There they are—Simon and Jesus. The party is essentially over. Simon’s dinner guests are still chatting and eating, wondering what happened. The woman who came in from the street and wept at Jesus’ feet, washing his feet with her tears, drying them with her hair and anointing them with precious ointment has gone. She heard Jesus’ words of forgiveness and has walked out of the house and into new life. She is gone, and the other guests at the table seem to be unaware of all that’s gone on, but Simon and Jesus remain. Can you see them? Still reclining at the table. Looking at one another. Jesus looks at Simon, and Simon looks back at Jesus—perhaps wondering what to do next.
Simon has just learned what happens when Jesus is invited into one’s life. The thing about Jesus is that he always goes where he’s invited, and he’s a very persistent guest when he gets there. So what do you do with Jesus after you’ve got him?
Yesterday, our diocese gathered in convention to elect our next bishop. Two hundred six delegates and 114 clergy gathered and invited the Holy Spirit into our midst. And the Spirit came. And, on the second ballot, we elected the Ven. Mary Gray-Reeves to be our next bishop. Those of you who were at the 10 o’clock service last Sunday may have met her. She was the tall woman with a collar who sat with her husband, daughter and son right over there.
We elected Mary to be our next bishop, and the secretary of convention and the president of the Standing Committee called her with the news and to ask if she would accept our call. She said she would. Then the results of the second ballot were read to the gathering, and Bishop Romero pronounced that we had an election. And we applauded and shouted and made all kinds of happy noises. Then someone held a cell phone to the microphone, and our bishop-elect spoke with us from her home in Florida, and we made more happy noises. After our phone call ended, we signed our names on the certificates of election. Then we prayed in thanksgiving for God’s grace and the movement of the Spirit among us.
After our closing prayers, it was time for lunch. Bag lunches were waiting for us outside the gym where we met, and most of us were very ready for them. It had been a long, intense morning. As we ate, the questions began. When will she be here? What will she do? What’s going to happen on down the road? How is our life together going to change? Even more amazingly, answers began to pop up here and there as we began to try to bring some certainty into the transition that is ahead of us. Now that we have elected a bishop, all of us are going to be learning what has been clear to the Search Committee for some time: when we invite the Holy Spirit to be with us, life changes in ways we can’t begin to imagine. Like Simon reclining at the dinner table with Jesus, we are wondering what to do next. We’re wondering what we’re going to do with this bishop now that we have her. And, like Simon, we are going to be finding out that the Spirit who brought her to us and helped us recognize her and helped her recognize us will be sticking around.
Right now, there is no way to predict exactly what will be happening as we build our relationship with our new bishop. We do know that past actions are the very best predictor of future behavior. If that’s so, we can assume that our new bishop will help us stretch in ways that will build a more flexible multicultural approach to our communal life. We can assume that she will identify our gifts we may not know we have and help us grow into them. We can assume that she will call us to increase our responsiveness to the injustice in our world. We can assume she will tell us the truth— even when we would rather not hear it. We can assume that she will be a compass needle, always pointing to God’s grace among us and calling us to live in grateful response to that gift. And—we can assume that she will lead us to places we would rather not go.
We can count on there being days when our prayer may be similar to that of a small child whose sibling had just been born. That night, just before bed, the child prayed: “Dear God, thank you for our new baby. It’s very nice, but I really wanted a puppy.”
Our bishop won’t always be what we want her to be. Some of us want her to be our savior. She won’t. She is not our savior. We already have one of those. She is not a magician who can make all our differences disappear. We are each called to reconcile ourselves to each other and to learn to celebrate our diversity in the body of Christ. She is not a Pied Piper who will fill our churches. We are called to share with others the Good News of Christ that transforms our own lives. She is not a reflected and projected image of our hopes and fears. We are who we are, and she is who she is: a woman who knows who she is and knows what she’s called to do in the Name of Christ.
So what is she called to do when she comes to be with us? First and foremost—to use her own words—she is called to facilitate a relationship of becoming between God and individuals and groups. A relationship of becoming. Becoming more deeply rooted in God’s grace than in our own sense of right and righteousness. Becoming more responsive in our mission and ministry to the world. Becoming more able to live into our faith as the people of God in this place.
She is called to be a bishop with us—learning to be a bishop as we learn to be a diocese. She is called to challenge us—to challenge us to be the diocese God is calling us to be. She is also called to nurture us—to help us live into our call to be a graceful, loving, trusting and inclusive community. And she is called to be with us—teaching us, loving us and nurturing us with the sacraments of the church.
I don’t know what we’ll do with her, but I do know what she’ll do with us. I guarantee she will bring courage and compassion, honesty and respect to her interactions with us, and that she will call us into becoming the people God creates us to be.
Thanks be to God.
Yay.