The Rt. Rev. J. Scott Mayer

Address to the Annual Diocesan Convention

October 23, 2026

I want to begin this afternoon by expressing my gratitude to the good people of St Paul’s for you generous and gracious hospitality. Thanks go to Jim and Renee Haney for taking the lead on this; thanks to your team; and thanks for the beautiful worship at Evensong last night, as well as this morning’s celebration of the Eucharist.

We held two workshops yesterday afternoon: one from Episcopal Relief and Development regarding Disaster Preparedness, and the other from our Bishop Transition Committee on the Role of a Bishop in the Ever-Changing Church. Thanks go to Race Hodges, Senior Program Officer, Global Disaster Response and Resilience of ERD and David Romanik who is serving on the Bishop Transition Committee.

I want to thank publicly my office staff. It is a privilege and a blessing to serve this diocese alongside this dedicated, talented, and hard-working staff. They serve this diocese sacrificially and joyfully, and I am very fond of them: Elizabeth Jones, Anna Mora, Martha Garcia, Leann Wigner, and Renee Haney. Join me in showing our gratitude.

Every diocesan convention is a time of transition. I would like to thank and recognize those who have completed terms of service on a variety of committees, commissions, and boards:

Mary Emeny completes her three-year term on the Standing Committee, and Jim Haney completes an unexpired term on the Standing Committee.

Ricky Bowman completes a five-year term on the Board of Trustees, and he is running for another term.

Justin Gibson and Mary Tinsley complete three-year terms on the Executive Council.

Chris Wrampelmeier completes a term on the Commission of Ministry, and he has been re-appointed.

Cindy Caldwell has completed a term on the Constitution and Canons, and she has been re-appointed.

Debbie Cox has completed her second three-year term on the Disciplinary Board and cannot be re-appointed.

Bob Hennagin and Amy Haynie have completed one term on that board and have agreed to serve another term.

Edson Way continues to serve as Ecumenical Officer after completing a one-year term.

Chris Wrampelmeier has agreed to be re-appointed as Intake Officer, and Erica Hall has been re-appointed as Church Attorney. Would those who have served in these roles please stand? Let’s show our gratitude.

Four members of our clergy have either retired, announced their upcoming retirement, or are moving.

Deacon Connie Fowler of St Mary’s Big Spring retired from active ministry on November 10, 2025, after 23 years of faithful service.

Father Doug Thomas retired as Vicar of Trinity Albany and as an Assistant Priest at Heavenly Rest on August 31, 2026, after 11 years of service. He is now the Vicar Emeritus at Trinity.

Deacon Melissa Wafer-Cross is retiring from active ministry after serving 27 years at St Christopher’s Lubbock. Melissa will be moving to be near family in California.

Deacon Mildred Stricker, who has served both St George’s Canyon and St Andrew’s Amarillo is not retiring but is moving to Nebraska sometime this Spring after serving 11 years of ordained ministry in Northwest Texas.

That is a lineup of faithful, resilient, talented, persistent, dedicated clergy, and if I’m ever in a proverbial foxhole, I want them beside me. I know Melissa and Mildred are here today. Would you please stand so we can express our gratitude for your presence and ministry?

Speaking of Transition. I want to thank the Bishop Search Committee for their hard work of discernment as they have presented to the Standing Committee and the diocese an outstanding slate of nominees for your next bishop. Chris Wrampelmeier served as the Chair of this committee, Mary Glover served as the Chaplain, and members of the committee include Gretchen Bakke, Kathy Balch, Debbie Copeland, Justin Gibson, Jared Houze, Cara Lindsey, Ricardo Lopez, Kayla McBurney, John McGarr, Rachel Petty, Lilly Plummer, Ashley Powers, and Mary Tinsley.

Now that the slate has been announced, the Standing Committee has moved the work to the Transition Committee. The Chair of the committee is Paige McKay, and the Chaplain is Dann Wigner. Members of this committee include Jo Craig, Melissa Faulk, Dorothy Jackson, Margaret Jenkins, Barbara Leeton, Nazly Lujan, Bikole Mulanda, David Perdue, and David Romanik.

The Transition Committee will have oversight of the Meet and Greet session around the diocese on November 11 through November 14, as well as the election, which is scheduled for January 16, 2027, at All Saints Episcopal School in Lubbock.

This is a very exciting time for the diocese, and for Kathy and me it’s an exciting and emotional time. Now I’m in that season of “lasts” – last visitation, last annual convention, and so forth. This is not goodbye; there will be time for that.

