The innovative rector, the Rev. Channing Smith, stresses relationship when proclaiming Jesus Christ’s gospel of justice and love. Though he organized a forum on immigration policy, the parish focuses on its ministry of helping immigrants prepare for their citizenship tests. Members address food insecurity and homelessness by working with the food insecure and the unhoused. Channing is promoting ecclesial egalitarianism as well, delegating oversight authority to clusters of parish ministries.
My responsibilities on Sunday were to preside, preach, and mediate the work of the Holy Spirit as 13 were confirmed, or reaffirm their baptismal vows. It was a blessing to see how Channing, his therapist spouse, Mary, and their seventh grade bound daughter, Olivia, have taken to the saints of All Saints and vice versa. The Rev. Christina Miller, formed in The Episcopal Diocese of San Diego, helped prepare the 13 for taking their courageous step. A longtime friend of All Saints, the Rev. Victoria Kirk Mouradian, was deacon of the mass. Both are associate rectors.
Music director Steven Thomson led the magnificent All Saints choir. Director of administration Beth Mohon organized everything. Channing and his folks sent Kathy and me home on the wings of beautiful words. They even put our names up in pavers. Thank you, dear friends in in Christ.
I did take some time to mull the story from Matthew’s gospel about the disciples receiving authority to heal in Jesus’s name. I wondered what happened to that in the lives of us latter-day apostles. Gathered in the name and spirit of a resurrected body, we naturally ruled out blaming old-timey magical thinking about miracles.
Another explanation is that the apostles, all together in one place for Pentecost Day, had the power, but lost it. They had been drenched in divinity, only to be drowned in their humanity. We had been of one faith; but we fell apart into 10,000 denominations and sects that can’t even agree whether to ordain and marry people as God made them or use wine or grape juice during Holy Communion. My prescription for restoring the unity, and perhaps the healing authority, to God’s faithful was a return to the golden rule, as embodied in Matt. 7:12.
As my time as bishop diocesan nears its end, it was also my blessing to make All Saints member Geoffrey Rusack a canon of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. Geoff’s legacy in law and business, his magnificent family, and his whole life are lit up by his love of his father, Robert, the fourth bishop of Los Angeles, and his late mother, Canon Janice.
Geoff has been a friend and advisor to each of his father’s successors. He is active in the lives of numerous congregations and a generous supporter of one diocesan event and campaign after another. He still misses his father, who died suddenly in 1986 at age 60, and has given his and Alison Wrigley Rusack’s sons, Hunter, Parker, and Austin, triple measures of his time and devotion. Nothing better can be said of a pilgrim than that he incarnates a commandment. In Canon Rusack’s case, it’s honor thy father and thy mother.
