Four Brief Announcements, and some thoughts about waging peace in a violent time
People of Trinity,
- Attached is a packet of Worship Resources for the Day of Pentecost, May 31. Prayers and readings from Sunday’s scripture are included, along with devotional resources for the days ahead.
You are invited to join us for worship on Sunday, May 31 at 9:15 a.m. – instructions for joining our live streaming and/or viewing the services later are included in the attachment. - BREAKING NEWS – you are invited to the second week of “Re-Zooming” Coffee Hour Fellowship! We really miss seeing you. Let’s all Zoom together! Join us this Sunday after worship for virtual “coffee hour” fellowship.Click on the following link to join us on Sunday May 31, at 10:30 a.m.
https://zoom.us/j/91008508772?pwd=RDd5UmEzUnFNZEZOVG5Td2pKNTk2dz09
You can also click on “join meeting” in the Zoom app and enter the following ID and password.
Meeting ID: 910 0850 8772
Password: 361544 - Trinity’s Children’s Ministry team is encouraging families with children from birth to 5th grade to respond to the spring children’s ministry survey. It will take just a few minutes and will be very helpful for current and future development of programming for our kids.
The survey link is:https://forms.gle/5BaMnWr4YEiB4sG79 
Finally, this coming Sunday, May 31, is the Day of Pentecost, the day we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit enlivening the Church, the Body of Christ. You are invited on Pentecost Sunday, May 31, at 7 p.m., to join a Virtual Hymn Sing sponsored by the North/West Lower Michigan Synod and University Lutheran Church in East Lansing. We cannot yet sing together in worship onsite at Trinity, but we can sing from home with friends from around our synod – be welcome to join in and raise your voice in song!
Join in on Facebook for the Virtual Hymn Sing!
Beloved community,
In recent weeks, the injustice of racial killing has begun to overtake even the COVID-19 pandemic in our national headlines. Jogger Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed on the streets of Brunswick, Georgia in February, although the video record of that murder was released only recently. EMT Breonna Taylor was gunned down by police in her apartment in Louisville in March, and George Floyd died on the street in Minneapolis on May 25, as an arresting officer held him to the ground, knee to his neck while he cried out that he could not breathe. More than eight minutes later his body appeared lifeless as he was lifted into the ambulance. Last evening the streets of Louisville and Minneapolis, along with the streets of other major cities across the United States, erupted in protest and rioting.
We do not have all the details in the cases of these tragic deaths of our neighbors in Georgia, Kentucky and Minnesota. But racial profiling in each case seems evident, and is, as Minneapolis City Council Vice President Andrea Jenkins noted, part of a disease of racism in our land, with 400 years of tragic history. She named racism a public health emergency in an interview this week and called upon the people of this nation to respond to the disease of racism like we have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr. King once said, “We must find an alternative to violence. The eye for an eye philosophy leaves everyone blind.” We know that the violence erupting in this nation’s cities, in response to the violence experienced by victims and their grieving families, will not help us meet the pandemic of racism in ways that are productive. But the call for our nation, for each one of us, to awaken to the crisis of racial injustice is urgent. We must find a path together, peoples of every race and tribe, to claim our common humanity and fight for justice and peace. “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” (I Corinthians 12:12) As the Body of Christ, our claim is to our unity together and in Christ.
I do not have great wisdom to share as we confront the crisis of racial injustice, but I do call on you, my sisters and brothers, to join me in repentant prayer and lives of action. Perhaps we need to be encouraged by the voices of children who dream of peace. I took note of the following little paths to peace a few years ago, from the voices of children, in a journal dedicated to peace and nonviolence as a way of active discipleship. Perhaps these young voices can inspire our repentant prayer and remind us that the way of peace is simple and attainable, even as it requires intentionality.
I am a peacemaker . . . I help people work things out.
Rob Clark, 2nd grade
To start peace, make a friend.
Javier, 5th grade
If I could have three wishes, world peace would be all three.
Marlia Moore, 8th grader
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment
before starting to improve the world.
Anne Frank
I have an old poster from the Northern Baptist Peace Fellowship which reads, “Peace, like war, must be waged.” Peacemaking begins as simply as making a friend, working things out, and choosing to act. And as Eleanor Roosevelt said, “It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.” Let us wage a peace that seeks to heal the disease of racial injustice in our human community and let us each take steps toward a deeper and more abiding spirit of unity and commonality in the care for each other and the world in which we live. Let us pray for the victims of racial violence and their families, and let us join our prayers with active discipleship, waging peace and dismantling the structures of injustice that separate peoples.
It remains a privilege to serve as one of your pastors. Join us in live streaming of “virtual worship” this Sunday:
- The Day of Pentecost, May 31 at 9:15 a.m.
Grace and peace,
Pastor Bob Linstrom