Progressive Christians Uniting

Reflections on Ministry

A sermon by Rev. Dr. George F. Regas on the 50th Anniversary of his ordination
All Saints Church
June 17, 2007

Fifty years ago today, June 17, I was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church. So there is one distinct place where my reflections today relate to a Father’s Day celebration. After my ordination 50 years ago on June 17, some people began calling me Father Regas!

Now some of you think I must have been 10 years old when I was ordained! Just keep on thinking that.

Fifty years a priest – some reflections. Part of my sermon is autobiographical for only through these lenses can I accurately describe a 50 year ministry.

I.

As many of you know, I am the son of a Greek immigrant who came to America from Patras, Greece. He arrived in New York in 1903 by himself when he was 13 years old, speaking no English. Like so many at the turn of the century, he wanted to come to the New World with its glorious promise of opportunities.

He washed dishes in New York restaurants, learned to cook, worked on building railroads across the country. Five years later his two brothers joined him, and they eventually made their way to Knoxville, TN. In 1919, he opened Regas Brothers Café. It was only an 18 stool counter in the beginning, but over the years grew into one of the south’s premier restaurants. After 88 years, it is still going at the same location in Knoxville.

My mother died when I had just turned 5; my father, who never remarried, died when I was 21. The deep impoverishment of a little boy without a mother, and with a father who operated a restaurant which was open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, gave shape to my life.

My father was a powerful influence in my life; I deeply loved and cherished him.

His love for America was palpable. He was always so thankful for what this country had offered him that he never stopped giving back.

He would often say to me, “go and make something of yourself, son.” The driving ambition for accomplishment and excellence so embedded in my soul by this father was a blessing and a curse. I’ve spent a lifetime struggling with those angels and demons.

Early on, I told my father I did not want to spend my life in the restaurant business. My immigrant father had great ambitions for his children. So I said I wanted to be a physician. It was a prestigious arena of work and it would get me out of being a restaurateur. I started my college education in Pre Med.

However, I was also a child of the church. I was substantially involved in the work of my home church in Knoxville and religious activities on the college campus. I loved and respected Gene Hopper, my Rector.

As I began my senior year, I realized I was being pulled toward the ordained ministry in deep but subtle ways. The church needed me. I had some gifts to offer and felt more drawn to a vocation as a priest than as a physician. And yet in those deep places, there was great conflict and uncertainty. After several months of prayer and struggle, I was fairly certain I wanted the ministry.

When I told my father of my intentions, he was profoundly disturbed, very angry with me. He was disappointed that I would not join him in the restaurant business, but the medical world was an ok alternative.
But how could I give up these opportunities and work in the church where, in his opinion, I would be directed by blue haired women with everyone my boss and where the pay is not good!

My father loved me and was so proud of me as President of the University Student Body. “Why, son? Why?” We talked and talked and talked. After a couple of months, he said: “If you are going through with this crazy ministry stuff – you need to go to the best damn school there is for ministers.”

Dad sent me and my first wife, Jane, on a two week trip visiting five of the Episcopal Seminaries. We returned home on a Monday. On Saturday, my father called. “Son, I don’t feel very well. I think you need to come over to the house.” I did. He was very ill. We called the ambulance and took him to the hospital. Jane was pregnant with Michelle. Dad’s last words, as he lay in the hospital bed, “I don’t think I’m going to be able to baby sit for you.” He died on Sunday morning.

It has been a great sadness that my father was never able to see his son as a priest. At least, not in this earthly life; however, I still feel very close to him. There is a very thin wall that separates the living from the dead.

II.

There is another lens through which I want you to view these 50 years of my priesthood, especially nearly three decades as the Rector of All Saints. I had a great mentor for ministry.

During my senior year at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, MA, I had the privilege of meeting and studying with John A. T. Robinson. Dr. Robinson was a biblical theologian from Clare College, Cambridge University and was teaching for a year at Harvard Divinity School. I took his course each semester. He became my greatest mentor for ministry.

He was a splendid teacher. I worked hard on his courses and spent lots of time talking with him. In the spring, Dr. Robinson said I had some gifts and he liked my papers. He invited me to come to Cambridge University that summer as a Research Student and begin my study with him for a doctorate. I was pleased and flattered but I had two children and saw no way to make it happen. John Robinson made it happen and in 1956 and 1957, I was at England’s Cambridge University.

