We gather at Convention as a people of hope and faith
by the Right Reverend Thomas Clark Ely, Bishop of Vermont
Mountain Echo, November 2008

Diocesan Convention is just around the corner. It seems like such a short time ago that we gathered in Convention, in the midst of our 175th Anniversary Celebration, to welcome our Presiding Bishop and embrace our commitment to global mission and the priorities of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. This year’s Convention takes up the topic of environmental sustainability as we gather in Rutland to close out our anniversary celebration and look to the future and our ministry of Tending God’s World – NOW!

Our Dispatch of Business Committee is busy with final plans and preparations for a smooth running Convention. The Program Committee is hard at work facilitating the Ministry Fair Workshops and preparing for the Convention Forum with Bill McKibben on Friday, November 7. Choirs are rehearsing to help lead us in our worship. Delegates are studying the budget, resolutions and nominations upon which they will vote. I’m preparing my annual Convention address. Bishop Mary Adelia McLeod is working on her sermon for the Eucharist on Saturday, even as we look forward to welcoming her back to Vermont. The good people of Trinity Church, Rutland, are preparing to welcome us with their gracious hospitality. And I hope that each and every one of you reading this column and this pre-Convention issue of the Mountain Echo is praying for our Diocesan Convention and staying informed by visiting our diocesan web site for all the latest information.

I am deeply committed to the theme of this year’s Convention, and I want to share two recent ways in which I have tried to express that commitment. The first is part of an email exchange I’ve been having with Bill McKibben, our Friday Forum leader and Convention banquet speaker:

“My reading of Deep Economy has deepened my commitment to the issue of environmental sustainability as the most important work/ministry I think I am called to do for the balance of my episcopate. This realization has been building for the last several years beginning with a retreat I attended with the other Episcopal bishops from New England that led to our Pastoral Letter on the Environment in 2003. Part of the challenge will be to live into that commitment when so many other agenda items press in from so many quarters. I pray that your being with us at Convention will help inspire folks in our churches to the kind of radical changes and commitment we all need to make before it is too late. We need to hear the reality of the situation, confess our sins, promise amendment of life and live into the hope that resurrection faith proclaims. I know from your writing and what others have said about you that you are a person of deep faith and so I want to encourage you to speak to us from that place as you are able and comfortable doing. My hope is that this Convention is the beginning of the next chapter of our diocesan commitment to do all that we can to heal and sustain the earth—God’s creation and our temporary island home.”

The second expression comes from a portion of my sermon on Sunday October 12, 2008, when it was my great joy and privilege to share in the celebration and dedication of the new solar installation project at Saint Barnabas Church, Norwich—a project that will provide all the electric energy needed by this parish and more:

“What I believe I have come to celebrate with you today is not that you’re the first church in our diocese to ‘go solar,’ or that your electric bill will be reduced, or even that you might benefit others by returning electric power to the grid, all of which are good things to celebrate. Our celebration is about that, but it is about more than that. It must be about more than that, or else we are simply celebrating ourselves and our accomplishments when what we need to celebrate is God’s creation and the community of this planet—human and otherwise—that is given life through that creation.

“Yes! Today we have come to celebrate that gift of creation, and yet still there is more. For even in the midst of our celebration we gather to acknowledge the grave danger God’s world is in and how precarious the future is for all life that is sustained by it. Perhaps it is an odd sort of way to think about a celebration, to be sure, but this joy and this concern are both very present and very real. The creation God has given us, the creation we love and rely on for life, the creation that bears witness to the glory, the majesty and the mystery of God’s grace and love is in danger of death, and we are both its greatest enemy and its greatest source of hope. We who love it have brought it to this brink, and we must love it enough to bring it back from that precipice.”

So it is that we gather in Convention in just a short time and amidst all the economic, social and environmental concerns of our present time. We gather as people of faith—both those who will be present in Rutland and those whom we represent in our congregations and the communities we are called to serve. We gather as a people with a heritage—175 years and more of good and faithful witness to God and service to God’s mission in the world. We gather as a people of conviction—baptized disciples of Jesus Christ who know the power of God at work in our lives and who proclaim our commitment to “pray the prayer of Christ, learn the mind of Christ and do the deeds of Christ.”

We gather as a people of hope—heralds of Christ’s resurrection and stewards of God’s creation who know that Christ’s reconciling work in the world has been entrusted to us. And we gather as a people of faith, committed to the promises of our Baptismal Covenant and confident in God, “whose power working in us can do more than we can ask or imagine.”
All of this is part of our 175th Anniversary celebration as a diocese, so be a part of this Convention in whatever way you are able. If you can’t be present in person, please be present in prayer, through the delegates from your congregation and through the continuing work that will flow from this Convention as we faithfully seek to Tend God’s Creation – NOW!

See you at Convention,
+ Thomas

Go to index of Bishop Ely's Mountain Echo columns and letters to the diocese