Homily: George Regas [May 7, 2022] All Saints, Pasadena

There are at least a dozen great preachers in this room today, and each one of them is now asking themselves the question, “Why is that mook up there doing the sermon instead of me?” I have to say, when Mary showed me George’s detailed plans for this liturgy and I saw my own name after the word “sermon” I was both honored and surprised; in fact I asked myself the same question. "Why me?" But then, casting my eyes to the right, I saw the answer. In parentheses after my name were the words, “ten minutes”.

George Regas never preached for ten minutes in his life, but he knew his colleagues well. He was certain that I, among all his former staff members, was the most likely to follow his instructions. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but where George is concerned, I always do what I’m told.

            George designed everything about this service. He chose the readings, the hymns, and the participants. And if you worked with George on anything, you know how intentionally he did things. So it is no accident that our two Hebrew/Christian scripture readings George chose for today are proclamations. They are announcements not only of God’s vision for the world. They are proclamations of how things actually are. George was first and foremost a preacher. Proclamation was his life’s work.

 

            Our reading from Isaiah 61 is well known to all us progressive religious folk, both on its own terms and as the scroll which Jesus reads aloud when he visits his hometown congregation in Nazareth in the fourth chapter of Luke’s gospel.

 

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
            because the Lord has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
   to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
   and release to the prisoners; 

            For Isaiah, this passage announces the new, joyous reality of Israel’s life after its return to Jerusalem from Babylonian exile. It is a proclamation of a new, restored world, a transformed community in which justice reigns and wrongs are set right. And when Jesus later chooses to read this passage as the inaugural announcement of his own ministry, Isaiah’s words take on an added resonance. Following Jesus will mean giving oneself over not only to the proclamation of this world. Following Jesus will mean working with others to make this world a reality.

For countless generations of Jews and Christians, Isaiah’s oracle has served as the warrant for prophetic utterance. If you want to see what God is up to, look to Isaiah’s list: bringing good news to the oppressed, binding up the broken-hearted, proclaiming liberty to the captives, releasing the prisoners. Established religious communities can fall into the trap of seeing themselves as the custodians of the status quo, defenders of the oppressive systems they are asked to bless. Isaiah and Jesus remind us that God is on the side of those up against it. Critics of us progressive preachers always say that we’re mixing religion and politics. Isaiah’s joyous oracle reminds us that you can’t authentically talk about God without also proclaiming God’s desire for justice.

            When I think of this Isaiah passage in relation to George, the things that he stood for over the course of a lifetime in ministry simply name themselves: civil rights, peace, economic justice, interfaith relations, equity for women and LGBT people in the church and world, healing the sick. Yet when I think more specifically about George, the specific idea of prophecy as “good news” rings clear and true. George was more of a joyous than an angry preacher. One reason you left church feeling exalted following a George Regas sermon was that he always provided not only an analysis of the problem but also an avenue to get together and work with others to address it. George always believed that concerted faithful action could actually change things, and he consistently held out a vision of the hopeful future to which God is calling us. I’ve heard (and delivered) countless prophetic issue sermons in my time, and to my ear they often sound like religious versions of Eyeore complaining about the burrs in his tail. People signed up to hear and follow George Regas because he preached good news. His good news wasn’t always sunny. But it was grounded in a hopeful vision of the just future God holds out to us. And the legacy I take from his life, ministry, and preaching is that we are all called, not to wait on God to free the captives and feed the poor but actively to participate with God in these acts of liberation we proclaim.

            And then there are the Beatitudes (Matthew 5: 1-10). As did Isaiah, so here does Jesus turn our conventional wisdom on its head. The Greek word makarios, which we usually translate “blessed”, more accurately means something like “happy”. Conventional church wisdom is more comfortable talking about the poor, the meek, and the peacemakers as “blessed”. We become a bit more uneasy when we think of them not as pious recipients of our largesse but as the people who, unlike most of us, are actually happy. As the German theologian Jurgen Moltmann once said right here at All Saints, “If you want to see authentic hope, look not to affluent suburbs but to the barrios of Buenos Aires.”

            If Jesus is right—if true happiness exists primarily among the marginalized—what hope is there for the rest of us? How do those of us who are relatively affluent and privileged find a place in this parade? Jesus’s Beatitudes could be seen as a prescription for renouncing the world. It was George’s genius to use them as a way into building solidarity across economic, racial, class, gender, and sexuality boundaries. George spent his life preaching prophetic good news to people whose relative affluence and privilege could easily have inoculated them from having to think about war, injustice, poverty, racism, and oppression. One of his many particular gifts was to accept everyone he came across as they were and, nevertheless, to call them into a deeper understanding and higher commitment in the service of whom Isaiah would proclaim good news and whom Jesus would call happy.

