Loving Our Neighbor: Serving the Wider World

Last week I brought up the ways in which this parish has shared with me your care for one another, and how that serves as a witness to Christ’s transformational love. It continues to be a source of inspiration for me, as the one who is here among you for a while, to bear witness to this care.

Some of you may have been present when I shared about how my husband and I found our way to the Episcopal Church, but what I didn’t share then was that more than the liturgy (gorgeous), and community (so loving), was the way they were constantly inviting us to put our faith into action through their “outreach” efforts. It’s where I was able to take the angst I felt from returning from mission trips where food insecurity was a life or death reality and make some sort of small impact on my local community, also facing food insecurity. It’s where my family developed our meat-eating ethic, appetite for turning our grass into gardens to feed our hungry neighbors, and the inspiration for us to help anglers and hunters think more theologically about their past time of harvesting from the woods and waters and sharing the abundance with their neighbors. This notion of reaching out in Love because of our faith in Jesus, has remained essential to how I encounter faith communities. Not only asking how do they love one another but how do they share that love with their neighbors? 

Our Eucharistic feast each Sunday reminds us of all that we have to be grateful for from the creation of this fragile earth our island home, to the salvation God’s people have experienced throughout human history, to the incarnation and resurrection manifest in Jesus himself. 

Each week, we are re-membered into this story through our communal reading of sacred text, hymnody, and prayers and ultimately in the bread and wine at the altar. 

And when our service has ended, there is one little line we say before we depart that really is our sending and commissioning each and every week, to be Christ’s hands and feet, his eyes and ears, his voice and heart in the world. 

In our vision, we also proclaim that this transformational love inspires every generation to serve the wider world. Our list of outreach efforts is concentrated, but covers a mighty lot of ground: education, food insecurity, and housing.

So what does it look like to be transformed by Jesus’ love so much that it inspires every generation to serve the wider world for Trinity? For those of you new to Trinity, or those who haven’t yet had the opportunity to explore our outreach efforts, I invite you to read, mark, and inwardly digest these efforts and contemplate how you can get involved. Then, when you have your curiosity percolating, reach out to one of our members of the Outreach team. Send me a message, and I will happily put you in touch with them.

It looks like addressing Food Insecurity at the local level through: 

• Supporting Open Table with in-kind food donations from our cupboards or grocery carts, which serves Concordians facing food insecurity, as well as 22 other surrounding communities.

• Supplying lunch for MANNA every 3rd Sunday, a ministry formed with and for the unhoused community of downtown Boston, out of St. Paul’s Cathedral. 

• Volunteering for one of the “work days” at Gaining Ground, a local non-profit farm that grows 100% of its produce for local meal programs and food pantries.

• Donating financially to the Bedford Community Table & Food Pantry around the holidays to provide holiday food distribution, gift cards, and more to local families in need.

• Helping with food drives or donations of their most needed items, at the Acton Community Supper and Food Pantry, a local pantry that provides food for over 600 humans facing food insecurity each and every week.

It looks like addressing the Housing crisis at the local level through: 

• Partnering with organizations like Habitat for Humanity with our time and finances to help get families into safe, dry, affordable, permanent housing.

• Organizing furniture pickups, volunteered to receive and clean furniture, and provided donations to continue the important mission of Household Goods, Inc., which provides a full range of donated furniture and household items, free of charge, to help people in need make a home.

• Literally building beds with Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, who seek to eradicate homelessness from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, so that every child in Massachusetts has a safe and comfortable place to sleep and dream.

It looks like addressing Education inequities both locally and globally through: 

• Supporting Concord Prison Outreach, either through volunteering or financial support. This is one of our longest standing partnerships, since the late 1960s, CPO is a non-profit organization of individuals and faith communities, committed to helping people who are incarcerated build better lives for themselves and their families through skill-building, education, and personal growth. 

• Support for Creative Life Foundation, which is one of our global partners, connecting vulnerable and marginalized children and parents in urban and rural Thailand to critical resources that create a path to freedom and prevent human trafficking. 

• Support for Maranyundo Girls School, another global partner who offers girls an education, regardless of a family’s ability to pay tuition, with the goal of providing a supportive community where students learn respect, responsibility, and leadership for themselves, each other, and the wider community.

• Provide meals, supply full grocery bags to their families, organize summer recreational programming, or provide financial support to St. Stephen's Youth Programs, one of our local partners, based in Boston.

• Financial support to UTEC. One of our newer partnerships, we look forward to participating more directly in the future through teaching and mentoring the young men and women who are the focus of this organization. UTEC targets youth and young adults in the Merrimack Valley, who are out of school and involved in gang-related or criminal activity and provides real-world employment and project-based educational programming.

What does it look like to be transformed by Jesus’ love so much that it inspires every generation to serve the wider world? It looks like noticing who our neighbors are both locally and globally, and rolling up our sleeves to help make a difference.