Homily: Bruce Bayne [St. Luke's, San Francisco] January 18, 2019

            I have known Bruce Bayne since I first went to seminary at ETS in Cambridge in 1973. I vividly recall our first meeting.  Bruce came by the apartment of our mutual friends Addison and Jody Hall to say he was going to the market and did they want him to get anything? Addison said yes, he could pick up a box of Quaker All-Natural Cereal with Raisins and Dates.  He showed Bruce the box and began rather tiresomely to insist that Bruce get it right and repeat the name of the cereal back to him several times: “Quaker All-Natural Cereal with Raisins and Dates”.  Bruce rather sardonically agreed and took off. An hour later he was back with a big bag of groceries. He reached into the bag and pulled out a giant box of Count Chocula. “I’m not sure I remembered what you asked for. Is this what you wanted?” he asked. Shortly after Addison’s meltdown, Bruce pulled out not one but two boxes of the Quaker all-natural cereal, and peace was restored. I think I actually ended up with the box of Count Chocula.

            For many years I considered Bruce my best friend. We knew each other through some operatic ups and downs for over 40 years, and life with him was always kind of like the oscillation between Quaker All-Natural Cereal and Count Chocula. He could be incredibly provocative. And he could be unbelievably generous. He could be angry, and he could be gentle. Our mutual friend Harvey Guthrie used to say that one person’s hard dichotomy is another person’s creative tension. Knowing and loving Bruce was often both.

            We’re gathered to remember and give thanks for Bruce’s life and ministry in the context of the Eucharist, the aspect of the church’s life that I know Bruce took most seriously. In a way, all three readings talk about the Eucharist and the community that Eucharist creates over time. They also talk about death and what lies ahead for Bruce, and you, and me. The Isaiah reading [Isaiah 25: 6-9] portrays the final gathering of God with God’s people as a feast:

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples

a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,

of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.

And he will destroy on this mountain

the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over

all nations;

he will swallow up death forever.

The passage from Revelation [Revelation 21: 2-7] shows the last things as the new Jerusalem where God dwells among us mortals and wipes away tears from our eyes, saying:

It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the

beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from

the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these

things, and I will be their God and they will be my children.

And then, of course, we have the familiar gospel passage in which Jesus announces that we all have been provided for [John 14: 1-6]:

Do not let your hearts be troubled.

Believe in God, believe also in me.

            In my Father’s house there are many mansions.

If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for

you?

            Standing as I am in Bruce’s pulpit, I’m not sure how to talk about these scriptures in a manner that is both respectful of our conventional pieties and faithful to Bruce. We use a lot of sentimental language to talk about both the church and death, and Bruce would have none of that. We often compare the church to a family. Bruce’s birth family did not treat him very well, so he did not particularly warm up to that image. We often talk about death as a passing from one realm to the next, but Bruce would scoff when in the presence of Hollywood visions of the afterlife. Bruce believed in community, and he believed in resurrection. So in the time remaining, let me say a word about the church and a word about whatever it is that comes next not only for Bruce but for you and me, too.

            Bruce Bayne spent his life in the church. His father, Stephen Bayne, was probably the last Episcopal bishop to have the kind of superstar career that doesn’t seem available to clergy anymore. In Bishop Bayne’s day, clergy were still culturally prominent the way they no longer are, and he was a larger-than-life public figure. For Bruce to choose to go into the same business as his famous father was, from the beginning, playing a losing game. And yet Bruce persisted. And he persisted, I believe, not because of some unresolved oedipal conflict but because he really believed all this stuff.

            In my second year at EDS, Bruce and I did an independent study with California’s own Henry Shires on the theology of Paul.   I remember two things from that course. One was the way Bruce skillfully derailed Dr. Shires from the assigned reading whenever he came unprepared.  If Dr. Shires asked Bruce a direct question about something he hadn’t read, Bruce would reply with a question of his own: “Dr. Shires, isn’t this just another example of the Gnostic influence on the apostle Paul?” Shires, always a defender of Paul’s orthodoxy, would run to the bookshelf like one of Pavlov’s dogs and we’d be off for an hour of spirited refutation of any Pauline Gnosticism. Case closed. Bruce was safe for another week.

            The other thing I remember, though, is Bruce’s keen interest in Paul’s understanding of the church and his vision of resurrection. For Paul, as for Bruce, the church was not a voluntary association of like-minded people. For Paul, as for Bruce, the church was literally the body of Christ here on earth. It was a sacred thing, an aspect of God’s incarnation. Bruce gave his life to the church because, believing as he did, he could do nothing else.

            In the same way as Paul did, Bruce rejected the idea of death and resurrection as metaphors for the coming of spring and new life. They were radical, eschatological things. We die, and we’re really dead. And then in God’s own time, we rise. Bruce believed and preached resurrection. But he knew what we all have to go through to get there.

            A couple of thoughts about Bruce’s life in the church. First, he was a great pastor. Bruce had a painful childhood, and while the vestiges of that pain made him an often difficult husband, father, or friend, the remembered trauma made him a wonderful pastor. Bruce could feel with and reach out to people who were up against it, especially in sick rooms and on death beds.