            George never fell into the trap of presuming to “speak truth to power”. Even when George directly addressed and confronted President Nixon, the Pentagon, Pasadena City Hall, or the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, he wasn’t really speaking truth to power. He was speaking truth with power, insisting on staying in relationship with those who resisted his vision, leading them not only by argument but more importantly by empathy and compassion to a new truth which all could embrace and celebrate together.

            It was my good fortune to work with George his last five years here at All Saints, but the trajectory of our relationship started much earlier and lasted long after his retirement. I first got to know George in the 1970s, working with him on issues like the ordination of women and the nuclear arms race. And I stayed connected to George long after he retired. He preached at my installation at the National Cathedral in Washington, and he delighted me when his call for the cathedral to renounce militarism prompted a dozen or so people to get up and leave in the middle of his sermon. I’m sure he would have chased them down and brought them back to talk it through if the decorum of the occasion hadn’t prevented it. 

            Jesus would remind us that abundant living has nothing to do with our privilege and everything to do with our openness to being instruments of God’s love and justice. If you saw George from a distance, you probably only know that he worked hard. If you saw him up close, you also knew that he played hard. George was a great phrase maker, and he often talked about people who had “gone to sleep on life”. George Regas never went to sleep on life, he was always awake to life in the way Isaiah and Jesus were. He knew that living into God’s vision of a new heaven and a new earth called for hard but joyous living. And those of us lucky enough to work with or for him came over time to know that, too.

            Right after George retired in 1995, Bishop Fred Borsch asked him to address the Los Angeles Diocesan Convention. George used that occasion to reflect on four decades of ministry here, in Tennessee, and New York, and he listed the myriad causes he had championed over time. At the end of his address, as he had described what it meant to work with others to proclaim God’s justice, peace, and love, all he finally could say was, “What a privilege. What a privilege.”

            There is so much to be pained and angry about right now: the war in Ukraine, the right wing SCOTUS draft opinion ending Roe versus Wade, assaults on voting rights and LGBT equality to name a few. I wish George were here not only to preach. I wish he were here to organize. But we know where he would stand, and he has left us with an extended interfaith community in which to engage, reflect, and act for the justice which Isaiah, Mohammed, and Jesus demand.

            I said at the outset that George Regas never preached a ten-minute sermon in his life. Apparently, neither have I. But one thing you learned sooner or later working with George is that sometimes it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission. 

There will never be another George Regas. But my life and all our lives have been changed forever by loving and being loved by this extraordinary, complex, faithful, loving, and brilliant man. I hope I speak for all the great preachers gathered today by using George’s words to describe what it meant to walk this hard, beautiful road with him. What a privilege, George. What a privilege. Amen.

            

 

 

Homily: The Third Sunday of Easter [May 1, 2022] St. Alban's, Westwood

I grew up here in Southern California, and when my parents divorced early in my childhood my father moved from Toluca Lake out to Malibu and got a house there because, if you can believe this now, it was cheap. So I spent many of my elementary school weekends at the beach, and that early experience probably colors the way I hear the 21st chapter of John’s Gospel when it is read. I cannot hear about Jesus at the beach sitting around a charcoal fire without thinking of what that looks, feels, and smells like from my own early experience. 

One of the things I remember best about those Malibu weekends was going down to the beach and sitting around a fire. In that seaside setting you have all the elements which early humans thought made up the universe: earth, air, fire, water. There is something primordial and eternal in that kind of moment, and also something fleeting: everything in the scene is ephemeral; nothing will remain as it is for long. As a setting which mixes the eternal and the ephemeral, a fireside by the water is the perfect place for Jesus to say hello and goodbye at once.

Since my earliest days of reading the Bible with some care, I have been moved that the risen Jesus’s final meal with his companions occurred on a beach gathered around a charcoal fire. As much as Easter is about the joyful return of Jesus to his friends, it is also ultimately about the loss of Jesus, too. Jesus is returning to the One he calls his Father. This is the last time his companions will see him. And without trying to sound impious or inelegant about it, it means something at least to me that Jesus leaves his friends after a final beach cookout, and the meal he shares with them takes place in the setting not only of a beautiful natural place but also in the context of the work of fishing, the stuff of their daily life.

If this is the last time Jesus will see his friends, it is also the first time he has seen Peter since his arrest, trial, and crucifixion. And you’ll remember that things between Jesus and Peter did not go well back then. Despite his protestations that he would remain faithful, Peter denied Jesus. And he did so not once, but three times.

It is no wonder, then, what Peter does when he hears that Jesus is back.  “When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea.” This is, at first, a surprising detail. And then it makes sense.  I guess you’d run away from Jesus too if the last time you’ve seen him was to deny him three times.

