Pastor's Letter - May
Pastor’s Letter
May, 2018
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Risen Lord Jesus Christ! Amen.
It is so good to serve others! I am one week removed from the cleaning of the apartment we are adopting. Today, people are going to paint, and on Saturday there are others going to move furniture in. By the time you are reading this, we will be well on our way to finishing the furnished apartment. We may even have another one to do after this!
I want to thank everyone for your generosity. On Sunday, there was a list of items placed on the bulletin board in the overflow room. I was expecting that likely we would have a few weeks before it had been filled. When I returned that night for the spaghetti dinner, I looked to see that the list was almost completely filled!
Speaking of that spaghetti dinner, we had an enormous turnout, and we raised quite a bit of money for the trip to Roanoke, Virginia that is coming this July. That trip is a mission trip, where once again a group from Trinity will be serving.
The cool thing about that is that we are serving a group of people that cannot pay us back. They cannot do anything for us- the relationship is simply us helping, and that's it. We will not have a relationship with the people who occupy the apartment that we are setting up. We will be too geographically far from Roanoke for those people to do anything for us in return. This is simply us doing good for the sake of the Gospel, because Jesus models this kind of activity all the time in the Gospels.
I think of Jairus' daughter when I think of this. This is a story recorded in three of the Gospels (John does not include it). This was a 12 year old girl who remains nameless. She had no relevance outside of who her father was, and scripture supports this, because it tells us his name, and next to nothing about her.
Jesus shows up at his house and she has died. Jesus says, in essence, "do not worry, she will live." Some in the crowd even laugh at Jesus because what he says is so unbelievable. But, Jesus being Jesus, commands her to get up, and she is brought back to wholeness of life.
This girl couldn't do a thing for Jesus. She was a non-person in her society. People cared about the young boys, but the girls were seen as nothing more than pawns to be married off. In and of themselves, they had little worth.
Serving means that we do good for those who can't do a thing for us. It is selfless, giving of our time, our energy, and our love, simply for the sake of those who are in need. Jesus tells us in scripture that when we help one of these, it is like helping him. He is present in that experience.
We will get to serve after the BHA apartment experience, and we will get to serve after the Roanoke trip. Come and be a part of it! It is a complete and wonderful expression of our faith unlike any other, and in taking part, you get to be a part of God's love working its way through the world.
See you along the way,
Pastor Brian