Grace Cathedral

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Great and mysterious God thank you for each person who brought us to this moment where we can be together with you. Amen.

Thirty years ago at this very moment I was getting ordained as an Episcopal priest at St. Clement’s Church in Berkeley, California. Tonight I want to share what that felt like and one thing that I have learned over the years since then.

1. On the first weekend after I left home as an eighteen year old, as I was setting up the habits of my adult life, I began attending regular Sunday services at an Episcopal Church. At the time I did not know any other student who was doing this. I lived in the dorms at the newly acquired property that had been the Blind School before the University of California had bought it. St. Clement’s was at the other end of that long block. When I first walked through its red doors forty years ago I did not guess that ten years later I would be ordained there.

Early in the afternoon on my ordination day I walked up the fire trails to the ridge of the Berkeley Hills (where we used to run as a rugby team). I went along a line of Monterrey Cypress through strong winds to a grassy hilltop miles away from any other person. The whole Bay stretched out before me and in that peaceful place I imagined all the people below and their struggles.

I watched as a storm gathered force over the Pacific Ocean beyond the shining city of San Francisco. I felt a wonderful sense of God’s presence there. I could see my life as if from a distance and all the lives around me seemed like the most miraculous gift.

Why did I get ordained? I loved the church. I felt the presence of Jesus in it and I could see it needed help. I knew with all my heart that it was worth giving my life for it. Gordon Kaufman (1925-2011) taught for more than three decades at Harvard. He was the advisor for my Master’s thesis. He wrote a book called God the Problem. And I think many people experience God in just this way, as a problem. They worry about whether or not God exists, whether their life has any meaning at all, about what will happen after they die.

Through no merit of my own, I have been given the strange gift of faith. I do not worry about God’s existence because, on pretty much of a daily basis, I feel connected to God. It’s almost as if I am constantly being converted. I feel it in the gifts I am receiving in the natural and human world. God is at the very center of my being. God is even closer than I am to myself.

Later that day when it was dark and windy outside, everyone I loved was gathered in that cozy redwood chapel which smelled like fresh candle wax. Kneeling in the warm light on that brilliant red carpet all the priests laid their hands on me and prayed. It was like a jolt of electricity and I felt changed forever. I had a new responsibility. I was part of this family in a new way. I had something to share and help in sharing it.

A tradition we have in the church is that immediately after the ordination service people ask the new priest for a blessing. It seemed like everything was completely backward. Priests that I looked up to: Walter Tsi, Colby Cogswell, Henry Bayne, Bill Geisler, Fran Toy, Rudy Johnson, Peter Haynes, Barry Beisner, Donald Schell, Rick Fabian, and many others all came to ask me for a blessing. And strangely enough I suddenly knew I had something to give. That night we felt so hopeful about the future, that with God’s help we could accomplish otherwise unimaginable things. And we have.

The night before Rick Fabian was ordained he had a kind of revelation. He realized, “If HONOR means anything, it must be an honor to minister, to serve your fellow humans,

in Matters of Life and Death.”[1] And this is what we have been doing together.

2. Let me tell you one thing I have learned since that day. In pre-marriage counseling Rev’d Rachelle Birnbaum (at Trinity Church in Copley Square, Boston) said that Heidi was going to be the most extraordinary asset in my career. I was so in love with her that I didn’t care. But looking back I realize that all the good things that I have been part of, were because of her, because of her natural gifts and the warmth of her love for everyone who comes near.

So that is not what surprised me. Let me tell you what did. Thirty years ago I knew that I would love writing and teaching theology and the Bible, that visiting people and talking about matters of life and death would make my heart sing. I even had an inkling that I would enjoy the administrative work of being a priest, as I have.

What I did not realize was how important my colleagues would be. I did not know that my favorite part of being a priest would be my colleagues. From that dusty September afternoon in the dry heat under the oak trees in Healdsburg when David Forbes welcomed me by name to my first clergy retreat at the Bishop’s Ranch to gathering with the Cathedral chapter on Tuesday, to my clergy group yesterday and our choir today I have found the most surprising and deep joy in my relationships to colleagues.

