Frank Cedric Smith
Church of the Holy Spirit, Orleans, Massachusetts
Sermon by Fleming Rutledge
October 30, 2010
I am profoundly grateful and honored to be here today. It’s my great privilege to represent Frank Smith’s 32 years as organist-choirmaster at Grace Church in New York City, where I was one of the clergy for a mere 14 years.
I'm not sure that I’m going to be able to talk about Frank Smith without talking about Dilys at the same time. I expect some of you read the article in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about the contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. The writer described the marriage of the composer and his wife Nora. They “formed a tight-knit unit, speaking in one voice to the [outside] world.”[1] Now we can’t say that Frank and Dilys spoke with one voice—quite the contrary!—but a tight-knit unit they most certainly were, as much so as any marriage I have ever seen. When I first arrived at Grace Church in the 80s, I wanted to get to know our esteemed choirmaster, who had already been there for almost 30 years. So I asked Frank if he and I could have lunch. He made it very clear that he wasn’t having any lunch without his wife. Afterwards, when I began to know them both better, I was standing next to the headmaster of the Grace Church School one day when Dilys made one of her fairly outrageous remarks and I observed, “Frank never seems to mind.” The headmaster and I looked at each other for a couple of seconds and then we both said with one voice, “He loves it!” That was part of their secret. Frank’s sweet serenity and unfailing equanimity were not a burden to him, because he had such a lively and freewheeling counterpart.
Were they yin and yang? Were they like two halves of an apple? Or more like a completely emulsified mixture? However we describe their union, it was a blessing to many. There are people at Grace Church still today who remember the moving service they had to renew their vows on their 25th anniversary (their wedding hymn, which we just sang, was “Praise, my soul, the King of heaven”—which says something about where their hearts were fixed). They were both appreciated and loved, perhaps more than they knew. I imagine they were like Baucis and Philemon in the old myth, the elderly couple who did not wish to live without each other and were rewarded in their old age by being allowed to grow together as two trees side by side with intertwined branches.
Well, that’s a classical myth, not a biblical story. The biblical story is much more separation and bereavement. The Christian hope is anchored in the resurrection, but it does not deny the pain and darkness of death. The third and fourth Scripture readings chosen for today give us a panoramic perspective on death and resurrection, encompassing both the cross and the empty tomb. The Christian gospel can never be one without the other.
Let’s hear again a few of the verses that were just read from Matthew’s account of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ:
Behold…there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone…His appearance was like lightning...and for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen…
So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. And behold, Jesus met them and said...“Do not be afraid; go and tell my brethren to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.”
Notice that in just these few verses, we hear four times that the event caused fear, even terror. Why is so much emphasis placed on the terror caused by the resurrection of our Lord?
This biblical feature can be found all through the Old and New Testaments. This “fear of the Lord” requires us to take note of the difference between the resurrection of the dead and “life after death” (or “the hereafter,” to use the title of the new Clint Eastwood movie). The Christian gospel does not tell of a natural passage, or gentle journey, from this life into a similar sort of life on “the other side.” The resurrection of Christ is an earthquake. It’s an invasion. It’s an eruption of the divine life in the midst of this mortal life. It’s an explosion of victorious power in the very heart of the kingdom of Death. The rolling away of the stone cannot be accomplished by human means. I saw a tapestry of the resurrection in the Vatican Museum last spring—it shows the Roman soldiers falling all over each other in terror to get away from the open tomb as fast as they can. In this sense, the resurrection is actually violent. What does this mean?
It means that death is so formidable an adversary that only a greater power can overcome it—a source of power from another sphere altogether, a power so great and so much not of this world that we can only be terrified by it. That’s why all the angelic appearances in the Bible are accompanied by some form of the words, “Fear not.” The Christian life is lived in the beneficent space opened up by those words from on high. It is a space of life in the midst of death, a space of freedom in the midst of oppression, a space of light in the midst of darkness. And so it came to pass that the longtime Grace Church receptionist said a few days ago, “You could tell that Frank walked in the light.”
