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.