From: Phil deHaan (dehp@calvin.edu)
Date: Thu Jan 09 2003 - 13:03:01 EST
January 10, 2003 == FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Family and friends of Lewis Smedes will have a chance to remember his life on
Monday, January 27 with a 3 p.m. service at Calvin Christian Reformed Church in
Grand Rapids.
The upcoming service will feature participation from a wide variety of people.
Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., president of Calvin Theological Seminary will preside
over the service (to which the public is invited). Tributes will be delivered
by Smedes' children, Cathy and Charles, his granddaughter, Emily, and friends
Clarence Boomsma, Max DePree, Joan Kromminga and Jon Pott. Alvin Plantinga and
Nicholas and Clare Wolterstorff will read Scripture. Alvin Hoksbergen will
deliver a message. Calvin CRC pastor Scott Hoezee will host the gathering and
Kenneth Bos will serve as organist.
A Calvin College graduate, and former professor of religion, 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 have three children: Cathy, Charles and John.
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 1970 he began a tenure at Fuller
Seminary that continued until his death.
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. 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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