The following is the full text of Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold's sermon at the installation service:

Readings: Isaiah 6:1-8; Ephesians 4:1-8; 11-13; John 15:1-11

It is a great honor and a profound joy to break the bread of the word on this occasion. The deep friendship that exists between our two churches on many levels is a gift that I cherish. There are so many bonds of affection between our two provinces, and between countless individuals in the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada. It is my privilege to bring to you today the greetings and the love of your brothers and sisters in the Episcopal Church.

This is not an easy time in the life of the church. And, it is certainly not an easy time in the life of the world we are called to serve in Christ's name. Anxiety, confusion, fear and anger abound.  Divisions and polarizations are the order of the day. And therefore, as you begin a new season in the life of the Anglican Church of Canada--having chosen Andrew Hutchison to serve as your new primate--it is important to pause and remind ourselves what the whole enterprise of being church together is all about. Here we are offered guidance by the readings we have just heard, knowing that it is the risen Christ who opens the scriptures to us and renders them "living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword."

But first, we must remember that the church is called into being not by us, but by God through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. As such, the church is never ours. And, we become part of the church not by joining, or by signing up, so to speak, but through an act of incorporation. We become part of the church through baptism whereby we are taken into Christ and made limbs and members of Christ's risen body. In this way Christ lives his life in us. Through us Christ continues to exercise his ministry of reconciliation, drawing all people and all things to himself in the unrelenting force of his death-defying love.

The letter to the Ephesians tells us that "each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ's gift." It then goes on to enumerate various modes of ministry which, together, build up the body of Christ as we "come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ."

What do these words mean, and what is "grace according to the measure of Christ's gift"? Christ's gift is not primarily a competency or a particular skill, but the gift of himself in the form of love. "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love." In other words, Christ's passionate love for the world obliges him to hold nothing back, and to continue to draw all things to himself by living his risen life in us and loving through us.

"It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me," cries St. Paul. Christ lives in us not by means of annihilating our fundamental personhood, but rather by indwelling it in such a way that the "Spirit of [God's] Son" bears witness with our spirit: making it possible for us to have the mind of Christ; to pray as Christ prays; to see as Christ sees; to love as Christ loves. Such is the nature of the grace we are given "according to the measure of Christ's gift."

But, let us be clear: the love of Christ dwelling within us isn't a warm and cozy feeling for us to revel in and enjoy. Love possesses an urgency which directs it outward toward others; love by its very nature must give itself away. Love, Paul tells us, does not insist on its own way: "it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." By these words I believe Paul is trying to suggest something of love's expansive and supple nature. Love can see below the surface of things and can find hints of God in often the strangest and most unlikely places and situations. Love opens us to constant surprise and supplies us with sufficient imagination and resiliency not to be utterly undone by God's wild and unpredictable ways.

"Consider the work of God; who can make straight what he has made crooked?" This is how the author of Ecclesiastes puts it. And yet, how frequently we do try to force God to fit our preconceived notions of how God should and ought to act. I wonder how often the prayer "your will be done" is a genuine seeking of God's desire, rather than an invitation to God to confirm our previously arrived at conclusions?

The love of Christ, given root room within us, is a dangerous force--to say the very least. We know that--as was the case for St. Peter--love can take us where we do not wish to go. It can require us to die to our desire for safety. It can demand a relinquishment of our carefully crafted plans, of our fondly held views, and of our clear expectations.

"Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing there is a field. I'll meet you there." Thus exclaims Rumi, the Sufi poet and mystic. The field is the "open place" of the psalmist. It is the pasture into which Christ the good shepherd leads his sheep. This field is the force field of the divine love which sustains the universe.

Love does not obliterate difference or do away with divergent points of view. Instead, love takes us to a new place--making it possible for me to recognize Christ embodied in you and the pattern of your discipleship. And, love gives you the ability to discern the image of Christ in me and in the pattern of my discipleship.

Here I think of some words of Thomas Merton: "If I allow Christ to use my heart in order to love my brothers and sisters with it, I will soon find that Christ, loving in me and through me, has brought to light Christ in my brothers and sisters. And I will find that the love of Christ in my brothers and sisters, loving me in return, has drawn forth the image and reality of Christ in my own soul."  What Merton is describing is what happens when "the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" breaks through our defenses and Christ says in no uncertain terms: "‘You must sit down and taste my meat,' and stop feasting on your own self-constructed righteousness and giving way to the spirit of judgment by which you afflict yourself and others as well."

"Listen," says St. Benedict, "with the ear of the heart." That is--listen to your brothers and sisters--limbs of Christ's risen body--"chosen and precious in God's sight," not with your judgments but from that deep center within each one of us where Christ dwells as love, compassion, mercy and truth.

"Acquire a heart and you shall be saved," declared the desert fathers and mothers of the 4th century, who were known not only for their rigorous asceticism but for their compassion and their ability to make room for the vagaries of the human condition, often in ways that shocked and disconcerted their disciples and fellow monastics. And yet, they lived the relationship of the branch to the vine so intimately that they were completely spontaneous and unselfconscious in their words and actions. The love of God had been poured into their hearts by the Holy Spirit and Christ was no longer external to them. Christ had become their very life, their consciousness, their freedom and their joy, and also the source of their occasional outrageousness.

Jesus' description of his relationship to his disciples as that of a vine to its branches is one of great intimacy. The vine and the branches are profoundly one. The life of the vine is the life of the branches. Cut off from the vine--the branches can produce nothing.

However, branches must be pruned in order to be fruitful. And so it is that the love of Christ is a pruning love which at times can appear harsh and difficult to face. And here I think of St. Theresa of Avila's quip: "God, if this is the way you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few."