Words are inadequate to express the depth of gratitude that Kathy and I have for this privilege, for our friendships, for your care for us and for our family, for the grace and mercy you’ve shown to me when I’ve messed up.

Each and every sacrament is a grace – a gift – including ordination. It has been a gift to serve such remarkable people, and to travel this amazing landscape. You may say love is blind, and perhaps so, but I’m a witness. I can testify to the beauty of the wide-open prairies, the breathtaking canyons, the sunsets and the stars, and the people – people who will ruin their own pickup truck while pulling a stranger’s pickup out of the ditch.

I’m describing you: your sacrificial generosity, your authenticity, your faith, and your call to express God’s love in word and deed. You are not perfect, thank heavens. But you are real.

So, I’m going to shift gears here to tell a story. The story is set in the mid 1950s in a small storefront shop in downtown Memphis, Tennessee. It’s a simple recording studio owned by Sam Phillips, who would one day be known as the one who discovered the likes of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, BB King, and Roy Orbison. And that’s just the 1950s.

One day a young door-to-door salesman, aspiring to be a songwriter and singer named Johnny Cash, pushed his way into an audition in the studio. We could say, “the rest is history,” and that would be true, but it would overlook an encounter that changed Johnny Cash’s life – and I believe, made this a better world.

Now this story comes from the movie about his life, entitled, “Walk the Line.” This is Hollywood. I don’t know how much of this story is historically accurate or how much is embellished or apocryphal. But I do believe it’s true.

As the story is told, Cash auditions singing a gospel tune which he wrote. It’s all about being saved, and forgiven, and having burdens lifted, and having peace within. It is painfully bad. Judge for yourself with this little sample of the lyrics: “Satan can’t make me doubt it; I’m a gonna shout it.”

Mercifully, Phillips interrupts the audition before Johnny has a chance to finish the song. He says gospel music isn’t selling anymore. Johnny asks, “Is it the song, or the way I’m singing it?” “It’s both,” Phillips replies.

He could have just pushed him out the door, but instead he goes on to tell Johnny rather bluntly: “I don’t believe you. … If you got hit by a truck, and you were lying in the gutter dying, and you had one song to sing before you were dirt, the song that would sum you up, are you telling me it would be THAT song, about burdens lifted and peace within? Or would it be something different, something real? Because that’s what truly saves people.”

Every poet, novelist, songwriter, singer, and preacher should hear, learn, mark, and inwardly digest the words of Sam Phillips. We have a song to sing. And it needs to be real. Like Alexander Hamilton, we don’t want to throw away our shot.

Now every preacher here knows there are cloudy days when we don’t have the energy, the vulnerability, and the time for reflection to sing our song – our real song. And we are amazed and humbled at the ways the Holy Spirit shows up in worship and works through us anyway. After all, our song isn’t about us. And somehow when we preachers need mercy the most, someone in the audience hears something meaningful – and in a way something saving; something they needed to hear. And it’s something we didn’t even say, and once again we preachers are saved by the Holy Spirit.

So, I’m not lying in the gutter dying, and it’s not my last supper on my last night (I hope). And nothing I say will surprise you, for the song I strive to sing is simply my perspective on the Good News of God’s love.

And that perspective is shaped by early childhood memories. At an early age – here in Lubbock – I began to hear some childhood friends refer to God in scary, threatening ways – in ways I had never heard in our home. Kids can have some wild ideas about God and the devil. I suspect it was all age-appropriate stuff. So, I asked my mother about that. I don’t remember the exact conversation, but I remember the message was reassuring, loud and clear. God is everywhere, and God loves you.

I knew always that I was born into a loving family. But it was years before I realized how lucky I was to be shaped by that theology. The only bad religion I ever needed to deconstruct came from the wider culture, and it never resonated with me anyway.

As I look back over nearly 40 years of study, including nearly 35 years of ordained ministry, I can say that this simple theology has served as building blocks for everything I’ve learned and come to believe from seminary to this day. Certainly, there is more to be said about God, and especially there is more to be said about us. I am not advocating an anti-intellectual approach to understanding God and God’s creation. But it is a good start: God is everywhere, and God loves you.

I’m not saying anything new or surprising. By now many of you can finish my sentences. You know that I believe, along with Michael Curry, that if it’s not about love it’s not about God; and that in the birth, life, teachings, parables, miracles, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, God’s love is revealed; and that when Jesus was asked by those trying to trap him which commandment is the greatest, he used the scriptures and answered: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength … and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

And then just as importantly, he said, “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” And that means that all scriptures – and for that matter, our doctrines – depend on and are interpreted through the lens of God’s love.

