Churches across the country are celebrating the first gay bishop with new music. St. Paul’s Episcopal Church is one of them.

In 2003, the Rev. V. Gene Robinson made history when he was elected and consecrated as the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, or any major Christian denomination.

This year, he is being celebrated in churches across the country with performances of a new musical composition, Our Wildest Imagining, commissioned in his honor.

The seven-minute piece will be performed by chorus, organ, and brass on Sunday morning at Chestnut Hill’s St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Robinson will give the sermon.

“My first reaction was, ‘Don’t you have to be dead to have something like that done?’” Robinson said in a Zoom call from his home in D.C. this week.

He retired as bishop of the New Hampshire diocese in 2013 and has lived in Washington ever since. At 78, he is still active in the causes that powered his ministry.

“Up until recently, I’ve really enjoyed Washington,” he said.

“I help out at the Washington Cathedral, and I’m quite active at my parish, St. Thomas.”

The parish, he said, “has quite a history with immigrants. When the governor of Texas sent busloads of immigrants to New York and Washington, they unloaded at our church.”

But now, “many of them have become members of our parish, although many of them are not coming to church now for fear of being snatched up off the streets,” he said.

The parish also has a long connection with the LGBTQ community, said Robinson, going back to the days of the AIDS crisis, when it offered funeral services for victims at a time when many churches refused to perform them.

Robinson’s outspoken embrace of all people into the Christian community is celebrated in Our Wildest Imagining.

The idea for the composition, he said, came from three of his friends — one, his former boss at the Center for American Progress, where he worked for several years after retiring. Another one had a deep background in music.

“They asked me to listen to Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait," which combines music with quotations from the 16th president’s writings and speeches, he said.

Asked to pick quotes from his own sermons and books, Robinson compared it to picking a favorite child: “I couldn’t do it.”

His friends had found “a brilliant composer, Dominick DiOrio,” he said.

DiOrio is the artistic director of the Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia and is a professor on the music faculty of Indiana University. He’ll conduct Sunday’s performance.

“Dominick said, ‘I’ll pick the words,’” Robinson said. “He listened to 20 or 30 sermons, read my two books, watched the two documentaries about me. The text of the piece is my own words coming back at me, in large part, which is a very strange experience but kind of nice, too.”

The middle part of the text is taken from Psalm 27.

“That is the psalm I credit with saving my life,” Robinson said. “You know I got my first death threat before I got home the day I was elected.”

He wore a bulletproof vest to his consecration.

“It’s a typical psalm, ‘Oh Lord they’re out to get me, eat my flesh, and tear me limb from limb, but you O Lord will keep me safe,’ that kind of thing. I literally read that psalm multiple times every day just to hold on and reassure myself.”

After the composition was finished, Robinson said, DiOrio “told us something I didn’t know.”

As it turns out, he lived in southern New Hampshire the year Robinson was elected bishop.

“He was a closeted, gay, Roman Catholic 19-year-old and feeling hopeless about ever putting his sexuality together with his religion,” Robinson said of DiOrio. “Then all of a sudden, this gay guy gets elected bishop in the state where he’s living, and he says it changed his life. He thought so much more was possible. He left Roman Catholicism and became Episcopalian, started writing music, and the rest, as they say, is history.

“It was a nice surprise. He’s become a dear friend.”

Robinson said he was especially pleased by the title of the piece, a phrase he uses so often that his two daughters and two granddaughters tease him about it: “They write it on my birthday cards, ‘We love you beyond your wildest imaginings.’”

His sermon on Sunday, he said, will be based on the day’s lesson, the story of Jacob wrestling an angel.

“Interestingly they fight to a draw, [but] Jacob won’t let this human thing go. He says, ‘I won’t release you until you bless me.’ Wrestling is central to Jews and Christians, and maybe to all religions. If you’re serious about your religion, you’re always wrestling with God, trying to figure out what God wants you to do in your life. The trick is to hang in there long enough until you get to the blessing.”

That wrestling, he said, has an urgent contemporary significance.

“We’re up against a frightening white Christian nationalist movement that distorts everything that I know Christianity to be, in all kinds of ways. And there’s going to be no way out of this without struggle.”

What Our Wildest Imagining celebrates, he said, is the idea at the core of his faith: “At the end of the day, love wins.”

“Our Wildest Imagining,” Oct. 19, 10 a.m., St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 22 E. Chestnut Hill Ave., Philadelphia. All are welcome to attend and all in attendance are welcome to receive Communion. There will be a Q&A session with Bishop Robinson after the service.