Second, Bruce was a great preacher. He was, in fact, a white-hot preacher, refusing ever to sugarcoat his understanding of the Gospel. His preaching was brilliant but dangerous. It was not for your average polite Episcopalian. Bruce was relentlessly theological in everything he did, and he suffered fools, not only ungladly but at all. While this tendency enlivened his preaching it also made his life in the church complicated. He loved it here at St. Luke’s, but he had a bumpy ride on the ecclesiastical road getting here. He didn’t often make great career choices, and the all too human institutionality of the church was always letting him down. He had such a high theology of the body of Christ that the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America could never quite live up to it. I used to remind him of the words of Flannery O’Connor: “Sometimes we suffer as much from the church as for it.” Cold comfort, but there it is.

And then there is resurrection. Probably because in our work we both did so many funerals, Bruce and I used to talk about death a lot. For a time I served a church in the Main Line of Philadelphia where, because we had the fashionable society churchyard we did probably three funerals a week, and I began to tire of the endless stream of eulogies that almost always concluded with, “I know he is playing golf or tennis or sailing up there with Jesus in heaven.” Bruce would have none of that. He had a fierce, eschatological faith. More than anyone I have ever known, Bruce Bayne not only preached resurrection; he believed in it. But for resurrection to be real death has to be real. . Before we can say Bruce will rise, we must acknowledge that he has died. Bruce would not have me say that he is somewhere now up there driving Alfa Romeos with Jesus in heaven’s version of Italy. But he would have me say that, when all is said and done, he and we will rise as Jesus did. I do not look for Bruce’s spirit to be wafting around the cosmos. I do look for Bruce to stand with Jesus and you and me at the last day.

Like many clergy, Bruce early on devised his own blessing, one taken from a collect in our Evening Prayer liturgy. Standing behind the altar at the end of the service, he would say:

Tend the sick, give rest to the weary, bless
the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous.

And then he would bless all of us. In some sense, this prayer provided the mission statement for Bruce’s ministry. In his life and work, Bruce did “in point of fact” as he was wont to say, “tend the sick, give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous”. He was the real deal both as priest and friend. I am so grateful for the gift in my life of Bruce George Cuthbert Bayne. He was one of the two or three funniest people I have ever known, and I grew up in Hollywood. He was one of the two or three most theologically honest and grounded people I have ever known. And he was a faithful, constant, and generous friend. True, he spent his life in a kind of emotional pain that could not help spilling into the lives of the people he loved. But when all was said and done, he loved those people fiercely, far beyond his capacity to show it. I owe a lot of what I know about love and death and God and friendship to Bruce, and I am profoundly thankful, even in the midst of all that pain, for the inexpressible gift of his life and ministry. And I look forward, in hope, as he did to that feast on God’s mountain, to that mansion in Jesus’s father’s house, to that gathering around God’s throne, where God will wipe away all tears from our eyes—yours, mine, and especially, Bruce’s. Amen.

Homily: The Ordination of Priests [January 11, 2020] St. John's Cathedral, Los Angeles

            I begin this morning with a confession: I feel a certain amount of trepidation stepping into this pulpit to preach at the ordination of priests. My fear does not spring from inexperience: I’ve been a priest myself for almost 43 years, having been ordained at these very diocesan ordinations on January 15, 1977, the day on which Victoria Hatch was ordained as the first woman priest in Los Angeles. And a good part of my ministry was spent in seminaries, so I’ve bloviated on occasions like this plenty of times before.

            What really scares me, though, is comparison to what happened at this event last year. Hartshorn Murphy, a longtime friend and colleague of mine, preached a spectacular sermon, telling spellbinding stories of his own early life in the church and and his long ministry in it, doing so with nary a note or a text before him. The excellence of Murphy’s sermon alone would have been enough to strike fear into any subsequent ordination preacher, but what really intensified the problem was what happened next. It seemed, for a while, that at every diocesan meeting I went to I was forced to watch the video of this sermon. Commission on Ministry: watch Murphy’s video. Standing Committee: watch Murphy’s video. Commission on Parking, Potlucks, and Purificators: watch Murphy’s video. It got to the point that I could only look at it by forcing my eyelids open, kind of like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. Luckily, they stopped short of issuing Murphy ordination sermon swag, so I never had to get the mug, the tote bag, or the souvenir key chain. But you get the idea.

            So here I am, not standing boldly on the step but cowering meekly in the pulpit, holding onto my manuscript for dear life. From this relatively safe position, let me begin with a doublesided prediction. On the downside, you will not hear anything this morning remotely as compelling as what you heard a year ago. On the upside, you’ll never be forced to watch the video again. Or buy the keychain, the tote bag, or the mug.

            We’re gathered this morning as a diverse group of people—families, friends, parishioners, diocesan community—to witness and consent to the ordination of eight people to the priesthood. In the church it is customary for us to pause for a moment before we proceed and allow ourselves to reflect on what the scriptures might have to say about what we are doing. We have two Bible readings this morning to consider, and I’d like to say a brief word about each.

