Sermon at Dick Trelease's Funeral

Richard Mitchell Trelease, Jr.
April 16, 1921 - February 25, 2005

C. Blayney Colmore, III
St. John’s Cathedral, Albuquerque
Thursday, March 3, 2005

Lo, promises the prophet Isaiah to God’s discourage, disgraced, defeated, downcast people…Lo, I will make for all people’s a feast of rich food, a feast of well aged wines.

This is that feast.

“Did you know, Dick asked me one day, soon after he had hired me to be his curate in Akron, hoping to shake me loose from my parochial eastern Episcopal roots, “Did you know there are more Methodist churches in the State of Ohio than there are Episcopal churches in the entire United States?”

It would appeal to Dick’s sense of irony, of God’s stealth, that this Eucharist, in which we mark and celebrate his life, falls on the day our Church calendar remembers John and Charles Wesley, brothers, Anglican priests whose passionate preaching of God’s transforming love in the remote reaches of the southern frontier of colonial America became so powerful it could no longer be contained within the bounds of the Anglican Church, so it spilled, scandalously, into a new unseemly creation we now know as the Methodist Church.

What, one wonders, might it look like for Isaiah’s promise of power, of a sumptuous feast, formed from bitter defeat, from the remnants of our broken lives, to leap from the dusty leaves of our Bible into the consuming heat of human flesh?

Maybe it would look like the Wesley brothers in the wilds of Georgia, or like this Eucharist. And perhaps like the 84 years of the divine roller coaster ride we have gone on with Richard Mitchell Trelease, Jr., whose brazen, unbalancing sponsoring of God’s overpowering love stirred our hunger for a taste of God beyond boundaries. Of God beyond God.

For Dick Trelease, who taught me how to be a priest and made me glad I was, loved power passionately. His final skirmish was with the powers of darkness that threatened, if he refused to yield, to snatch from him his beautiful full head of hair. Dick, of course, refused to yield, and, he died with every hair, still numbered by God still intact on his handsome head.

So this homily is about power and passion, gifts entrusted to us by God, for a season, and about Dick’s lifelong, brave, sometimes reckless exercise of those gifts.

At first glance his passionate love of power looked to be for the usual reasons. Dick was a classy guy with classy appetites. Cars, (the Akron parish gave the Rector a new car every year, but in the interests of ecclesiastical modesty, insisted it be a Chevrolet. What the vestry may never have known is that Dick colluded with the local dealer, packing so much horsepower beneath the hood of that Chevy that he was finally driving a virtual Corvette in Caprice clothing) clothes, rich food and well aged wine, music, literature, success, professionally and in his personal dealings with people. Dick grabbed for the gold without apology, and often grasped it.

But to understand Dick and power, and passion, you must look at how he used it, and how it was for him when, by the world’s measure, he lost it.

Much as he loved power’s trappings, Dick understood his legendary energy and the way power seemed to seek him, as for God’s purposes even more than for his own. And he believed he was meant to use it to do what he could to battle injustice and unfairness. Set things right. Because he read the Bible as the story of God’s passionate love affair with the world, a drama in which God and God’s minions never rest so long as one person remains in anguish.

In 1966, Akron, like all America’s old industrial cities, was seething in its decaying core with unemployed African Americans who felt trapped. The Council of Churches wanted to run a full page ad in the Beacon-Journal calling for fair housing, for a bill that would require real estate agents to sell anywhere to anyone who had the money. Sounds pretty basic now, but in Akron in 1966 it was anything but. And when Dick came to the vestry and said he wanted St. Paul’s Church, St. Harvey’s-in-the Polo Field, to take the biggest piece of the ad, the Senior Warden, President of one of the nation’s major rubber companies, made it clear he would fight it to the end.

Though Dick was patient, compassionate and understanding, he was also resolute and crafty. He did his homework, lobbying other members of the vestry, spending endless frustrating and, as it turned out, futile, hours with the Senior Warden. In the end, Dick prevailed. He was a hero to me, but it was an expensive victory. He was anathema to that Senior Warden who never forgave him.

As the youngest, greenest curate, I got myself elected President of the Summit County Committee for Peace in Viet Nam. Only when I became a rector and had my own hot-headed curates, could I know what it must have cost Dick when my picture appeared on the front page of the newspaper the next day. To hear him tell it in the announcements the next Sunday, you would have thought I had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

When Dick Muir and I went to the March on Washington, the one best remembered for Norman Mailer’s drunken call from the steps of the Pentagon for revolution, our brave boss again stood on the chancel steps and announced that we represented him and the whole staff.

Dick died on the cusp of St. Matthias’ Day. All we know about Matthias is that he was chosen, by lot, to fill the spot left vacant by Judas’ suicide. Must have been a daunting assignment. It fell Dick’s lot to be tapped by God for the risky business of sponsoring God’s passionate, unrelenting engagement with the world, and Dick accepted the job willingly, eagerly, brilliantly, if sometimes intemperately.

Even after he was brought low, Dick’s conviction never wavered that his vocation had not been rescinded. I talked to him after he had taken his first job after bishop, managing the men’s accessories in a department store. I dreaded the conversation. I need not have.

“I love it,” he told me, with that trademark energy in his voice. “The people I work with have all been beaten up by the world in various ways, and they are hiding nothing from each other. We are a band of brothers and sisters, bound fiercely together by our wounds. I can’t wait to get to work every morning.”

Our enemies reveal as much about who we are as do our acolytes. Dick’s enemies were, inevitably, those determined to manage on their own terms the frightening embrace of God’s transforming love. Not that Dick, or any sane person welcomes, without reservation, the unmanageable encounter, but those who trust God with the kind of daring Dick did, are in for a wondrous ride.

You’ll have to ask Carol and Kolu and Chris and Phyllis, and others I don’t know about, what a ticket on that ride has cost those closest to Dick. There is always a price tag. For me it has proved as priceless as the prize we claim for the world in this unlikely feast, made from the failure of the one whom we call Christ. The broken body, the spilled blood. Soul food. Dick was the one who taught me that daring to come to this table will take us on an adventure none of us would likely sign on for knowing the full story. And that when the moment is offered, swallow hard, and seize it. Because, as Dick liked to say, it is the only game in town.

So, with a taste Dick’s daring, Lent be damned. (Sung) Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast.