Dear Trinity Family,

A blessed Friday to one and all!

It’s time once again for the weekly update on goings on at Trinity, and honestly, not much new to report as the county’s limits on religious gatherings continue. We look forward to hearing from the County Executive a change to these limits so we can open our doors to a larger group to come and worship. But until then, we wait.

As a part of our getting ready for reopening, we would like to thank Joy Sandiford and family for their donation of Clorox wipes and hand sanitizer which we will be putting to use both in our preparing for and when we gather again.  Thanks for your gift!  If other members have or are able to share cleaning supplies that would be useful to keeping our church home clean for when we meet again, they will be greatly appreciated as these supplies are often hard to find.

We rejoice along with our brothers and sisters at Our Savior Lutheran in Laurel who will be celebrating the Ordination and Installation of their new Associate Pastor, Joshua Hileman, who is coming to them from after his graduation from Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis. Praise God for answered prayers for new laborers in His harvest fields!

We are scheduled to have a Zoom Fellowship this Sunday afternoon at 4 PM. We hope you can join us. Connection information will be sent out in a separate email. If you did not receive the email and would like to join us, please email Pastor at trinity-elc-pastor@verizon.net so he can send you the connection link.

All of the other news is available in this Sunday’s Bulletin which can be found here

To close, some thoughts about this coming Sunday…

The Feast of the Holy Trinity both closes the festival half of the Church Year and opens the long season of “Ordinary Time”. It is a celebration of the great mystery of the Triune God–one God in three Persons–as well as a celebration of how this God is revealed to us in His great and glorious works seen in how God has created us, redeemed us, and made us holy.

This Feast is also special for us as a congregation because it is our “Festival of Title”, our “name day”. Our congregation received its name from our “mother church”: Trinity (now First Trinity) Lutheran in Washington, DC, who started what became our congregation as a mission to reach out to the emerging suburbs of Washington in 1931.

As we remember our congregation’s name–named for the One True God–we are also reminded that not only does our parish bear this Name of God, but each one of us bear this same Name as well as we were baptized into this Name–the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

When one “wears” someone else’s name, like being named after some dearly loved relative in one’s family tree, there is almost a hope and expectation for you to “live up to that name”.  How much more is the expectation that we “live up” to God’s Name that we bear in our life and living?  It seems to be too high of a goal for us to be able to fulfill.  But that fact doesn’t exempt us from trying.

Perhaps in the days we find ourselves in, maybe the best thing for us is to see how God’s attributes show themselves at work in our lives.  We know that God is Love.  How is that love at work in our lives?  How are we loving God?  Are we loving others as God has loved us?  In answering these questions we will come to discover how much we are living up to being bearers of God’s Name, how much we need to repent of our failures to live up to that Name, and how we are strengthened and renewed by God to truly love one another as God loves all.

May God bless us and give us grace to be worthy bearers of His Name in the world!

God’s blessings on your weekend and look forward to “seeing” you at worship on Sunday!

And as always, “May the Lord watch between me and thee, while we are absent one from another.”

Peace and blessings,
+Pastor