A very serious illness prevented my finishing this doctoral program, but John Robinson remained an integral part of my life and ministry and urged me to finish a doctoral at Claremont. As some of you remember, Robinson was with us at All Saints Church many times, 10 to be exact.

In 1960 John Robinson was appointed an Anglican Bishop and in 1963, he wrote a little book called Honest to God. It has sold more copies than any religious book since Pilgrim’s Progress.

This book forced people to recognize that the language of traditional religion was not a language that people believed in the 1960s whether they continued to use it or not. Our childhood understanding of God would not live in our scientific world.

Honest to God forced the public to face the fact that the words of both the Bible and the Creeds that sound so strange to post modern people had to be reinterpreted or they had to be abandoned. Forty-four years ago, Bishop Robinson helped us rethink many of the religious symbols and biblical images so that we could claim them with integrity.

God, he wrote in Honest to God, is not some supernatural being “out there.” God is not spiritually or metaphysically “up there.” God is the deepest reality of your being. Robinson says that what we mean when we speak of God is “that which concerns us ultimately;” that to speak of God is to speak of the deepest things we experience. Robinson pointed us to a belief in God that focused in “what you take seriously without any reservation”…”the ultimate reality” or the “God of the depths,” to use Paul Tillich’s phrase.

Honest to God rocked the Church of England to its core in the 1960s. He is the author of more than 20 important books – all a rich blessing to me. This liberal, progressive Christianity of John Robinson shaped my life as a priest, and you have witnessed its expression at All Saints Church over the decades. Bishop Robinson knew that either the Church find new ways of expressing our Christian faith, or it goes into decline.

The liberal, progressive Christianity of Robinson was not merely a set of complex theories and redefinitions, but instead a real world attempt to make sense of both the legacy of faith and the evolution of thinking brought on by science.

John loved America but he was a stern critic from his very first visit. His theology was never far from the political scene. His biblical, theological and political views jarred many over several decades.

I received a letter in the late spring of 1983 from John saying he had been diagnosed as having cancer of the pancreas, and had only a few months to live. It was devastating news.

I flew to London to spend a week with John at the end of his life. On Sunday I celebrated the Eucharist for him and his wife, Ruth, and anointed him with oil.

I’ll never forget how John shared with me that morning his deep, deep conviction that the final definition of this world reality is the love of God and if everything is stripped away from him, he will believe at his death that nothing, nothing can separate him from the love of God he has come to know in Jesus.

John Robinson’s echoes could be heard in almost everything I said in this place, all that I’ve written, all that I’ve stood for, all that I’ve given my life to. I’m so grateful I had such a mentor.

III.

This past spring, Mary Regas and I took a trip to Eastern Europe and visited Prague, Budapest and Krakow.

In Prague I was fascinated by a most unusual statue, a memorial to Franz Kafka, in the historic Jewish Quarter.

This tall black sculpture represents a headless male figure in a suit with a much smaller figure of Kafka sitting on his shoulders. This permanent memorial to Kafka spoke powerfully to me.

I sense very significantly that I have stood on the shoulders of so many over these 50 years of my priesthood, so very many.

But most of all, in some mystical sense, I see myself standing on the shoulders of all of you. Over the last 40 years, this great congregation has been a source of inspiration and courage; you have been the loving, implementing arms of my vision of justice and peace. You have made it crystal clear that it is possible to be a peace and justice church and survive – survive gloriously.

I remember reading somewhere of a half mad artist, swinging from a high hung scaffold, who tries to paint a picture of creation on the walls of a building condemned to be destroyed.

There needs to be a little madness in a priest. That’s the task of a priest…to keep life’s possibilities before an individual, a church and a world; to keep saying to a world apparently condemned to destruction through its folly – you can live; to call into searching judgment every aspect of life that is counter to the great biblical vision of peace and beauty, all that impedes the creative hope of a new world. Yes, to say it is still possible to end hunger around the world, to eradicate HIV-AIDS, to free the world of sexual and racial prejudices and end war forever.

I’ve been so privileged to be part of a congregation that has the audacity to think a new and better world is possible – and give its life to that mission.

The Anglican Communion is on the edge of schism over the ordination of a gay bishop in the U.S. and the blessing of same sex unions. But remember, All Saints Church has been blessing same sex unions at this altar for the last 16 years and we go from strength to strength; we could never back away from this justice commitment.

