The 214th Annual Council of the Diocese of Virginia has adjourned sine die – without a day specified for its next session (though we know it will most likely be in late January next year). It was a memorable Council on several fronts. The most significant, was Bishop Lee’s announcement that he intends to resign his office as of October 1 this year. Bishop Lee spoke of the many privileges of his ministry as our Diocesan Bishop summarizing it this way:
As I enter these last months of our active ministry together, I am increasingly aware of what is unfinished. At nearly every church I visit, I think of ways that I might have been a more effective bishop and pastor. I would like to finish this ministry with a sense of accomplishment and completion. But that human desire to finish exposes the distance between what we want and what our faith requires.
By placing the cross in the midst of life, Christian faith says that God is met in wholeness and in love just at the places we experience brokenness, incompleteness and alienation. Christianity goes further and says that unless we walk along paths that take us through these valleys of the shadow, we cannot learn that the way of the cross is the way of life. Our desire for neat and tidy endings can trap us in a past that becomes illusion and that same desire can blind us to a future that could become a promise.
(See his announcement on You Tube here).
The Annual Council had its share of difficult resolutions and debate over the place and ministry of our gay and lesbian members, yet another report on the Windsor Listening Process, the reality of ongoing litigation over property currently occupied by non-Episcopal congregations, and the challenge of creating a balanced budget in a climate of economic fear and uncertainty. There were no “neat and tidy” endings at the end of this Council, but there was an unmistakable reminder of the gift of tested faith and unyielding hope in the figure of a man who has given his all in service to the Diocese of Virginia for the last 25 years.
It has been said that a person’s greatest legacy is not found in the outward signs of accomplishment, such as programs, buildings, and organizational reforms (and admirers of Bishop Lee can legitimately point to these). In the Christian community what abides is holiness. We are given the rare privilege of seeing the kingdom alive and real in a person, in the way they have served others, in the way they have met hardship, in the ways they were tested and still persisted in the work of forgiveness and reconciliation. This is what I have known and seen in the leadership of Peter James Lee for most of my ordained ministry and his example will continue to be a source of guidance and inspiration for years to come. Holiness abides.
