The Third Sunday after Pentecost
“That’s the song!” the man said. “My wife and I, she’s gone now, danced to it right here in Trinity House. What a wonderful memory!” Several of us at Thursday night’s Trinity Summer Series concert heard happy attendees confide in us precious memories like that one. It helped that our MC Jonathan announced, at the beginning of the evening, that the summer concert series honors Trinity House and that the tent for last night’s performers was placed about where the parish house stage would have been. Wonderful memories. Remembering might be bittersweet, maybe wistful or regretful, and I understand. It’s a type of grieving, for some. Even I heard tunes that my parents would have danced to, and with my mom’s recent passing, that memory is part of my grieving. And yet when we remember, even more is open to us than simply recalling something from the past that might never be again. Jesus and the church that follows Him offer us another way of remembering. It’s a way that’s just as heartening, while also putting us back together in a way that takes our memory and makes it part of what is to come. It’s a way that asks us to remember what we loved about the past and then re-members us – puts us back together, as members of a whole, so that we’re stronger and even more alive than we could imagine on our own.
Re-membering: recalling the past while also being constructed as the future in a new and more compelling way. It happens every Sunday at Holy Eucharist as we pray the prayers and come forward for body and blood. In large ways and small ways, as we take living bread, Christ’s own body, we are re-membered as Trinity Church’s living body. A living body of people and its community who are always growing in Christ. May our memories and the growth they engender be created with the deep love we know through Christ.
In God’s Peace,
Mother Molly
