Bishop Anthony B. Taylor delivered this homily March 3 for George Sanders’ ordination to the diaconate at St. John the Baptist Church in Hot Springs.
You may be wondering about the connection between the Gospel you just heard and the ordination of George Sanders to the diaconate which we are celebrating in this Mass. “Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with the blood of their sacrifices”? And “the 18 people who were killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them”? And Jesus’ message that “unless we repent, we will perish as they did”?
We read this Gospel because the readings and prayers of the Sundays of Lent are not to be replaced, regardless of what else we celebrate on those days. But I am always amazed at how through the liturgy of the Church as given to us, the Holy Spirit brings to us the very message we most need to hear.
Because, what is Jesus’ message in today’s Gospel? It is that life has a purpose, but we are free to live it according to that purpose or not, and God respects that freedom. The disasters Jesus refers to simply show that all of us will eventually die and Jesus wants us to think about that, so that we will choose to live our few years well: growing in friendship with him, building his Kingdom. Our lives are the time Jesus gives us to “bear fruit,” in contrast to the barren fig tree in the second half of today’s Gospel.
I think that captures for us beautifully George’s long journey to ordination in the Catholic Church, so I would like to describe his journey of faith — often using George’s own words. He began to feel God pulling at his heart at an early age at his home church, St. Mary Episcopal Church in El Dorado, and at age 14 he discussed with his pastor his feeling that God might be calling him to be a priest. His pastor encouraged him to listen to God’s call and follow it with his whole heart and not worry about how it would all come about, but just to trust in God. He also assured him that if he was on the right track, the desire for ordination would never go away.
For George this “right track” had a few twists and turns over the course of the next 30 years, taking him from the Episcopal Church to the Assemblies of God and then to the Charismatic Episcopal Church, for which he was ordained a priest in 1997 after many years of active involvement in catechetical and youth ministry in each of the churches to which he had belonged.
While in the seminary for the Charismatic Episcopal Church, George studied patristics, which the Lord used to open his mind to the unexpected depth of theology of these early Christians and what really got his attention was that they were Catholic, which had never occurred to him before. They had bishops, priests and deacons from New Testament times and by the 200s AD the unity and orthodoxy of the faith was understood to be guaranteed by the communion of the bishops in apostolic succession in union with the successor of St. Peter in Rome.
Once George learned to read Scripture through the lens of the Fathers of the Church, an astounding thing happened: like a lattice work, the apparently contradictory passages of the New Testament, which had troubled him so much as a Protestant, began to fall together and George could see by reading Scripture in this light, how amazingly “faithfully the Catholic Church has lived out the Gospel in minute detail.” These are George’s exact words. This is true regarding the sacraments. Baptism is not an “empty rite” but rather “a dynamic nexus of the grace of God where temporal meets eternal” — George’s exact words too — and effects a real regeneration in the person baptized. And he discovered that our belief in the Eucharist as the real body and blood of Christ “was already a uniformly held belief in the testimony of the early Church.”
In these and in other areas, George says that he was “surprised by truth,” and he goes on to ask, “What does a person of character do when he is surprised by truth and realizes that he had been mistaken in something he had thought was true?”
It would be easier to just ignore the truth and seek to defend the original belief, but that is not an option for a person of integrity. George is a courageous man, so he knows that the “essence of courage is to step forward and act, when to do so is at high personal risk.”
Which is precisely what he did in the year 2000. George heard God’s call once again, but this time God was asking him to lay down his priesthood in the Charismatic Episcopal Church and enter into full communion with the Catholic Church, which he did here at St. John the Baptist Church in Hot Springs.
When George became Catholic, he did not know it was possible for married clergy from some Protestant churches to receive holy orders in the Catholic Church. And upon learning this, he still did not know how long it would take — neither did we, nine years. In this I have learned that George is a patient man — and Brenda is patient too, maybe even more so than George.
In all of this they give eloquent witness to the positive side of the truth expressed negatively in today’s Gospel: namely that our lives have a purpose and we are free to live it according to that purpose for the building up of God’s kingdom, or not, and suffer the consequences.
It gives me great joy to be able to ordain George to the diaconate and then to send him forth to bear fruit abundantly as a deacon today, and then — God willing — as a priest in the near future.
His ordination to the priesthood is already scheduled for Aug. 3 at the largest Catholic church in central Arkansas, Christ the King Parish in Little Rock — and you’re all invited.