With people like Bill Burrill, Mary Goshert, Suzanne Guthrie, Peter Haynes and Barry Beisner in my life before my ordination, I should have realized this earlier. In my first year Bishop Bill Swing taught me how to lead and preach, both through stories and by his example. He said that being a rector is like being mayor of a small town. Since then every time we mayors and retired mayors have gathered I always have in mind the questions I want to ask my friends.

Our former dean Alan Jones in particular helped me. We saw each other twice a week for about a decade. He could not have been better retired predecessor. With deep love he guided me on everything from minor details about how to dress to major ones like introducing me to billionaires who might help the church. I have a list several pages long of all the colleagues who helped me over the years. My clergy group (including: Donald, Rick, Bruce Smith, Kitty Lehman, Jane MacDougall, Beth Philips, Blake Sawicky, Chris Rankin-Williams, and others over the years) is still teaching me just how to be a priest.

3. Let me close by saying a word about this faith we hold in common and what it takes to sustain it. We share an unusual and strange kind of faith. It is centered in the person of Jesus. It respects reason, science and the life of the mind. It is compassionate, trying imperfectly to include every person. It is concerned about beauty and those fleeting experiences of awe. It is non-dogmatic and recognizes the power of story.

This set of traditions includes everything from our music, theologies, prayers, calendar, lectionary, even architectural spaces like this cathedral. What is its purpose? All of this is to shape our lives in a way that is centered in Christ. All of this forms how we look at the world and come to act on it. And this means everything – because that inner disposition is what ultimately leads us to isolation and despair, or to joy as children of God.

Institutions create a context that makes this possible. I have in mind St. Martin’s Davis, Berkeley and Stanford Canterbury, the Bishop’s Ranch, the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, the Anglican Theological Review, the Graduate Theological Union, St. Clement’s Berkeley, The Christian Century Magazine, Episcopal Community Services and Grace Cathedral. These are among so many other ways that God reaches out to us. On this occasion as we gather to celebrate their ministries I want to especially thank our retired clergy. Thank you for inspiring us and continuing to teach us.

Let us pray: O great God thank you for our unique form of faith, for making us your children. Sustain us with your Holy Spirit. Give us inquiring and discerning hearts, the courage to will and persevere, a spirit to know and love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works. Amen.

Production Notes

Please include the opening prayer in the stand alone video

St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, Berkeley California

Rev’d Rick Fabian, St. Gregory of Nyssa, San Francisco

Grace Cathedral

[1] “My Yale and Cambridge friends included only a dozen Christians. Most other friends were post-Christian, and would tell me the Church was an irrelevant organization or worse. (Martin Luther King Jr made only a temporary exception to Christianity’s collapse in their esteem.) Surely I was too smart to spend my time on such an outdated outfit. But I liked the music and ritual and other beauties, so I defended my attraction. Then at Theological College in Mirfield, Yorkshire, singing evensong one night, I recognized that I had never really believed Christianity, but only defended it—like a mercenary, or a child soldier in the Congo, told “Take this gun and shoot at anything that moves.” My tutor monk Benedict Green, a historical critic, dismantled all the bulwark beliefs I thought I needed to guard. Benedict left my humane values upright, and a sense of duty and loyalty like his own—but loyalty to what? My diocese those days (not California) ran their ordination program like a fraternity hazing, full of

stuffy pretense. Ordination means public vesting for life, right? So why would anyone nowadays put on such foolish clothes?”

“Then that night before the ordinations, it occurred to me: If HONOR means anything, it must be an honor to minister, to serve your fellow humans, in Matters of Life and Death. And Christ’s Gospel Good News is a Matter of Life and Death, whether people welcome it or not. So serving people in the Church is honorable, no matter how well or badly Christian institutions do it. After all, Tavistock group psychology research—which was so very important for planning St Gregory’s—Tavistock defines an institution simply: as a social arrangement made to last. All institutions are flawed, because we humans are. Providentially, at General Seminary I met Saints Gregory of Nyssa and Donald Schell, two gospel ministers who have straightened my meandering path ever since.”

Rick Fabian, “Sermon on My Fiftieth Anniversary,” 31 January 2021.and Work of Rumi (Boston, MA: Shamballa Press, 1992) 28, 119-122, 182 .”