From: Phil deHaan (dehp@calvin.edu)
Date: Fri Dec 20 2002 - 12:37:29 EST
December 20, 2002 == FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Calvin College graduate, and former professor of religion, Lewis Smedes passed
away on December 19 after suffering a serious head injury in a fall earlier in
the week. The Fuller Theological Seminary professor emeritus had been hanging
Christmas lights at his Sierra Madre, California, home when he fell. He was
81.
Smedes was married to the former Doris Dekker, a 1945 Calvin graduate, in 1948.
They had three children.
Smedes graduated from Calvin in 1946 and from Calvin Theological Seminary in
1954. In 1985 he was named by the Calvin Alumni Association as winner of the
Distinguished Alumni Award, Calvin's highest alumni honor. Smedes taught at
Calvin in the late 1940s in classical languages and then returned to teach as a
professor of religion from 1957-1968. In 1977 he began a tenure at Fuller
Seminary that continued until his death.
In 1987, Smedes gave the first-ever Henry Stob Lectures at Calvin College and
Calvin Theological Seminary on "The Making and Keeping of Commitments." See
http://www.calvin.edu/publications/stob/smedes.htm Those lectures later were
included in an omnibus volume of the first 10 Stob Lectures entitled "Seeking
Understanding."
In 1996 Smedes was a participant in the Genesis series on PBS, hosted by Bill
Moyers. Called Genesis: A Living Conversation, the series gathered thoughtful
and engaging individuals to discover what the Genesis stories say to us today.
He participated in a segment called "Call and Promise," that looked at God's
call to Abraham to leave his home and the promise that he would father a great
nation.
Smedes was a prolific and accomplished author whose 1984 book, Forgive and
Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don't Deserve, remains a landmark work on the
topic of forgiveness. He continued to think, write and speak on the topic up
until his death. In fact, in late November he spoke at a California church on
forgiveness.
"There are two reasons I am talking about forgiveness today," Smedes said.
"First, the single greatest cause of misery and tragedy in our world is the
inability of people to forgive those who have wronged and wounded them.
Secondly, the only cure for the bad memory of a past wrong is the act of
forgiveness."
Smedes also wrote Shame and Grace: Healing the Shame We Don't Deserve, How Can
It Be All Right When Everything Is All Wrong?, Sex for Christians and dozens of
other books that both were critically acclaimed and popular with the people in
the pew.
His 1998 book, Standing on the Promises, was subtitled: Keeping Hope Alive for
a Tomorrow We Cannot Control. That was a crucial theme for Smedes. He liked to
tell the story of painter Michelangelo, who, one night, after a long day of work
painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, wrote: "I'm no painter." But when
the sun came up again, Smedes said, Michelangelo got up from his bed, climbed up
his scaffold and labored another day on his magnificent vision of the Creator.
What pushed him up the ladder, asked Smedes? Hope.
"A person without hope is inwardly dead," Smedes once told the San Diego
Union-Tribune. "There's nothing, nothing, that anybody has ever done without
the power of hope." Smedes added that Christianity is big on hope.
Christianity, he said, provides hope beyond hope. A hope that can keep you going
when you can't find a reason.
And so each day Lewis Smedes continued to labor on his magnificent vision of
the Creator. He had the hope beyond hope.
-end-
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