            Our first reading is from the book of the prophet Isaiah, and it recounts the call of Isaiah to be a prophet [Isaiah 6: 18]. It is a powerful account: Isaiah sees God and the angels hovering above him and is both overwhelmed with a sense of God’s holiness and filled with personal despair.

And I said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’

 Now although we often read this passage at ordinations, the dramatic experience of God it relates is not shared by most of us in the ordained ministry. Frankly, if one of our eight friends had presented themselves to the Commission on Ministry and announced that they “saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple” they would politely have been told to seek professional help. As they say in the ads, “Don’t try this at home”. Yet we regularly read this passage because it gets at something that all of us who have offered ourselves for this work feel. We feel both driven and unworthy to do it.

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!‘

This reading from Isaiah reminds us that we who follow Jesus—baptized people and clergy—do so because we really can’t do anything else. And the church sets some of us apart to dress up and perform priestly actions because it knows that we fragile, finite, dependent creatures will somehow advance the common good, often in spite of ourselves. We don’t get ordained because of our professional competence. We get ordained because, in the words of the New English Bible, we “know our need of God”. And if we really know our need of God we can help others find it, express it, and live out a response to it—which, for the time being, will be enough.

So that’s our first reading. The second comes from the Gospel of John [John 10:11-18] and it is also a familiar passage

‘I am the good shepherd. . . . I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.’

To people both inside and outside the church, all of this talk about shepherds and sheep can be a little confusing. Jesus is the shepherd and we are the sheep. Wait, aren’t we all the same species? When we call clergy shepherds, aren’t we setting up some kind of hierarchical difference between them and their congregants? One of my long-ago seminary professors solved this by changing the analogy. Clergy were not shepherds, he said, but sheepdogs. My own longtime friend and mentor, Harvey Guthrie (who preached at that ordination in 1977) told us all we were about to become “sheep in shepherds’ clothing”. Both of these figures point to the same problem faced by Isaiah: we priests are regular people being asked to do something extraordinary. And the only way to get through it without massively messing up is to remember how regular and sheep-like we really are.

            For our ordination retreat this week, I asked these eight folks to read a short story by Wendell Berry, a story called “A Desirable Woman”. It tells of a young minister and his wife in a rural community, and it describes the beauty and nobility of the priestly calling as few things I’ve ever read. Here are a couple of lines from that story:

[The minister] had the gift of comforting. He carried it with him, not by his will, it seemed, but by the purest gift, the very presence of comfort. And yet even as it was a comfort to others, it could be a bafflement and a burden to him. His calling, and the respect accorded to it, admitted him into the presence of troubles he could not mend.

            Whether we’re parish clergy, school, hospital, or prison chaplains, seminary professors, even bishops and cathedral deans, the truest thing you can say about us priests is that we are regularly “admitted into the presence of troubles” we cannot mend. When I was in seminary, I was so daunted by the prospect of facing those troubles that I tried to prepare by reading everything and trying to store up pastoral responses that would serve in any emergency. It was only after years working in the church that I realized the folly of that kind of proleptic cramming.

What makes it possible for us priests to do any good at all is the simple gift of the way people let us into our lives—to be with them in the troubles we cannot mend. Sometimes those are public troubles like war, peace, and injustice. Usually they are private troubles like illness, death, failure, and loss. And the best we can do with that gift is not get confused about what it means. Our people are neither our lovers, our enemies, nor our followers. They are, as we are, human beings who suffer and love and try to do their best. All they really want is some empathy and compassion along the way.

And so, to Jamie, Brainerd, KC, Sarah, Bill, Jon, Carlos, and Judith: welcome to the burden and bafflement of priestly ministry. Like all of us who have come before you, you have first said, “Woe is me!” and then answered God’s call in Isaiah’s words, “Here I am, send me.” And like all of us you will spend the rest of your lives being invited into the presence of troubles you cannot mend. Your task, in the midst of those troubles, is to witness to the infinite grace and mercy of God by first remembering what a privilege it is to step into other peoples’ lives and allow God to work through you. But remember: Jesus is the good shepherd. You and I are fellow sheep who have now been asked now to dress in shepherds’ clothing. We are regular people asked to do something extraordinary, allowing ourselves to be vessels of the healing, liberation, and blessing which finally belong to God.

As we stood in the nave of St. Paul’s Cathedral on Saturday, January 15, 1977, none of the six of us being ordained that day could have imagined the changes that would be coming to the church in our working lifetimes. As you stand here today none of you can predict where your ministries will take you over the next 40 years. Some of you will be prophetic movement leaders, others parish or chaplaincy pastors. Most of what you do will never be captured on video or shared on social media. Yet all of it—the public, the private—will be characterized by what Wendell Berry calls the privilege of being “admitted into troubles you cannot mend”. To the extent that you come to know that about yourselves and those you work with, you will come to see God not only calling you but working in and through you as well. And what way of life can be finally be more fulfilling or noble than that? Amen.