This Week at Trinity, Beamsville

For Friday, July 3, 2020

Dear Friends,

            This week we’re launching into our summer worship series – which really isn’t much of a news flash, for this time of year.  It’s been our practice for the last few summers and more, to move into a time of extended focus, a little more in the seasonal pace; and to use these weeks as a time of hearing more of each other’s faith stories.  Summer after summer, it has been both gift and privilege to give more intentional space for more voices.  Summer after summer, it enriches us as a whole community, to hear a message from someone other than the usual feature-preacher-creature (not a phrase I invented, by the way, but it works).

            I cannot tell a lie, and so I will also say that summer series like these simultaneously offer blessed lift from the otherwise weekly search for a sermon of substance.  Lifting my gaze out of the art and science of exegesis, and to instead focus on the nuance of liturgy, is a refreshing re-focus for preaching in the balance of the year.  It also gives me precious time to really listen to more of your stories.  Maybe that sounds a bit strange, as a significant piece of my pastoral life is to listen to your life stories, short and long term; but there is a different kind of listening, and a different kind of speaking that can happen, when there is invitation given and accepted, to share that story with the church family as a whole.

            So, that’s what we’re up to this Sunday, and for the balance of the July and August Sundays, as we offer the 2020 series, called ‘Questions of the Heart’.  I’ll still be serving full-time, and leading in worship, but I’ll also accept this time to follow.  In the same way that a few of my weekly lectionary subscriptions have now shifted to a summer hiatus, I’m going to take (and give you) a mini-hiatus from this solitary voice of preaching.  And, like those lectionary resources on seasonal break, I’m going to use the weeks ahead to refresh and re-invest in that which might otherwise get lost along the way.  It’s a little weird at first, to be sure; at least it is for me, with such a shift in routine.  But then, in time, in God, through God, there are inevitably new learnings and opportunities.  Call it a summertime project, for this Jesus-following soul.  Call it blessing and blessed, because I believe wholeheartedly that we all are, in the process.

            With love to you all,

Heather

“All shall be well, and all shall be well

and all manner of thing shall be well.”

(Julian of Norwich, ‘Revelations of Divine Love’, 1373)