serve as Rector of Calvary Church in New York – near Gramercy Park which had been a well-to-do area and is again now, but by Shoemaker’s time the neighborhood had declined and the church was struggling.
Well, the new rector threw himself into his work, and Calvary Church grew a great deal.
He famously greeted people at the church door and also held outdoor services in Madison Square Park.
He built Calvary Mission, which could house up to 57 homeless men and served many thousands of meals – and where the Oxford Group hosted meetings for “drunks.”
I’ll come back to that in a minute.
In 1926, Shoemaker established “Faith at Work” - a ministry for lay people who would gather each week and share how they had evangelized in their everyday life, how they had been good Christians at work.
An amazing example of “Faith at Work” that Shoemaker often recounted was Ralston C. Young, the “Red Cap Preacher” of Grand Central Station.
Three times a week, Young – who was a “red cap,” a porter - hosted a lunchtime service in a railroad car on Track 13 of the station. These services attracted an economically and, unusual for the time, racially diverse congregation.
Faith at Work.
The Oxford Group was always somewhat controversial and over time it changed, losing some of its Christian focus, and eventually Shoemaker broke with Buchman – although the basic ideas of the Oxford Group continued to influence Shoemaker, and AA.
So, Sam Shoemaker and AA is a complicated topic.
But in a nutshell, both Bill W. and Dr. Bob, the future founders of AA, visited Calvary Mission in 1934 and attended Oxford Group meetings there.
After finally getting sober, Bill W. made it his life’s mission to both stay sober and to help other alcoholics – and he attempted to do that by following one of the key Oxford Group and Shoemaker ideas: the best way to hold onto something is to give it away.
There was a rift between Shoemaker and Bill W. in the early days of AA, but eventually they patched it up and Shoemaker, although not sober himself, spent the rest of his life as an avid and vocal supporter of the group.
Shoemaker was the primary spiritual influence on the development of the Twelve Steps, especially the ideas of self-examination, acknowledgement of character defects, restitution for harm done, and helping others achieve sobriety.
Shoemaker himself was modest about his role in the Twelve Steps, giving credit to God for inspiring Bill W., but there’s no doubt that Bill was deeply influenced by what he had learned from Shoemaker.
After 25 years at Calvary Church New York, Shoemaker accepted the call to serve as Rector of Calvary Church in Pittsburgh.
There he started the “Pittsburgh Experiment,” which aimed to make Pittsburgh as famous for God as it was for steel.
The “Experiment,” which still exists, was essentially the same idea as “Faith at Work” – helping and encouraging people to live out their faith and share their faith in their everyday lives.
Throughout his life and ministry, Shoemaker was tireless. In addition to his pastoral duties, he conducted many thousands of one-on-one meetings, hosted radio programs, conducted preaching tours, and wrote 28 books.
Whenever I think about him, I feel like a total slacker who should be doing a whole lot more!
He was probably the best-known Episcopal priest of his day, his influence reaching far beyond our church.
In fact, Billy Graham once said that no one “in our generation has made a greater impact for God on the Christian world, than did Samuel Shoemaker.”
That’s quite a statement, quite a legacy, isn’t it?
Shoemaker’s health began to fail and in 1962 he retired to Burnside, but continued to write and broadcast until his death, in 1963.
As you know he was buried here, joined by his beloved wife Helen, thirty years later.
So, what does Shoemaker’s life and work say to us here today?
A lot, I think, but I’m going just highlight three points.
First, just like in his day, we need to bridge the gap between what we say and do here in church and what we say and do out there in the world.
We have to find ways to live our faith at work, at school, at the club, at the train station, in the supermarket, on the Internet - everywhere.
Second, we can no longer assume that people are just going to find us on their own and come to church. We need to go out and meet people and share our story and personally invite them to join us.
I know that’s hard for most of us, but as Shoemaker said over and over, there is just no substitute for personal Christian witness.
Finally, we need to be who we say we are – just like Shoemaker’s Calvary Mission, we must really be a servant church, offering God’s love to people in need, welcoming them as best we can, as if we were welcoming Christ himself.
And, with God’s help, when we put our faith to work, there is no limit to the difference we can make, no limit to the number of lives we can touch.
Just look at what our brother Sam was able to accomplish!
Amen.
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