The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon
Presentations: Frank Allan
A Funeral Homily for JERRY ZELLER given on July 12, 2008, by Frank Allan, Retired Bishop, Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta
I met Jerry Zeller fifty-five years ago when I was a freshman at Emory University. He was curate at Holy Trinity and chaplain to the Episcopal students. Jerry was the first normal preacher I had ever met, though I must admit that my contact with clergy was quite limited. Jerry was a mentor, a friend and a colleague, and it is because of him that I became a priest. During the summers when I was in seminary I worked for him in two parishes of the Diocese of Florida where he was vicar and rector. There, one of the clergy told me that Jerry was the most effective priest in the diocese.
Effective means that one is able to make things happen, to get things done, to be active, powerful, energetic, competent. All of that was true about Jerry. But I have pondered that definition over the years. What is it about someone that makes him or her “effective”?
What was it about this man that drew so many people to him--all sorts and conditions of them, whether Christian or non-Christian, rich or poor, white or black, scholarly people or ordinary people he’d meet in the street, people in parishes, in a restaurant or in the classroom, the people who ministered to him in his last days or hours? He made an instant connection. Yet he never allowed himself to be the focus of attention, or allowed a cult to form around him. Jerry was able to go into struggling parishes and turn them around, or into the classroom to challenge his students or prick their curiosity. He empowered people and energized them. As a priest he was not interested in ecclesiastical millinery or pomp and circumstance liturgy or the prerogatives of clerical office, but he was interested in people as teacher, pastor, prophet and friend.
What was it about Jerry? I couldn’t put my finger on it; then not too long ago I came upon a re-run of the 1970s movie Little Big Man, a satiric and stinging allegory about American imperialism, starring a young Dustin Hoffman. And I got my answer.
Little Big Man was a white man who was taken in as a boy and raised by the Cheyenne. Throughout his life he wove in and out between the Cheyenne and the white man’s cultures. The Cheyenne called themselves the tsis-tsis-tas, which simply means “the people,” or more appropriately, “the Human Beings.” There were the Pawnees or Lakota, Sioux or white men, and then there were the “Human Beings.”
Little Big Man’s mentor is Old Lodge Skins, the Peace Chief of the tribe. There is also a war chief. Little Big Man asks Old Lodge Skins, who he calls Grandfather, about the difference between white men and human beings. Grandfather says,
The Human Beings believe everything is alive. Not only man and animals. But also water, earth, stone. And also the things from them. But the white man, they believe that EVERYTHING is dead. Stone, earth, animals. And people! Even their own people! If things keep trying to live, white man will rub them out. That is the difference.
Old Lodge Skins adds, “There is an endless supply of white men. There has always been a limited number of Human Beings.”
Sitting there in front of my television set where I watched the movie, it became clear to me: Jerry was one of the limited number of Human Beings. St. Irenaeus wrote in the second century A.D., “Man fully alive is the glory of God.” A more inclusive and more appropriate form of this would be “A Human Being fully alive is the glory of God.”
In his last months and days Jerry and I talked a lot about politics and theology and dying and the Middle East and justice and the poet Rumi and the state of the church and worship. Jerry totally rejected the notion that Jesus was sacrificed on the cross by God or to pay a ransom to the devil or to placate the bloodlust of an angry deity—to be a battered child of God. Nor is our vocation to be battered children of God—but rather fully human sons and daughters who stand before God in praise and thanksgiving.
The Eucharist is not about changing bread and wine into body and blood, but it is about changing us into human beings who are fully alive—the Glory of God. It is the humanity of Christ, not his divinity, that reconciles us to God. Jerry was a minister of reconciliation—a human being who, like a midwife, helped everyone he touched to be birthed, not stillborn but fully alive.
Jerry’s family said that he set the gold standard for dying. At the end he held on tight to his family and friends because he loved them and life so much that he didn’t want to let go. As his wife Pat told me, he was always the last one to leave the party, so much so that they took two cars to most events so that she could go on home when she was ready.
Notice the lessons we read today that Jerry picked out: Isaiah is about a great banquet at the end of time, Philippians is about rejoicing always, and Matthew is about not being anxious. These words from Jerry are for us.
And so, we thank God for Jerry Zeller, the human being who helped all who knew him to be human beings more fully alive. As you know, there has always been a limited number of human beings.
