What does it look like to be transformed by Jesus’ love?

Dear Friends,

Every Wednesday, Fr. CJ and I meet with the Parish Care Team Co-Coordinators to pray and check in about various needs that are running through the community: people facing surgery, those recovering, current loss, graduations, and other celebrations, things like that.

I’ve been a priest now for 12 years, and one of the greatest assets in a faith community is a strong lay pastoral care team. Together, as clergy and laity, we are able to, as our mission proclaims, “inspire every generation to care for one another” because of Christ’s transformational love. 

And, as I’ve been getting to know who does what around here, I have been immensely impressed by how many of YOU serve on this team! Last I checked there were over 30 names on that list, many of whom are on several other committees and ministries. Other ministries we have inspired by the transformational love of Christ … to care for one another …are ministries like: the Funeral Reception Team, the handcrafts group, Lay Eucharistic Visitors, and Healing Prayer group. I’m sure there are countless other ways, both big and small, that the people of Trinity show up for each other which aren’t documented for me to name here. 

The point is that a parish with this kind of history has learned a thing or two about how to steady the boat during life’s storms and celebrations. I’ve heard stories of the cards people have received, the shawls that have wrapped others in your love, the community they found by coming back, week after week, year after year. All of it has revealed tangible ways you care for one another!

At its core, this is what our liturgies provide: a timeless way to connect with God and others both in this place and throughout the world; to set down our divisions and sing together, pray together, and feast with God, together, at the banquet formed at the beginning of time. To be invited into this feast is to be invited into a space where time suspends, or collapses even, and where we are united with ancestors from the beginning of time as well as in the realm where Jesus sits on the throne and angels sing Holy, Holy, Holy, without end.

In her commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, Joan Chittester, O.S.B. writes, “We forget that, new as the future may be, its value will depend entirely on what we bring to it ourselves. It will depend fundamentally for its character, its value, on what happens to us as we grow into it. Its quality will depend more on what is in us when we get there than on what is in it, however new.”

“The fact is,” Chittester says, “that not everything has failed us over the centuries. There are things that remain from one culture to another with substance enough, with pith enough, to lead us through the dark days and difficult questions and questionable social systems of our own times.” 

My friends, this question before us today, “What does it look like to be transformed by Jesus’ love so much that it inspires every generation to care for one another,” is as contextual as a question to wrestle with as they come. For how we (Trinity Episcopal Church) care for the ones with whom we share this space is a reflection of our own relationship with Christ and how his love has transformed us. And from this vantage point, even though I hear you longing to do better and grow in God with one another even more, your reflection is looking beautiful!

In Peace,