Rev. Robert C. Smith, interim rector at the Church of St. Luke & the Epiphany, dies at 80

The Rev. Robert C. Smith, 80, of Philadelphia, the interim rector at the Church of St. Luke and the Epiphany in Center City, died Wednesday, Jan. 27, at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital after suffering a brain aneurysm.

In 2012, he retired as rector at the Memorial Church of the Good Shepherd in East Falls.

After retiring, Rev. Smith worked as an interim minister in the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania, traveling from one parish to the next to administer to the needs of parishioners after a priest had moved to another church or died.

On the Sunday before his death, Rev. Smith woke early, about 4 a.m., “to tweak the sermon,” read newspapers, and walk the dog, his wife, the writer Lorene Cary wrote in a tribute on the website Medium. But about 8 a.m. a brain aneurysm burst and caused a stroke.

In Cary’s tribute, she wrote that the two of them had discussed the text for that sermon.

It was from Matthew 4:19, in which Jesus told the apostles Simon and Andrew to follow him, and he would make them “fishers of men.” However, a modern translation said he would make them “fish for people.”

She quoted him: “It’s different,” he said. “One is about changing who you are. The other is just an action.”

In her grief Cary wrote:

“A week after the King holiday, after the 2020 election and the January insurrection, after all the hate and oxymoronic talk of Christian nationalism, the ability to be changed by love, redeemed, seemed as urgent as ever it had been. And besides, well, that was Bob’s Ur-sermon. God is Love; Love calls us to Itself. More love, less fear. Do it. Let Love change you.”

Rev. Smith entered the seminary late in life after having a long career as an English teacher, writer and editor, including a stint as managing editor of TV Guide.

He taught English at Valparaiso, Northwestern, and Texas A&M Universities. Before he arrived at TV Guide in Radnor, he had been an editor at the Saturday Review in San Francisco and managing editor at Columbia Journalism Review in New York.

He met Cary at TV Guide, when she was a newly hired editor. Later, the Philadelphia-born Cary would become an author of several books, including Black Ice and The Price of a Child, and the recent play, My General Tubman. Cary is also the founder of Art Sanctuary, a program that uses Black art to build community.

“He had a sense of justice, of decency and quality,” Cary said of her husband.

The two became members of the Church of the Advocate, when the Rev. Isaac Miller was rector. Then a lay person, Rev. Smith became the treasurer, vestry member, parish administrator, and coordinator of the North Philadelphia church’s capital campaign.

It was at the Advocate that he was called to the ministry, Cary said:

“It was something he felt, when he saw Ike’s hands giving people communion, he felt this was something he should do.”

Rev. Smith studied at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia for two years, and graduated from the General Theological Seminary in 2001. For two years, he was a seminarian at Christ Church in Philadelphia. He was a curate at St. Paul’s Episcopal in Doylestown before he became rector at Good Shepherd.

Robert Clarke Smith was born in March 1940 in Sioux City, Iowa, to Alfred and Elizabeth Clarke Smith.

He was 3 years old when his aunt and uncle, Edith and Carl Peters of Ogden, Iowa, adopted him.

After attending Drake University, he graduated from the University of Iowa, where he attended the Writer’s Workshop. He later earned a master’s degree in English from University of Chicago in 1963.

He was married and divorced twice before he married Cary. With his first wife, Marjorie Smith, he had a son in 1966. In 1969, he married Suzan Smith.

He and Cary were married in 1983 and had two daughters.

“Bob was Zorba the Anglo, with Midwestern reserve covering a low-key hilarious wit, as our daughter calls it, and an adopted child’s experience of abandonment — and willingness to risk, over and over, the miracle of rescue through love,” Cary said.

“Rev. Smith loved books, chocolate, movies, driving, family and mountains. He tracked snow leopards in the Himalayas and took each of his children on special dad-and-me trips, hiking up up up,” Cary wrote.

In addition to his wife, Rev. Smith is survived by a son, Geoffrey; daughters, Laura and Zoe, four grandchildren, a sister and a stepbrother.

Due to pandemic restrictions, the Rev. Smith’s funeral will be limited to immediate family. The family asks that donations be made in his memory to Project Home or the American Civil Liberties Union.