Walking in the light created by the divine life of Jesus Christ in the midst of a world ruled by Sin and Death does not mean treading on air. In the midst of all the comments about how sweet Frank Smith was, it’s important to hear the words of a former Grace Church vestry member who said, “Yes, Frank was sweet and mild-mannered, but he was also firm and stalwart.” He and Dilys were challenged in serious ways. He served during times of turmoil at Grace Church. The two of them knew sorrow and tragedy. Only they know what that was like, but through it all Frank was firm and steadfast, utterly dependable, a rock He had the quality which is called, in the New Testament, hupomone (also makrothumia). It’s hard to translate. It means patience, but it means patience with great strength. It means long-suffering, but it doesn’t mean being a pushover. It means endurance, but it means endurance “with joy”—the joy of the eternal age (“Count it all joy when you meet various trials—James 1:2). Hupomone was a favorite word of the former Grace Church rector FitzSimons Allison, who liked to call it longanimity—the Christian life steadfastly lived, over the long haul, in the midst of the struggle. The Epistle to the Hebrews, which Frank loved, puts it this way:
Jesus suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore let us go forth to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured…Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name…
Through 32 years of hupomone—“longanimity”—at Grace Church, and beyond, in his time with the people of the Cape, Frank Smith offered up a sacrifice of praise to God. He walked in the light of Christ and everyone knew it. One Grace Church member quoted Scripture when speaking of Frank: “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:20).
The music of Frank’s choirs were “the fruit of lips that acknowledge God’s name.” Speaking particularly of those musical offerings at Grace Church and elsewhere over the decades, Arvo Pärt has something else to tell us. To the writer from The New York Times, who most likely doesn’t know much about Christianity, Pärt said this:
“This old music, when it was written, the focus of this music was the Holy Scripture for composers for centuries. It was the reality for every artist. Through one, you can understand the other. Otherwise, you are like some teachers in the Soviet Union who said, ‘Bach was a great composer but he had a defect: he was religious.’ It means this teacher cannot understand the music of Bach.”
Frank Smith understood the music of Bach, and the music of the other composers who wrote music for Christian texts, and it was a gift for which he was greatly loved.
Everybody I talked to said the same thing: “Everybody loved Frank.” But we should not think of him without Dilys. She complemented him. She made his hupomone more than bearable—she enabled it. It was a rare partnership and, as I feel sure they knew, it was a gift of pure grace.
“Everybody loved Frank.” Was that true? You have probably heard it said that no one knows you better than your successor in your job. Frank’s successor at Grace Church is Patrick Allen.[1] I sent an email to Patrick asking him if he would like to say anything about his predecessor, and he answered by return mail. Before I read it to you, I will make just one observation. Patrick mentions a smile and a twinkle. At first I thought he meant Frank’s smile and Frank’s twinkle and I wondered how he knew, since he never met actually met him. Then I realized he was talking about people who knew Frank. I have read that babies try to imitate the expressions of adults who make eye contact with them. It’s pleasing to imagine that these people who knew Frank actually picked up some of that little smile and that twinkle. He definitely had a twinkle. It was a tiny little sign of what he knew about the joy and, indeed, the humor of serving God. Here is what the present organist-choirmaster at Grace Church, Patrick Allen, wrote to me:
I never actually met Frank, but from colleagues at Grace Church School and from former choir boys I have seen over and over the delight in the eyes and the beauty of the smile lighting the face of the person sharing memories of Frank—memories filled with the love he shared and the profound significance he made on that person’s formation. I have met grown men all over New York City who are Frank’s boys, and without fail that beautiful smile and twinkle of the eye would bloom as they spoke of him and their time in the choir. To God be the glory for Frank’s life and ministry and for all he shared with us. I never met him physically, but he will always be a part of me.
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The words from Hebrews that were read to you by Geoff Smith were chosen by Frank himself to be read at this service.[2] They are words that he loved, and they say so much to us today about the source of his strength and peace of mind—strength and peace that can also be ours, through the Giver:
We have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God…a high priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses, having in every respect been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
The disciples fled from the empty tomb, Matthew tells us, “with fear and great joy.” It is the combination of fear and great joy that defines the gospel. Fear because the realm of God is perfect and all of us are stained by Sin. Fear because Christ was raised by the power of the eternal God, whereas we are subject to Death. Fear because, as St John writes, this world and its ruler is judged (John 12:31). But joy—inexpressible joy—because the Lord who reigns from the right hand of God is the One who intercedes for us poor sinners, at the hour of our death and in every other hour, the One who is ever ready to receive us before his throne of grace, pouring out upon us a never-ending flow of mercy “to help in time of need.” For in the words that Frank Smith kept by his bedside,
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever. Amen.
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