There is so much going on in John’s 21^st chapter—the final appearance of Jesus, the big catch of fish, the symbolic meal Jesus and his friends eat together around the charcoal fire, the questioning of Peter about love and the commandment to feed the sheep. Among all those details, this story seems primarily to concern forgiveness. On this third Sunday of Easter, let’s sit with Jesus and Peter as they attempt to reconcile.

Following Peter’s attempt to swim away from this meeting, Jesus invites his companions to join him in a meal of bread and fish. It is not stretching things to suggest that this meal has symbolic, Eucharistic overtones. In the early church the Eucharist was not the polite, institutionalized ritual we have come to perform over time. It was an actual meal, often featuring not only bread and wine but also milk, honey, and fish—real food with scriptural saving significance. The first audience for John’s account would have understood this.

It is only after this meal that Jesus approaches Peter with his threefold interrogation: “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Jesus asks a version of this question three times, and Peter answers each time, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Given that Peter had denied Jesus not once but thrice, it shouldn’t be surprising that Jesus questions Peter a similar number of times; and Peter’s answers are also predictable. The surprise comes with Jesus’s response to Peter: “Feed my lambs.” “Tend my sheep.” “Feed my sheep.” Roman Catholics will see here a prediction of Peter’s role as Bishop of Rome and founder of the papacy. But prior to any institutional connection, Jesus’s directions to Peter seem to offer the clue to his pathway to forgiveness.

Jesus’s interrogation of Peter ends perhaps differently that we 21^st century people would imagine. There are no cultural markers of forgiveness in this interchange. Jesus does not offer Peter an extended hand to shake, nor does he embrace him in a reconciling bear hug. He simply gives Peter two commandments. “Feed my sheep,” and “Follow me”. 

You and I tend to imagine things like love and forgiveness as some kind of mental states. To our minds, loving someone or forgiving them has primarily to do with how we think about them. We’re convinced that the most important aspect of something is what it means.

This way of seeing these core biblical concepts is alien to the world that gave us the scriptures. Love and forgiveare not gaseous mental notions, floating somewhere around in the ether. Love and forgive are verbs. If you love someone, you behave a certain way toward them. If you forgive someone, that pardon is made real in action.

In his post-betrayal, post-resurrection encounter with Peter, Jesus bypasses the endless therapy session that you and I imagine they might have been forced to endure. Instead, Jesus gives Peter two commandments. He tells Peter to feed his sheep, that is, to do something concretely loving toward his fellow disciples. And then Jesus tells Peter, very simply and directly, to follow him.

If you are like me, questions of forgiveness and reconciliation are always somewhere not far from the top of your consciousness. There are folks in my life I both need to forgive and be forgiven by. What I take from this morning’s seaside cookout is a new understanding: the way to enact forgiveness is not through thought; it is through action. Rather than stew over the offence either committed or received, the way to get myself and the other past it is to do something new: feed and follow. Because our culture seems to be so in love with endless talk, we think that we can work out our differences merely by introspection and dialogue. But Jesus offers us a different, and more pragmatic approach. 

As Western, 21^st century, media-savvy Christians, you and I live too much in our heads. We imagine we will solve our problems by turning them into rational, intellectual concepts. What Jesus offers is something entirely different: a call to get out of our heads and into our bodies and hearts. We love Jesus not only by praying to him but by feeding the people he cares for. We love Jesus not only by saying the creed but by living and acting as his disciples. In this morning’s encounter on the beach, Jesus offers forgiveness to Peter as a new way of acting in the world. The implication seems to be that when we get out of our heads and into our hearts and hands the hurt and betrayal that had seemed so vital becomes less important than the human need that, together, we can begin to address.

We all carry so many burdens of offenses both endured and committed. What Jesus offers us this morning is a way through and out of our obsessions. If you want either to forgive or be forgiven, feed Jesus’s sheep. If you want release from the injuries or the guilt you carry, follow Jesus in living a life of compassion, justice, and love. Jesus never promised Peter that he would feel better about things. He promised Peter that, in giving himself over to loving God and serving others, he would find a new life that would cause his worries ultimately to fade away.

You and I live in a world of such desperate need. From the war in Ukraine to the streets of Los Angeles, from suffering on a grand scale to the loneliness and illness of those close to us, there is no shortage of sheep for us to feed. On this third Sunday of Easter, as we celebrate the risen life of Jesus, let us claim our share in that Easter promise, too. As he called Peter, so Jesus calls you and me. A new life of joy and purpose is on offer for all of us as we gather around God’s table. We claim that new life by stepping into the deeds and actions Jesus calls us to do. “Feed my sheep.” “Follow me.”  It sounds so simple. Yet it’s the life-changing renewal all of us so deeply want and desperately need. Amen.