Sixty Years of Ordination - at St. Bede's Episcopal Church

I am very happy to be here - because earlier this morning when I was changing a light bulb at home, I fell off our ten-foot ladder. (pause) I was lucky I was on the bottom rung. (I’m glad that’s over). For those of you who don’t know me, I am Tom Woodward, a retired priest who has been a member of St. Bede’s for 19 years. This is the 60th anniversary of my ordination, and first I want to thank Fr. Lucas and Jerry Nelson for their support in helping me celebrate this anniversary today. And second, I want to take this occasion to share with you some of my reflections on my life as a priest and what it means to be a priest. For me, it has always been a real privilege to be a priest in The Episcopal Church – and that has been true even when the times have been rough. And those times have been rough at times. It began way back in 1965, when I was Episcopal chaplain at the University of Kansas. It was two years after being ordained as the most conservative and one of the more racist members of my seminary class when several black students came to my office to implore me to attend their civil rights demonstration outside the Chancellor’s office. When I arrived there, reluctantly, I sat down to talk with the students who were protesting - and I quickly discovered that almost all of those students were the first ones in their family to attend college. And the stories of those young students had such power for me -- and in their stories there was so much of the presence of God I had only read about, that I joined them. So, within three hours I was arrested and jailed - . along with 103 Black students. My life changed that day more than on any other. The pain in the arrest came three months later when my bishop, who had urged his clergy to be involved in the civil rights struggle, caved into some very vindictive leaders of the diocese and, in effect, put me on half salary for the next year and a half - just as my wife and I had bought a house and adopted an infant child. I lived through that and more; and more importantly, was able to resist becoming cynical about the church as institution. Angry, yes, but never cynical. Twelve years later much the same thing happened in North Carolina when my support for gay and lesbian students cost me another job. Heartbreaks: one after the other for acting on my deepest beliefs. There have been other kinds of heartbreak, as well. In Madison, Wisconsin it was what seemed like almost weekly AIDS-related funerals at my church So often, the service was for someone who, just weeks or months before, had been in one of our pews mourning the death of one of his friends. There have not been many months in the 60 years of being a deacon and priest - without some kind of heartbreak. My ordained life has been lived on two parallel levels. On one level was the ongoing life of pastoral ministry; but the other level was wild and wooly. As priest I was arrested and jailed twice -- though later I went back to jail to coach an inmates’ chess team which then beat the University of Rochester faculty chess team – five matches to two. In earlier years, I led encounter groups hosted Allen Ginsburg and other major poets at our Coffee House ministry in Kansas, wrote three books, performed as a fire eater and juggler in several States, and in front of the Wisconsin legislature, I stood up to Bart Starr and Randy White of the Green Bay Packers on matters of human sexuality. About the same time, out of a shared conviction about the moral use of money, Tony Earl, the Wisconsin Democrat governor, appointed me to serve as one of eight trustees of the State’s Investment Board, where we oversaw the investment of over 85 billion dollars. There I teamed up with the most conservative trustee to co-author the State’s Active Investor Program. It committed us to use our enormous power to go after corporations on moral and ethical issues. Our first experience was with General Motors and I got to go head to head with their CEO, Roger Smith. We won that negotiation – and many more to follow. Later, I continued my service in the Republican administration of Governor Tommy Thompson and continued serving as liaison between SWIB and the State legislature. During this time I also served as President of Friends Outside, a non-profit organization which worked with incarcerated State and Federal prisoners, providing them with support while incarcerated and assistance as they were released. Later, I was appointed by our Presiding Bishop to serve on the Episcopal Church’s national task force on the Status of Women. As the only male (you can guess it) I was elected Secretary. And I benefitted greatly from my wife Ann’s advice to keep my mouth shut so I could learn something. It was a rare opportunity to learn and to grow. All in all, I could not dream of a more exciting or fulfilling life. But the best, the very best, was always out of the limelight with people like you, week by week, together, building up the life and ministry of our church family. That has been the deep satisfaction. As some of you know, things have changed drastically since I was ordained 60 years ago. When I was ordained, women were not allowed to serve on Vestries, girls were not allowed even to acolyte, there were separate churches for Black and white Episcopalians. When I was ordained, it was like the congregation hired a priest to be the minister. Where the priest was, there was the church: it felt like the task of the lay people was to assist the priest in his (and I mean his) ministry. Things are so much healthier now, where the real purpose of the pastor is to support you in the real ministry of the church – the living out of the Christian faith in our families, among our friends, acquaintances