I think of all the courageous ways this congregation has stood against the violence of war, sometimes even risking its institutional life; that has been the mission of All Saints Church for over 40 years. It is the defining mark of this great church.

We committed ourselves, heart and soul, to opening the doors to the priesthood and episcopacy for women in the Episcopal Church in the United States, and we worked to see it happen. All Saints Vestry allowed me to give half of my time to chairing the National Coalition for the Ordination of Women for two years and hired a full time secretary for this project. After two hard years, we were successful in 1976.

There were many who were fiercely opposed to women in the priesthood, and the Anglican Churches in most of Africa condemned us in America just as they are repudiating our gay bishops today.

We were confident that the bitter opposition would pass. Women will so enrich our priesthood and Episcopacy that the day will come that these opponents will forget they ever stood again your ordination. That was our posture.

Mary Regas and I were worshipping recently in the magnificent St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. There has been a church on that site since 607AD. Few places equal the splendor of that Christopher Wren masterpiece. 30 years after the doors to the priesthood were opened for women, I was so elated during the morning Eucharist when the celebrant was a woman adorned in the most magnificent vestments and the preacher was also a brilliant and inspiring woman.

Although it will be a more bitter struggle and will take longer, the day will come when gays and lesbians will be gratefully and wondrously celebrated as priests and bishops in the Anglican Communion.

IV.

These reflections of 50 years as a priest would not be adequate if I did not say a few words about my personal spiritual journey.

God’s urgent call is for us to love this broken, desperate world, to put our arms of compassion around a world at war with us. But that is simply impossible until we put our arms around ourselves with love and acceptance.

I personally had a fierce struggle in my journey toward self-acceptance and self love in the early years of my priesthood.

There is a moment in Leonard Bernstein’s modern opera, Mass with which I identified in the most profound way. The priest celebrating the Mass puts on one priestly vestment after another, one elegant robe on top of another.

The priest staggers. All that religiosity is about to destroy him.

Then the priest tears all the vestments off, and there he stands in blue jeans and a t-shirt before the altar. He sings, “Look at me. There is nothing but me under this.” It is a scene where we see someone growing, someone becoming himself, someone willing to be human. And that vulnerability is always a crack in our armor through which the power of God enters our lives.

I know something about that scene. When I was a young priest, I had so many battles going on inside of me and still do! I refused to accept the darker side of my spirit. How could I be a priest – one set apart by God to do God’s holy work – if there were so many weaknesses, so many conflicts, so much ugliness, and darkness, so much confusion in my spirit?

So on with those vestments! I covered up and repressed so many parts of my life that were threatening. But oh my – that was a costly thing to do. It created a fierce conflict within my spirit, and it also blocked the power of God – the power that brings healing and transformation.

Only after a number of years with a compassionate psychoanalyst, and the support of some strong friends who held me accountable but cared deeply about me and my ministry – only then was I gradually able to put my arms around myself – all of me – and love that person. Love the contradictions and conflicts and weaknesses, as well as the wonder and beauties within me. It led to the miracle of transformation. Radical self-acceptance always releases the divine energies that push us toward the destiny God has in store for us.

We don’t have to be that perfect priest for God to use us effectively in the kingdom’s work, and have God’s blessing in ministry.

In Arthur Miller’s brilliant play, After the Fall, he deals profoundly with forgiveness and self affirmation. There is a haunting line in the play that has stayed with me over the years: “One must finally take one’s life into one’s arms and kiss it.”

Today’s Gospel from the 7th Chapter of St. Luke – with that woman kissing Jesus’ feet, wiping them with her tears, and knowing she is safe before his love, speaks to the deepest places in my spirit. “Your faith has saved you,” Jesus says, “Go in peace.”

The very heart of the Christian message is love– that profound assertion that God loves you and me just as we are – warts and all. Over the years, this amazing grace finally got into the deep, deep places of my being and I realized the more I accepted myself and loved all there was to me, the more I had to offer a wounded, desperate world.

It is in this love, this amazing love, that I feel God has sent me into the world as a peacemaker, to share this love in the moral wastelands and on the death slopes of our world.

V.

What a privilege it is has been, these 50 years, to have had this ministry with you.

What a privilege. Amen.

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