Our Quest for Faithful Presence
Dear St Luke’s,
As you may recall, last Sunday we explored the question, “Who is God?”
As it was Trinity Sunday we teased out some implications of Christian traditions’ understandings of God as three-persons-&-one-essence, rooting the very existence of the diversity of people, cultures, and creation in the diversity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. While wondering how the unity of the Triune persons might invite us to imagine and participate in God’s dream of shalom for the diversity of all of creation.
Claiming that God is Triune, is a bold two-part claim. First, we claim that diversity is a good and beautiful gift reflective of God’s own being: ‘Tri.’ And second, that to follow in the way of God invites us to open to difference so as to discover God’s way of love: ‘unity’…Tri-unity. The greater the perceived difference between yourself and another, the greater the possibility for discovering and experiencing the depth and wonder of God’s love and welcome as seen in Jesus Christ.
Picking up on some of the themes of Trinity Sunday, Cheri Neill is going to guide our Community Forums for the next two weeks. Cheri will help us open to our faith community’s future by guiding us to lean into practical considerations necessary for becoming the kind of welcoming community reflective of our Creator. Bringing our collective mission, the quest for belonging, and our understanding of God into conversation with some of the practices, assumptions and biases which can sometimes hamper the kind of communion Christ invites, Cheri will help us deepen our skills for self-awareness, Shalomic reflection, and curiosity.
For those of you newer to St Luke’s Cheri is our minister of music and arts. Most Sunday’s you see and hear Cheri leading us in worship and playing piano. Cheri is also a counselor, and has many years of pastoral experience. So, its delightful to have her offer even more parts of herself to our faith community these next couple of weeks.
As you prepare to participate this weekend I encourage you to be thinking about the three terms we use to describe our collective mission: Refuge, Renewal, Reach. What might these three beautiful ideas be inviting of us today and into our tomorrow?
Two more notes: First, this Sunday we will be blessing Thomas Bailey who is graduating from high school. You did it Thomas, and we’re excited to bless you into your next steps. Second, we are experimenting with creating a printed “Praying Community” handout, which you can find by the candles when you walk into our sanctuary. Please, take a look at it and let our church’s office know if you have prayer requests or if you have any suggestions to make it an even more useful prayer resource for our community.
Please know that you are a treasure, there is no one quite like you, you are loved, you belong, and you are not alone.
Peace, dwight