and the community which surrounds us. Our job as clergy is to feed, to nourish, to support, sometimes to inspire -- but then to get out of the way, because you are the ministers. So, what it is like to be a priest or pastor? On the one hand, there is a powerful intimacy with people. It is the intimacy of being privileged with the deepest doubts and the most serious questionings and struggles of so many people. What many of us have . . with two or maybe three people in our lives, a priest or pastor will have with hundreds of people over the years. But over against the intimacy is the isolation. For most of my life, when I would walk into a room with my collar on, a hush would settle over the room -- as though the collar represented Holiness, itself. One of the children in my congregation had it differently. When I asked him what the collar meant - “That’s easy,” he said: “It kills ticks and fleas on contact.” The worst came fifty-seven years ago when I announced to the congregation that my wife,Judy, and I had just adopted a baby boy. One sweet, older member of the congregation, Agnes Hungerford, cornered my wife at the coffee hour and with a loud voice that rang through the hall, announced, "What a wonderful way for a minister to have a baby!" (I won’t share my wife’s response to her). The best things about the work of ordained ministry are the people and the enormous variety of challenges and tasks and demands of the work: teaching, preaching, organizing, nurturing, administration, counseling, studying, working with community organizations. The list is endless. The worst part of all that is that no one can do all those things well. Responding, dealing with the expectations of a congregation and oneself is a life-long endeavor – and should never be done alone. I think the things for which I am most proud are also the things for which I am most grateful. Way back in 1966, a fellow college chaplain, John Simmons, asked me to join him in trying to build bridges between the church and a group the church had only oppressed – the homosexual community. I don’t think I have ever been so frightened in my life as I was with John’s invitation – but somehow, through the grace of God, I said yes. That was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Over the years I have experienced such wonderful lives and I’ve always been grateful to have played a part in the church and elsewhere in facing down the evils of homophobia we all know and remember. It has been a quite different experience with the clowning I’ve done. When I was chaplain at the University of North Carolina, I ran into a young man, Kenny Kaye, who had dropped out of school, giving up two scholarships, simply to juggle. He was so talented and so shy: shy and almost completely broke. So, with Kenny’s skill (he ended our act by juggling 3 ping pong balls out of his mouth) – with Kenny’s skill and my professional training in passing the hat, the two of us, with both of us juggling and me doing simple mime pieces, we formed “Uncle Billy’s Pocket Circus” which we performed all over the South. Kenny kept the money and I used the opportunity to share the vision of the Christian faith. For me, the clowning has always been an expression of my faith and of my ministry. It was through the clowning that I saw, more and more, the parables, the Beatitudes and so much of the life of Jesus as the ministry of the fool, the pied piper, enticing us into a different and more compelling vision of life. It was not much later when a social worker parishioner gave me my second big scare by asking me to teach two of her clients who were confined to wheelchairs with very significant cerebral palsy how to be clowns. That experience soon blossomed into “The Care Fools,” a clown troupe of severely disabled clowns who worked miracles wherever they went – real miracles for the people they encountered. Back in 1983, my church in Madison, Wisconsin along with St. Mark’s, Berkeley, where our Robbin Clark was soon rector, were the first congregations in the Episcopal Church (maybe in the country) to provide public sanctuary for political and religious refugees fleeing for their lives from El Salvador and Guatemala. We did so, knowing that as priests and parishioners we would very likely be arrested and imprisoned for doing so. Our first family, like so many along our border, was so kind and so gentle and so committed to their faith; but their bodies were covered with scars and cigarette burns from being tortured by their own government which our country was supporting. They had earned those scars, as Archbishop Romero had earned his death, by witnessing to their faith. That was a side of church that continues to touch me. And this is so important: in just about everything I’ve talked about, I was first inspired or welcomed by lay people. And I hope my ministry has always been within that context. My father always said that one good lay person equals about two priests -- and I have always benefitted from that observation. After my experience in Lawrence, Kansas I was called to a small congregation in Warrensburg, Missouri. I turned them down. because it seemed like a place where the main entertainment in town was probably going down to the barber shop to watch haircuts. But their bishop later called me into his office and said, “Tom, I am so sorry you turned those people down: the one thing that congregation does better than any other is that they do whatever it takes to make really good priests. And that is what I want that for you.” After he said that, my decision was easy: I said yes. And this is what I want to say more than anything else: may their calling be your calling, as well. Lay people, so valuable. Clergy, with our own value. We are, thank God, in this together. Amen.