And this love is something more than affection – however wonderful that is; it is sacrificial. Jesus hangs from the Cross and prays for those who deny, and betray, and crucify him: “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they are doing.” This is undeserved forgiveness, unmerited grace, and unconditional love. And that’s what changes people’s lives. It’s what saves us.

God loves you. And God is everywhere. On that last night before he dies, Jesus gathers his disciples in the Upper Room. He takes a loaf of bread, gives thanks, breaks it, and gives it to his followers and says: “This is my Body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

“Do this in remembrance of me.” “Remember.”

It’s more than remembering something that happened once upon a time in a land far away – however true. It’s not simply that we remember a saving act in our past. The Greek word for “remember” means more than that. It means the past is made present. We aren’t so much traveling back in time to the Upper Room. Rather, the Upper Room and angels and archangels and all the company of heaven are gathered around the Altar. Our salvation history is made present in the breaking of the bread.

And for 2000 years faithful Christians have gathered for this sacred meal, believing that the Risen Christ is made present, believing that there is something more to this meal than a bite of bread and a sip of wine, believing that there is something more to this world than what we can touch, and see, weigh, and measure, believing in the Real Presence of Christ.

We gather not because it’s the only way to encounter and experience the presence of God, but because it’s a sure and certain way. Yes, in some mysterious way Christ is present in bread and wine. Present within, true; but not contained by. Christ is not contained in bread and wine, or in the ambry or tabernacle, or in the sanctuary of this sacred space, or in you and me or all Christians – not any more than Christ can be contained in a tomb by a large stone.

Christ is risen. According to the Apostle Paul, the Risen Christ made over 500 resurrection appearances before the Ascension. I’m thinking of Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary come to the tomb. It’s empty. They encounter an angel who tells them He is risen. In their excitement they run to tell the disciples. And the Risen Christ meets them and says: “Go tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will find me.” Wherever we go, Christ is there already.

We can imagine what the disciples are thinking when Jesus ascends into heaven. It’s easy to imagine that they’re thinking he’s leaving again, even as he says, “I will be with you always, to the end of the age.” He’s not abandoning his followers. Every Ascension Day we pray a prayer that says it best. It’s a beautiful collect, and it should be prayed more than once a year. It begins: “Almighty God, whose blessed Son our Savior Jesus Christ ascended far above the heavens that he might fill all things … .”

Far above the heavens, and filling all things. Transcendence and Immanence. The transcendence and immanence of God is a fundamental Christian doctrine – transcendence meaning beyond, distant, independent, and unknown, and immanence meaning within and all around. Everywhere. Heaven and earth are full of God’s glory. It’s not so much that God is in all things; it’s that all things are in God.

I have a favorite New Yorker cartoon. The cartoon depicts two fleas standing on top of a dog. One flea says to the other: “Do you think there really is a dog?”

I’m not suggesting, nor do I think the cartoon necessarily suggests, that the earth on which we stand is God. I suspect the author is taking a poke at religious skeptics. To me, the cartoon suggests that the presence of God is very near, and we are not aware or awake. In a humorous way the cartoon says, “wake up.”

Throughout history people have been called to awaken us. I’m mindful of poets like Emerson and Thoreau – and recently, Mary Oliver, Annie Dillard, and Wendell Berry. They had a deep spiritual connection to nature, and a strong sense of the connection between all human beings, all nature, and the divine.

Mary Oliver doesn’t want to miss life, and she brings us along on her ride. In her poem, “When Death Comes,” she writes: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing or frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

And then there are those called to awaken us to the disconnection, the alienation, the sin of this world: the prophets. On March 31, 1968, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr preached at the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, also known as the Washington National Cathedral.

He began the sermon by reminding his audience of the story of Rip Van Winkle, who slept for 20 years. When he went up to the mountain for his long sleep, he passed a sign with a picture of King George III of England. When he came down the mountain 20 years later, the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States. He slept through the revolution.

In the sermon, Dr King says the obvious: there are three revolutions happening at once. One is a technological revolution. One is a revolution in weaponry (atomic and nuclear). And one is human rights. And he preaches about racial injustice, poverty, and war. And he expresses his concern that good people are sleeping through the revolution. He is assassinated 5 days later. The title of his sermon was, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” As William Faulkner said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

As baptized people we are called to participate in God’s mission of reconciliation – that all people may be restored to union with God, union with one another, and that we may be restored to our true selves as persons. All three ways of reconciliation are connected, and one doesn’t happen fully without the others. And only God can restore us fully to union.

