Diocese of Olympia, you made it! After the resignation of Bishop Greg Rickel over two years ago, being shepherded by Provisional Bishop Melissa Skelton over 18 months, conducting an intentional and Spirit-led 14 month search process followed by a quick 4 months between election and consecration, and now with 42 days since Holy Cross Day—but really, who’s counting?—it’s finally all done! We’ve made it!

One of the first questions I was asked when I arrived at D-House in early August concerned the theme for this Convention. The pre-planning team suggested hearing from Isaiah 43: “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” Not a bad guess at all given the beginning of this new era of ministry. But I had spent the previous month packing boxes, sorting through kitchen gadgets, purging books, and saying goodbye to a congregation that I deeply loved.

Back in the era when I took the General Ordination Exams—or “GOEs,” for those in the know—the last part of the four day written exam was often called “Coffee Hour Questions.” This closed book section was used to see if the ordinand had the chops to answer difficult questions from parishioners wanting to stump the chump all while sipping a cup of joe. My seminary classmates and I scoured previous years’ GOEs in order to get a sense of what types of things might come up. Often included in the mix was a random question about the life of some saint. In conversation with our Dean about this, he said, “Remember, it’s completely reasonable to respond with ‘I don’t know, but I know where to look for the answer.’” 

When I learned that the lessons for today’s celebratory evensong would be taken from the Feast of David Pendleton Oakerhater, Deacon and Missionary, I grabbed my copy of Lesser Feasts and Fasts in order to begin pondering this sermon. I looked up the first lesson, and began to read familiar words from the Prophet Isaiah: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’” Isaiah’s text is often read on Christmas Day, and I thought about the many possibilities they opened up for me in describing the good news of Christ brought to David Pendleton Oakerhater and which he also proclaimed to his people of the Cheyenne community in Oklahoma.

In our lesson this morning from John’s gospel, Jesus and his disciples are once again in a boat making their way across the Sea of Galilee, really a large freshwater lake. It was at this same lake that he called his first disciples and began his ministry, and he grew up near there as well. And word had gotten out that he’d doing miraculous things—healing people of various diseases and turning water into wine—and so a large crowd recognized that it was him and followed him up the mountain.

The gospel lesson we just heard is a strange one. If you were paying attention, you may have noticed that there are 18 verses missing out of the middle of our reading, verses 35-52 of Mark 6. And with this splicing of the passage, it reads weirdly too. It’s as if Jesus and his disciples are “traveling by map,” as the Muppets termed it, and this is a montage in a movie with a red line showing all the places Jesus and his entourage are going with quick little clips of the action at each place. In this case it’s the disciples coming back from their mission, and then grabbing a boat to the other side of the lake for some R&R only to be overcome by the crowd, and then skipping ahead to see them take another boat across to Gennesaret and having people meet them there. And then there’d be a scene of them traveling to a bunch of different villages and cities and farms with all sorts of needy folks pressing in all around them to be healed. The action just continues non-stop.

The last we heard from Mark, John the Baptist had taken up a spot at the Jordan River proclaiming his message of repentance. Many people came to him at the water, and he baptized Jesus. As the story picks up today, we learn he didn’t stop his proclamation, and he also didn’t compromise his message. In fact he got pretty specific about the call to repentance for wrongs done, especially when it came to Herod.

And so here we are. Three weeks from tomorrow, I’ll be hopping into a car with Noah and Charlie Brown to begin a road trip on I-90. We’ll be heading west on the MassPike and taking it all the way to the Pacific where it ends in Seattle some 3000 miles later—the longest highway in America. And I can’t believe it. I cannot fully comprehend that I’ll be leaving this place where we’ve lived among you and loved you and raised our kids and done so much good work together for the kingdom. I’ve been able to push it out of my mind until now, staying busy with tasks and graduations and walking a 175 mile Camino in Portugal and Spain. But now there’s no denying it. Our time together is drawing to a close. I’ve got 4 sermons left, and a lot of books to pack.

I’ve always been enchanted with Isaiah’s vision that we heard described in our reading today. “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord,” he writes. In that year when things changed a great deal, Isaiah had a vision of the living God sitting on a heavenly throne high above with the bottom of God’s robe spilling down and filling the entirety of the temple like Princess Di’s long train on her bridal gown back in the day. In that year when a major shift happened in the political realm, God showed up in a new way.

Oh friends, the Spirit moves in mysterious ways.

On this day we remember the way the Spirit moved over the dry bones of the Israelites, how the Spirit was promised by Jesus to be our Advocate and Comforter, and the way she came down at Pentecost in wind and flames. (And yes, I’m intentionally using the female pronoun for the Spirit because she’s also known as Lady Wisdom throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, and it’s good and right to honor that.) We first hear of the Sprit in the way she brooded over the waters of Creation in Genesis, and she continues to hover and move even now making it from Boston to Seattle just yesterday for those two episcopal elections. And she is here with us today which is why we are wearing red, and holding on to Jesus’ promise that the Advocate will guide us into all truth and be present with us throughout all of our days.