Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Bishop Dabney Smith’s sermon delivered Sept. 15 at his investiture service at St Peter’s Cathedral.

What are we doing here? I’ve never been to one of these kind of services before, so I thought I would take the opportunity to offer, with great accuracy and clarity, what we’re doing here.

Well, first, we are gathering as a diocese. But more than that, we are gathering as the Church of Jesus Christ, where we have with us in the life of our diocese this day ecumenical representatives, bishops from other dioceses including Mexico. We have the bishop of Georgia, whose father was the bishop of the Diocese of South Florida, before it became Central, Southeast and Southwest Florida, so we have historical and familiar continuity.

We also have each other — simply gathered for worship representing the various and distinct aspects of our life in the diocese in common, representatives of the Standing Committee, Diocesan Council, the youth. We have leaders, clergy and lay people, and members of congregations. We are gathered as a diocese for worship. That’s the first thing we’re doing.

The second thing is we’re officially marking a transition, a transition in the lives of at least two individuals, but also the lives of their families and an official transition in the life of the Diocese of Southwest Florida.

How we are doing that is the third point. We are using ancient and specific gestures and symbols to articulate episcopal responsibility for a specific jurisdiction. I’ve been called to be the bishop of Southwest Florida, not Southeast Florida. I am blessed to work in this diocese among and with you and nowhere else. That’s just the way we work.

Finally, we’re liturgically expressing continuity, and this is perhaps the most important thing we are doing. We are liturgically expressing continuity with the apostolic age. Please hold onto that.

This celebration is intentionally rooted in the mission of the apostles, but not because of me. Frankly, this isn’t really about me. It’s because the Church is defined by apostolic action. The Church is defined by being sent on mission.
And what we’re doing this day is prayerfully reminding ourselves of what we are all about.

If and when we allow ourselves to listen carefully to Holy Scriptures, we will note there is, indeed, a unifying theme in today’s readings, set apart regarding the mission of the Church. Here it is, in case you didn’t pick up on it: God is passionate for the peoples of the Earth. Or to use the language of the Bible, “all nations.”

It may have been stunning for the people in Isaiah’s time to hear the prophet say, “in days to come, the mountain of the Lord,” talking about God’s presence and purpose, “will be established and all the nations shall stream to it.” Words, I suspect that the chosen people reacted against, somewhat, when they realized that God was choosing, through them, all peoples.

“The nations will come before the Lord and be judged and in their judgment, they shall then beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and nation shall not lift up sword against nation.”
Said another way: Coming before God, the nations will be so transformed, they will be changed from being destroyers of life into sustainers of life.

When we turn to the letter to the Ephesians, we find very simply that the writer is saying the barriers that have separated people from one another are broken. The barriers are down. We are told, “Remember, you were, at that time, without Christ talking to the nations who were not of the chosen ones. But now, in Christ Jesus, you who were once were far off have been brought near.”

And it goes on to say that the dividing wall is broken down and, therefore, so is the hostility between us. You might note that that sounds very much like what the prophet Isaiah is saying, “Neither shall they learn war any more.” The hostility that breaks people is broken because God desires and is passionate for all the people.

It’s often helpful when we’re reading Scriptures to find what is going on, on either side of the readings we hear in church. And in this case, we hear about the utter, inexpressible fullness of God’s grace. “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved and raised up with him so that in ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us.”

God is passionate for the peoples of the earth.

And finally, we hear from Luke about Jesus’ sending of the 70 disciples. Sent by Jesus with urgent mission, to go out and not search for better places to eat, like I probably would … But to find people and seek to build community with them, to care for their physical needs and to proclaim the gospel of the Kingdom of God, Jesus Christ, with us.

The key, many biblical scholars believe about this passage, has to do with the figure 70. The preponderance of evidence points itself mainly toward Genesis, chapter 10, in which all nations of the earth are described, and chapter 10 ends with this: “These are the families of Noah’s sons, according to their genealogies in their nations and from these, the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood.” And there are 70 of them.