Two things are true. We are created in the image of God, and we are sinners who live in a fallen world. I am one who believes, along with Thomas Merton, that deep within each of us is a space uncontaminated by sin – we could say, a divine spark. And just as true, we are covered with layers upon layers of a crusted hard shell of fear, selfishness, self-preservation, self-deception – sin. And out of this need for self-preservation, we construct this false self, and it isn’t real – not who we are created to be.

And prophets and poets invite us to wake up. And that awakening can come from the unlikeliest of places. It can happen in a recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee. “You’ve got one song left to sing, and it’s THAT song?”

For half an audition Sam Phillips had only seen an imposter, a phony. It’s not that Johnny Cash didn’t believe in God or believe he was saved – he did. But that song was not Johnny Cash – not yet anyway. The man behind those lyrics was a constructed personality – a personality constructed to try to make it in the music world. And Sam Phillips knew just what to say.

So, Johnny Cash started picking his guitar, slowly at first, and sang from the heart: “I hear the train a comin’, it’s rollin’ ‘round the bend. And I ain’t seen the sunshine, since I don’t know when.”

It’s the Folsom Prison Blues. It’s not that Johnny Cash had been to prison, literally, which made the song ring true. He had not. It’s that Johnny knew what it was to be a prisoner. His childhood family was dirt poor. Johnny picked cotton as a child and worked in a sawmill with his brother by his side. Worst of all, his father was abusive, and blamed Johnny for the tragic death of the favorite son, Johnny’s beloved brother. “The wrong one died,” his father told him. “You are nothing,” his father said. “You are no good,” his father told him again.

Johnny Cash had to live with that. He even believed it at some level, confessing years later that “the good one died; it should have been me; all I ever did was hurt those who love me.”

Johnny Cash knew prison. He sings about that train, passing by Folsom Prison: “I bet there’s rich folk eatin’ in a fancy dining car. They’re prob’ly drinkin’ coffee and smokin’ big cigars. But I know I had it comin’. I know I can’t be free. But those people keep a movin’, and that’s what tortures me.”

Johnny Cash got real. In a storefront in Memphis one day in the mid 1950s, Phillips created an apocalyptic moment for Johnny Cash – an end time. As the death of a career flashed before his eyes – a career dead before it started – Johnny came to life. Something real, something true within him woke up. A little boy who had gone fishing, who was not there in the sawmill with his brother on that tragic day, a good-hearted boy who loved to sing from his mother’s hymnal, and make up rhymes, and listen to country singing on the radio woke up.

For one brief moment – a window in time – something real, and honest, and true, and maybe even holy and divine came to life. It didn’t solve his problems; not for a long time did he come to terms with his childhood, but for a moment he encountered his deepest, truest self.

An apocalyptic moment will do that. The sudden awareness of an end time, a near-death experience (for example) will awaken us to that innermost center – our true selves.

Every Ash Wednesday when the priest places ashes on our foreheads and says, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” we live into a near-death experience. It’s an awakening to what’s important in life.

We see that things which separate us, and divide us, and make us defensive and protective and envious and competitive and cause us to operate out of a posture of scarcity – never having enough, enough security, enough praise, enough sense of accomplishment – all of that fades away in the near-death experience.

Jesus says: “Keep awake, for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”

This passage is known as “the little apocalypse” – Mark’s record of Jesus telling his disciples about the end of time. Stay awake. It can be an ominous warning, like “watch out.” It can be “stay awake” – don’t sleepwalk through life. Don’t miss it.

Every week we process to an Altar, at least in part, because we don’t want to miss it. We gather around consecrated bread and wine, along with the whole mystical Body of Christ, and raise our arms, and open our hands. And we become what we receive: the Body of Christ.

St. Symeon, a tenth century theologian, says this: “We awaken in Christ’s Body, as Christ awakens our bodies. … We wake up inside Christ’s Body/ while all our body, all over, every most hidden part of it, is realized in joy as Him, and He makes us utterly real, / and everything that is hurt, everything that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged, is in Him transformed / and recognized as whole, as lovely, as radiant in His light. We awaken as the Beloved in every last part of our body.”

And that’s good news to a little boy who picked cotton, went fishing, and listened to the radio, and was told he was nothing. It’s even good news for his father. It’s good news for you and me, and the whole world.

God is everywhere. God loves you. In these very challenging and fraught times, let’s stay awake. Let’s stay awake to the sin of the world, and to our own sins. Let’s stay awake to God’s presence. Let’s stay awake to God’s love. And let’s stay awake to the ways God calls us to embody and proclaim God’s presence and love in the Name of the Holy Trinity, One God, in Whom we live, and move, and have our being. You know I love you. May God continue to bless the Episcopal Diocese of Northwest Texas.