Isaiah 61:1-8
Hebrews 5:1-10
Luke 24:44-49a

As your presiding bishop, it gives me particular joy to preside at the ordination of your new bishop, John Neil Alexander. The road you have traveled in order to come to this moment has been, at times, difficult and possibly disheartening, but you as a diocese have managed with grace and constancy to arrive at this point, which is both a conclusion and a new beginning. I am deeply grateful to those of you who have been members of the Nominating, Transition and Standing Committees, to Bishop Allan and to Bishop Tharp for the way in which they have served this household of faith, as well as the whole church during this unusual season.

I am grateful too for the presence of the sixth and seventh bishops of Atlanta, Bennett Sims and Judson Child, and for the sign of apostolic continuity by their serving as co-consecrators along with the eighth bishop of Atlanta, and Onell Soto, sometime assistant bishop. And it is a special joy to welcome in the bond of full communion, and as a co-consecrator, Bishop Ronald Warren of the Southeastern Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

“If one member suffers all suffer together” Paul tells us, “and if one member is honored all rejoice together with it.” And, therefore, we who are present from other dioceses, and indeed other communities of faith, come to honor you in electing Neil Alexander to serve you as chief pastor and also to rejoice with you as we ordain and consecrate him your bishop.

In pondering the Scripture that has been chosen for this liturgy, I found myself drawn, first of all, to the gospel reading. In it the risen Christ stands in the midst of his dumbstruck disciples. And, as Lord of the Scriptures, as the Eternal Word, who inhabits and through the Spirit animates the scriptural word, he renders the biblical witness alive and active and sharper than a two-edged sword as it pierces and shatters the grief that surrounds the eleven. He opens their minds “to understand the Scriptures.” He opens their minds by taking them by the hand and leading them through the broad expanse of Scripture – “the law of Moses, the prophets and the psalms” – and possibly through some of the passages that had strengthened and illumined him during the time of his ministry – passages that had deepened and clarified the profound sense of being chosen and called that bore down upon him at the time of his baptism, and that he had to reclaim again and again in times alone in prayer.

But in opening their minds to understand who he was in the light of Scripture, Christ didn’t simply instruct them, or provide them with information; he drew them out of themselves into a new space, a new mode of being, a new way of perceiving both who he was and consequently who they were in virtue of their relationship to him. They were transformed from those who had followed and largely observed into witnesses (martures in Greek) from which we get the term martyrs: those who declare that a thing is true not only with their lips but in their lives. In this sense all of us who have been baptized into Christ are called to be martyrs: to embody the faith we profess by being conformed to the image of Christ through an ever-deepening companionship with the Risen One worked in us by the Spirit of the Son: the Spirit, who – praying within us – makes it possible for us to cry “Abba” “Father” and thereby enter into the intimacy of Jesus’ own prayer making his loving address to God as “Abba,” our own.

The apostles’ new vocation to be witnesses, to be martyrs, means taking into themselves the pattern of Christ’s own life and faithfulness. And therefore, as Christ proclaims, “Thus it was written that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day,” he is saying to all of us that dying and rising is the fundamental dynamic of all authentic witness. This is true, however and wherever we are called to proclaim the good news with our lives that Christ is not simply a totem or exemplar, but the Way, the Truth and the Life. This is no more true of the vocation of bishops, priests and deacons than it is of all of us who through baptism have been buried with Christ in his death and raised with him to newness of life.

Your new bishop, as many of you know, was in his former life professor of liturgics in the School of Theology at the University of the South. One of the fruits of the liturgical movement of the last century (which has profoundly affected patterns of worship in the churches of the West) was the recovery of the understanding of baptism and the eucharist as a proclamation of and participation in the paschal mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection.

While we are familiar with the cross and resurrection, the intimate connection between the two sometimes escapes us and produces a skewed understanding of what it means to live the Christian life. There are those who focus on the cross as the sign of human sin but never go through the cross into the new and abundant life of resurrection. And there are those who see everything from the perspective of the resurrection without being mindful that the new life it imparts can be treated as possession rather than gift, and used to distort and dishonor God’s desire and intent for our flourishing and that of all creation.

The paschal mystery embraces both the cross and the resurrection in a double dynamic set forth in the gospels and the apostolic letters, particularly those of Paul in which the paradox of authentic discipleship is proclaimed: we enter into life by dying; we find by losing; and it is as we face our essential poverty before God that the way is opened for us to experience the riches of Christ’s grace – a lifegivingness which, as Paul knew well, comes to full term, is made perfect, in weakness.

