By Father Casey
We have a busy weekend ahead, friends. I hope you’ve been heeding my advice to get plenty of sleep, stay hydrated, and eat your Wheaties. We’re going to need it!
On Sunday morning, we’ll welcome back the Blood Mobile. How often can we say we helped save a life, and yet that’s exactly what we do whenever we make a blood donation. I’m hopeful everyone who is eligible will make this extremely precious gift.
Then, after the 11:15 service, many of us will hustle down to Fair Park to participate in the Dallas Pride Parade. It’s been one of the great joys of my ministry to march with our church and joyfully proclaim that “God thinks you’re fabulous!” This year feels especially important, given the recent legislative actions targeting trans persons, so we will stand loudly and proudly with the LGBT community.
Finally, in the evening our Men’s Fellowship (EMF) will throw the Fish Fry and Silent Auction, our church’s largest fundraising event of the year. The last time we held this event in 2019, we raised over $60,000, which EMF gave away to support all kinds of wonderful ministries, organizations, and church needs. Not being content to simply resume after a four-year hiatus, this year they’re hoping to set a new record. But that will depend on great turnout and a pervasive spirit of generosity.
Each of these events is fundamentally about community. We give blood knowing that it saves lives. We march in pride, because we honor the dignity of all persons. We come together in fellowship to raise funds, because it strengthens our mission. Which is why it’s so fitting that we’ll do all of this on Trinity Sunday. Trinity Sunday is the great reminder that God’s very being is a relationship. God is not a soloist, but a choir; not a solitary individual, but a living community. In a world that is all about “me,” we worship a God who is, fundamentally, a “we.”
Which is why we can’t follow God alone, and why participating in community – our church community, and the wider human community – is essential to the practice of our faith. We need God, and we need one another. What we do and believe in our individual lives is important, but it is not the entire story. I am not my best, most made-in-the-image-of-God self, when I am alone. I am my best, most-made-in-the-image-of-God self when I am with you. It’s like Bishop Tutu said, “I need other human beings in order to be human. The completely self-sufficient human being is subhuman. I can be me only if you are fully you. I am because we are, for we are made for togetherness, for family.”1
So this Trinity Sunday, let’s do this. Let’s show our togetherness with one another and with the whole human family. Let’s live in a way that echoes our communal God. Let’s follow in the way of the Trinity and be a living community of love.
Father Casey
1Desmond Tutu, “Ubuntu: On the Nature of Human Community, God is Not A Christian, p 22.