There are times when we feel that way. We ask: "God, is this how you reward my faithfulness?"  And yet, dispossession is paradoxically the way in which we come to maturity. It is the way we come to "the measure of the full stature of Christ." This is true of us as individuals, and as communities of faith, and as ecclesial households. And, if I might say, Andrew, this is also true of us as primates.

One of the great paradoxes of life in a hierarchical church is that the more elaborately you are dressed, and the more extensive the honorific attached to your name, the more you are stripped and become aware of your interior poverty. This is, of course, nothing less than the paschal pattern of Christ which lies at the heart of all authentic discipleship and ministry: we are made one with Christ in his death in order to share in Christ's resurrection. Dying and rising, losing our life in order to find our life, become the way in which the eternal fruitfulness of Christ, the true vine, is made manifest in us.

"It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ lives in me." The paschal mystery is the narrow door through which we must pass in order to enter the field of Christ's love. And, we live the paschal mystery through the very circumstances of our lives. This certainly includes our life within the body of Christ, the church. The church does not protect us from dispossession. In fact, in many instances the church is the instrument of our dispossession whereby we are conformed to the image of God's Son through "the sharing of his sufferings."

We speak a great deal these days about communion. Are we in communion or out of communion? Is our communion real but imperfect, or is it impaired? We speak of communion as if it were a human construction, as if it were something we have the power to bestow or withhold. In so doing we overlook the fact that communion is an expression of God's love: the love with which the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father in what St. Paul calls the "communion of the Holy Spirit." And, it is this communion of the Holy Spirit into which we are drawn through baptism, which unfolds within us the mystery of God's fathomless and all-embracing love. The joy of which Jesus speaks in the gospel is the deep knowing that he is rooted and grounded in--and indeed draws his identity from--the Father's love. And, it is this deep joy--Jesus' own joy--which the Spirit of truth works into us over time as we come "to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ."

We frequently begin or conclude our worship with the familiar words of St. Paul: "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship--the communion--of the Holy Spirit be with us all evermore. Amen." And yet, how often do we really reflect upon what we are saying? Grace, love and communion are all dimensions of one reality: God's own life and God's desire to share the love between the Father and the Son with us in the power of the Holy Spirit.  It is this being drawn together in the life of God, poured into our hearts as love by the Holy Spirit, which constitutes our true unity: our communion with one another. Looked at in this way we see how limited our notions of communion are in contrast to what the Holy Spirit intends.

And, communion implies difference. There would be no communion between the Father and the Son if there were no distinction between them. There would be no risen body of Christ if we were all a hand or a foot. Communion requires differentiation in order that love can go forth from itself and find another to love. Communion requires that there be singularities that set us apart from one another: that there be various ways in which we seek to inhabit and live the gospel, as well as different contexts in which we seek to discern the authentic workings of the Spirit--who is weaving the love of God into the fabric of our lives and spinning the webs of relationship of which our lives are made.

When it comes to our life within the body of Christ, each one of us has our particular experience, our personal history, a culture that has shaped us, a way in which Christ has encountered us, and faith has been born in us. We have each had our struggles, our successes and failures. We have had to live, in the fullness of our humanity, with all its paradoxes and contradictions, what we might call the scripture of our lives. And, through it all, the Spirit is deeply at work--shaping and forming Christ in us--and conforming us to the image of God's son, loving us into a fullness of being that reveals Christ in us, "the hope of glory."

That same Spirit is at work in others as well "according to the measure of Christ's gift." I may be a hand and you may be a foot. I may wonder at your otherness and strangeness and you may wonder at mine, and yet, we are both part of the same body--knit together in love and without which the body is incomplete. Together we form the full Christ: the Christ who speaks Ojibway and Inuktituk, Nisgaa and French, Swampy Cree, Moose Cree and Oji Cree, Naskapi and English, the Christ who seeks us in the plain exposition of the gospel and in elaborately celebrated sacramental rites, the Christ who lives in a refugee camp, and the Christ who dwells in a Toronto suburb, the Christ present on the right and the Christ present on the left. Only together can we form the full Christ.

I return to Thomas Merton: "If I allow Christ to use my heart in order to love my brothers and sisters with it, I will soon find that Christ, loving in me and through me, has brought to light Christ in my brothers and sisters. And, I will find that the love of Christ in my brothers and sisters, loving me in return, has drawn forth the image and the reality of Christ in my own soul."

Such is the true nature and cost of communion, a cost Christ bore upon the cross in order to draw all people and all things to himself.

We are faced with many challenges to the life of communion God so deeply desires, not only for us but for the whole creation. Our two churches are experiencing strains and tensions caused by events past and present. We are also living with questions that yield no easy answers. None of us stands alone. Therefore, our struggles to discern the mind of Christ in the context in which we find ourselves have profound ramifications in other parts of our Anglican Communion where many are dealing daily with matters of life and death. What is it that binds us together across our many differences and our varying ways of reading and interpreting the gospel as we seek to live it faithfully and forthrightly in our various circumstances? It is nothing less than "God's love which has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us."

Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, as you begin a new chapter in the life of the Anglican Church of Canada under the pastoral leadership of your new Primate, it is my hope and my prayer that "the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" will draw you ever closer together. May the very things that seek to divide us become the means whereby we are led to discern Christ in one another, and discover more profoundly what it means to live a life of communion for the sake of the World. And, in the power of that discernment, may you, Andrew, and your brothers and sisters echo the prophet Isaiah as you look to our global village in its desperate need: "Here am I, send me." At the same time, know that I, together with many others south of the border that divides our two nations in so many ways, am eager to share with you the continuing ministry of reconciliation in which, "by God's mercy," we are engaged, deeply aware that "we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that it may be made clear," as Paul tells us, "that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us."

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with us all evermore. Amen.