This weakness, this poverty, is not, however, an invitation to some sort of passive resignation, but rather it is revealed to us in the midst of active engagement: in the midst of “insults, hardships, persecutions and calamities for the sake of Christ,” (2 Corinthians 12:10) as Paul tells us. “For whenever I am weak then I am strong;” not with the strength of my own psychological, intellectual or physical effort, though they may certainly be called into play, but with the strength of the risen Christ: “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Phil 4:13)

The passage from the letter to the Hebrews that was just read tells us that “Although [Christ our high priest] was a son, he learned obedience through what the suffered.” What is obedience but the capacity to listen intently for God’s desire at the heart of our lives and the circumstances that life sets before us: not “what do I think given the limitations of my mind and heart, but what does God yearn for, what is God’s project, what is God’s imagination seeking to bring into being.” This kind of deep and costly availability to God’s desire – listening to what the Spirit is saying – invites suffering: the crucifixion of the altitudes and opinions, the unacknowledged biases and prejudices and fears that keep us from entering into that open space spoken of in the psalms where all is reconciled according to God’s own truth and justness. “In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself” and to us, through baptism, has been given “the ministry of reconciliation.”

We have come here this morning to ordain Neil Alexander – a fellow limb of Christ’s risen body and minister of reconciliation – to be a bishop in the Church of God and to serve as ninth bishop of Atlanta. Don’t be fooled by pointed hats, elaborate walking sticks and amplified honorifics before his name. The truth is that the more you put on externally, the more you are obliged to take off within, and the higher you ascend in the eyes of others, the more you are invited to descend into the truth of your own poverty before God. (This is perhaps the most hidden and precious gift of episcopé).

This puts me in mind of the words of that great African bishop, Augustine of Hippo, who, reflecting on the episcopal office, had this to say: “For you, I am a bishop, but with you I am a Christian; one is an office accepted; the other a gift received. One is a danger; the other is safety. If I am happier to be redeemed with you than to be placed over you, then I shall, as the Lord commanded, be more fully your servant.” Augustine lived at a drastic and perilous time both for the Church and for the Western world, yet his confidence, his ground, his security held firm because his sense of himself was derived not from his office as bishop, but from his having been baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ and made thereby a sharer in Christ’s eternal priesthood and ongoing work of reconciling all things to God.

This profound sense of being rooted in the paschal mystery of Christ led the contemporary Brazilian bishop Helder Camara to open himself to the deep demands of the gospel, thereby provoking both challenge to the mighty and hope for the dispossessed. From that vantage point he offers this reflection: “The bishop belongs to all; let no one be scandalized if I frequent those who are considered unworthy or sinful. Who is not a sinner? Let no one be alarmed if I am seen with the compromised and dangerous people, on the left and the right. Let no one bind me to a group. My door, my heart, must be open to everyone, absolutely everyone.”

I ran across these noble words shortly before I was ordained a bishop. They spoke to my heart and I said, “Yes, that is just the kind of bishop I will be.” How naive I was and unaware of the cost involved. What God had done was to entice me with Dom Helder’s words, and what I perceived as my noble intention was in fact God’s agenda with me. The stretching and the reluctant opening of my heart continues, as does the dying to my fears and judgements in order that, over time, and according to the wild and unpredictable motions of the Spirit, I might have, in the words of Paul, the mind of Christ. And what is the mind of Christ? It is a mind transfigured by compassion, a compassion that can embrace and contain all, a compassion that passes all understanding and calls our narrow and sectarian views our into the brilliant light of God’s trinitarian love, reordering and transforming them and enabling our hearts to run free “overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love,” as St. Benedict tells us.

A compassionate heart “burns with love for the whole creation: “for humankind, for the birds, for the beasts… for the enemies of truth and for those who seek to do us evil.” (St. Isaac of Syria) Clearly such an open and expansive and undefended heart is not for us to claim, but to ask God in Christ to work in us through the purifying action of the Spirit – the Spirit who empowers us to bring good news to the oppressed, liberty to those held captive, and gladness to those who mourn.(Isaiah 61) This brings me back to the unrelenting yet lifegiving dynamic of the paschal mystery that we encounter over and over again in the ebb and flow of our lives, whereby we are shaped and conformed to the pattern of Christ.

The ordination of a bishop always takes place in the context of the Eucharist in which the risen Christ, in the full force of his dying and rising, abides in us and we in him. And though the newly ordained bishop presides at the table, he too, along with us, receives the one who seeks to give himself to us in bread and wine.

On this solemn and hope-filled occasion, may each one of us, therefore, along with Neil, receive the bread of life and drink the cup of salvation in a profound spirit of availability and willingness to be caught up afresh through the paschal mystery, into God’s project, God’s mission, of reconciling all things and all persons to God’s self. And may we do so with eagerness, courage and joy. Amen. 
 
 
The Most Reverend Frank T. Griswold
XXV Presiding Bishop and Primate
The Episcopal Church, USA