And we can presume that Luke is using this sending of the 70 disciples out before Jesus that it’s pointing forward to the beginning of the Church in the day of Pentecost when the Church realized it was being sent to the nations, to all the peoples of the earth. The love of God, through Jesus Christ, the Scriptures are unifying in voice to tell us, is to be proclaimed to all. 

I would invite you to listen again to the prayer we prayed this morning. “O God, you have made of one blood all the peoples of the earth, and sent your blessed Son to preach peace to those who are far off and to those who are near: Grant that people everywhere may seek after you and find you, bring the nations into your fold, pour our your spirit upon all flesh, and hasten the coming of your kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Now you may not know that that particular prayer for the mission of the Church has been in use in our Episcopal Church since the late 19th century. It was composed by the missionary bishop of Calcutta, India. His name was George Edward Lynch Cotton. The church gravitated toward this prayer in a time when the church globally began to realize the need for greater fervor in proclaiming mission to all the nations. So we have been using this prayer ever since.

You may not know — but you should — but this prayer is found in Morning Prayer in the Daily Office. And if you didn’t know this, you need to know this truth: The daily offices in the Book of Common Prayer are not designed for professional Christians. They were put together so all of God’s people may be praying, in common, the prayers of Christians across the globe. And you need to recognize that in the daily office, the prayer for the mission of the Church is an expected prayer to use daily.

And don’t you think we can assume that if the prayer for the mission of the Church is to be used by Christians daily, that the prayer for the Church to be involved in mission is expected by and for all the Christians?

The one thing we can always recognize about prayer is that prayer is always going to change us, the people that pray. And when we gather or even when we kneel or sit at home, in private, and pray for the mission or the Church, we’re praying for ourselves to be involved in mission.
The mission of the Church, we are informed, is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.

The mission of the Church is driven and empowered by regular, ordinary people.

When my mother was dying just recently, we began to see that she was clearly in transition, seeing things that we could not see, reaching out for something, somewhere. My family remarked “she’s living in two worlds now.” And I struck me almost immediately: Living in two worlds — that’s a rather healthy way of describing the life of the baptized. We are constantly and continually living in two worlds. We belong to God’s kingdom while we live in the kingdoms of the world.

Ephesians tells us we belong to the household of God even while we remain in our own households. Wherever we are, we the baptized are always connected to the apostolic mission of the church. We are connected completely to Jesus sending the 70 to the Holy Spirit descending on the apostles and sending them out to every corner of the earth, even if that corner is Fourth and Second in St. Petersburg.

The mission of the Church, it is who we are. It will not be the same work it was for the 70. St. Peter’s Cathedral will function to offer radical hospitality. It will not be the same work as St. John’s on Pine Island, still helping a community recover from the ravages of a hurricane. It is not the same work as St. Giles in Pinellas Park, trying to offer housing for low-income elderly residents.

In this diocese, every congregation, from Brooksville to Marco Island, will not be doing the same work. But the mission work that they do will be for the same God who called to all the nations through the prophet Isaiah.

That’s what we’re doing here this day. Following the model that we get from Luke’s description of Jesus sending out the disciples out ahead of him to build community, to take care of the needs of those they found and to proclaim the Good News. We find as we pray for the mission of the Church as the baptized, corporately and individually, every single day, our purpose is to pray, simply, for the mission of the Church.

We are also to be persistent and persevere. Frankly, things will not always work out and we will be discouraged but we are not to remain in a spirit or attitude of discouragement. For if we went on just a little bit in Luke’s gospel, Jesus said to the disciples he was sending out, even if they don’t welcome you, he says, “yet know this: The kingdom of God has come near.”

What we do this day is intimately rooted in the mission of the apostles. And remember — As we gather this day as the Diocese of Southwest Florida, this mission of the Church is not in addition to who we are. It is who we are.