Beloved Friends,
This coming Sunday we are going to do our best to live into our “both/and” identity lifting up a liturgical day we call Trinity Sunday while also engaging the difficult and important topic of Gun Violence Awareness. And while at first glance these may feel like disparate topics as our Trinity team worked on the liturgy, we found the opposite to be true.
If the doctrine of the Trinity is grounded in the possibility that God, the Divine, the Eternal Source of Love, is best described through the mystery and intimacy of relationships; Creator Redeemer & Sustainer or Father, Son and Holy Ghost- then what better way to explore how that concept shows up in our lives than through the courage, compassion and clarity it takes for a community to embrace the hard, gospel-grounded work of facing into the devastating reality of gun violence in our culture today.
Our goal in the liturgy this Sunday is less about trying to fix anything, but rather, to ground ourselves in the power of the Trinity, lift up the words, prayers, music, preaching and community conversation all in order to be the Body of Christ together in all our unified diversity.
The gospel lesson comes from Matthew and includes Jesus’ instructions to the disciples, charging them to go out into the world, empowered by God’s love and grace to roll up their sleeves, engage the world around them teaching and spreading the love they know can change the hearts and minds of those who’s hearts have hardened.
In both Sunday services, Trinity@Home and Trinity@316, we will hear the powerful piece called Say Her Name. Written by an amazing music educator and social advocate Alysia Lee, we have included it this week as a way to draw our attention to the plethora of people we have and continue to lose through acts of human violence.
Here is the composer’s description of the piece.
This original song by Alysia Lee was written as a vehicle to bring the powerful libation ceremony to the concert stage with a call to action. The #SayHerName movement resists police brutality against Black women. If you say the name, you’re prompted to learn the story, and if you know the story, then you have a broader sense of all the ways Black bodies are made vulnerable to police violence. (From Alysia’s website)
During our in-person service we will be including the following names- those who have died from all gun violence in Lucas County already in 2023.
Kayla Coleman
Jeremy Black
Mark David Wortham
D’marea Thornton
Levell Saunders
Justice Williams
Jameson Turnbull
Jaden Skaggs
Donald Hogan
Anthony Krug-Overton
Jason Means
DeAsia Green
So come home this Sunday as together we continue to be a community that lives and moves and dances our way into this loving, living, life-giving Trinity of the Divine as well as a community that faces bravely into the areas of our lives that need our agency and justice-seeking action.
May you never forget that you are loved.
Lisa