Pastor's Comments

“Whom are you looking for?”

These words were read at our Good Friday service, from John’s account of the Passion.  This is the moment that starts God’s plan for reclaiming our souls – a simple moment, an ordinary question, but the answer drops people to the dirt: “Whom are you looking for?”

I thought of this question related to our lives together at Holy Trinity.  Our community, the friendship and fellowship we share, is such an important part of all our lives.  So many times I’ve heard us say, “Without Holy Trinity my week feels lost.”  So many times I’ve heard and seen what a difference this place makes in your lives.  I’ve witnessed and been amazed by what God can do within people’s hearts through Holy Trinity.  And what an incredible blessing and joy that is!

It’s helpful for us all to ask ourselves Jesus’ question sometimes: when we come to Holy Trinity, whom are we looking for?  When we serve at Hope or Preschool Storytime or in Youth Group, whom are we seeking?  When we come to worship, what are we expecting?  Is it community and friendship?  In that case liturgy will be a boring framework because it’s not entertainment.  But if we’re expecting an experience of God, liturgy becomes a roadmap, a well-worn path handed down by millennia of faithful people who experienced God in this way.  Hopefully that’s why we here, but – whom are we looking for?

It’s clear the question is vital, because it informs and deepens absolutely everything we do.  Mission trips, quilting, youth group, worship, even Bread Breakers, we should ask ourselves: Whom are we looking for?  Are we expecting God to show up today?  What are we seeking?

This month we will have the chance to meet in Cottage Meetings to talk about God’s preferred future for us here at Holy Trinity.  Our Visioning committee has prayed much and talked long over these questions, and we’re incredibly excited about what God has been saying.  Now it’s our turn to include you in the conversation.  What is God up to here?  How can we remember to put him at the focus?  Whom are we looking for?

Blessings to us all in this exciting part of our lives together!  And may we continually ask ourselves: whom are we looking for?

Peace,

-Pastor Tim

Our Visioning group has been meeting now for several months, gathered around the conviction that God is up to something at Holy Trinity, that the Spirit is at work in our midst, and that God has a future in mind for us.  We’ve met and prayed together and separately, asking “God, what is on your heart and mind?”  We’ve sought inspiration about our ministries, about programs, about who we’re called to serve, about the shape of our lives here as servants of Christ at Brick and Mayflower Road.  And, we’ve often been surprised by the answers.

One of the convictions we share is that God has a plan, God is up to something in the world.   We share that conviction with all God’s faithful, because the Bible shows us through history God at work on that plan.  Our calling as Christians is not to invent a purpose for our lives, nor is it our job to invent a future for Holy Trinity.  God’s already doing all of that – God already has a purpose for your life.  Our task, our calling, our great privilege as people of faith is to watch for what God is already up to, and then to get on board.

The Visioning group has become more and more convinced that the place for us to start looking is in our own faith lives as a congregation.  We have come to believe the Lord is fashioning himself a people, shaping us by his mercy and his grace, transforming us by his presence.  God is forming you into his child, and that’s where we begin.

It’s what I’ve recently been calling “thick faith” or “deep faith” – one of the joys of Holy Trinity, and the primary thing that has been drawing people into relationship with our community and with the Lord, is the vibrant, lively, transforming faith here.  This is a place where God changes lives, where being together changes and challenges and makes the rest of the week meaningful – and makes it go better.  Truly I tell you, I have heard story after story and have witnessed people being transformed by the work of the Spirit at Holy Trinity.  God has been changing lives within and through this community, because it’s a place that encourages and nurtures a thick, lively faith.

The interesting question then, is where that leads.  And that’s a question that can only be answered by all of us, by all of our eyes looking within our faith for what God is doing.  The Visioning group can’t answer that for us, we need your answers and listening as well.  That’s why, over the next couple months, we’re going to start a series of Cottage Meetings gathering in members’ homes to laugh and pray and listen together.  We want to listen together for what God is doing to your faith, what God is doing in your life, where your joy is, where your energy is, what gives you life.

So pray with us.  Laugh with us.  Grow with us.  Learn with us.  Listen and look with us for what God is already up to.  And join us in conversation at our Cottage Meetings, because God is up to something here.  Lives are being transformed by the Spirit here.  What a privilege to be part of God’s plan!

Peace,

-Pastor Tim

Last month we talked about prayer, the primary means of our communication with God.  This month we turn to the second major faith practice in our lives: worship.  Worship is our most public act as disciples: every week, we gather; every week, we come to a central location; every week, we greet and encourage and connect our lives together.  It is that necessary, repeating movement that fills our tanks and strengthens us at the start of the week.  I’ve heard from many of our members that worship is what gets them through the week, and without it, the week does not go nearly as well.

For us, worship is filled with the structure and language of the ancients, brought into our modern context.  We bring today’s energy and a sensitivity to what’s happening in our world and infuse them into ancient words, motions, movement, and mystery.  Our worship rings with the silence of the catacombs.  We thrill to the soaring chords of the cathedrals.  We are moved by the chants of the medieval monks.  We proclaim and echo the words of our ancestors, gathered through all time and space, in our shared Creeds.

Then we bring today’s world into this rich living faith of our ancestors.  We sing newly composed hymns and songs alongside familiar ones, because they speak to us in a language that resonates.  We plan worship texts to match the rhythms of the seasons and our own usage of language.  We utilize the best scholarship available in understanding what the Creeds and prayers meant to their authors, and what they mean in our world today.

As a liturgical tradition, worship for us becomes a well-worn path, a familiar route that brings us where we need to be: basking in the filling and fulfilling presence of God.  That familiarity is important because its structure can feed our soul and bring an expected peace.  But, there is also a danger of our path becoming a rut, and so as a congregation we watch for things to be too-familiar, too-comfortable, too-expected.  Worship should always have a sense of adventure, of the possibility and opportunity of being approached by God in a new way, of a new aspect of God’s grace breaking in like sunrise.

Above all, worship is when we know God is here, when the Spirit is available, when we are breathed into by God’s strength and presence and sent into the world.  Worship is the breathing in and breathing out of the body of Christ: brought into community, filled with his life, and then sent into the world.  What happens to you in worship is not for Sunday.  Worship is all about the rest of the week: encountering God changes how we meet the world.  It is Jesus who makes it possible for us to invite our friends and family members to come, to know the joy we have found in the Lord.

So come and worship, come and be filled, come and be connected across space and time to the words and motions of the ancients, to the new movement of the Spirit among composers and musicians, to the work and mission of God in the world today.  Come and see and be filled with God’s presence, that we can be sent into the world, so that everyone – your friends and neighbors and family members especially – can know his peace.

-Pastor Tim