This Saturday morning, clergy and laypeople from around our diocese will gather to celebrate the consecration of the Rev. Julia Whitworth as the Seventeenth Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. Bishops from around our church will lay their hands on her to “consecrate” her, setting her aside for the office of bishop in the church, a moment that will be led by the Most Rev. Michael B. Curry, Presiding Bishop and Primate of The Episcopal Church, along with the Rt. Rev. Jennifer L. Baskerville-Burrows—Bishop of Indianapolis, where Bishop-elect Julia served prior to her election—and the Rt. Rev. Matthew F. Heyd, Bishop of New York.

This consecration will induct our Bishop-elect into a line of bishops that stretches back two thousand years. Each bishop in our church is consecrated by a group of (at least) three others, each of whom was consecrated by three others, each of whom… and so on. Depending on exactly how you trace the “family tree,” any given Episcopal bishop today is in the 160-something-th “generation” in a line that stretches back through the founding generation of the Episcopal Church in the early days of the American republic, through more than a millennium of the history of the Church of England and the Church in Wales, and ultimately back to the first Bishops of Rome, Jerusalem, and Lyons and to their mentors, the apostles themselves.

This “apostolic succession” is about more than the laying on of hands. What is “handed over” is not a magic blessing, but a message. Each generation of our bishops entrusts to the next the incredible good news that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” Sometimes we Christians live up to these words. Sometimes we betray them. Sometimes our bishops inspire us; sometimes they discourage us. But they embody, for us, the transmission over time of the simple but shocking idea that there is a God of boundless compassion and grace.

I hope that you’ll join me in praying for our Bishop-elect this Saturday! May her ministry among us embody God’s love for us.