Hazelwell Weekly Contact June 4th 2023
1 Jun 2023 • Weekly Notices
Hazelwell Weekly Contact June 4th 2023
Trinity Sunday 10.00am
Hazelwell Special Parade service
Led by Val Harris
- All who have ever been members of the scout or guide groups and those who have served as their leaders.
- Teachers and young people currently involved in public examinations.
- Please remember in your prayers Anna, Stewart, Patricia, Joy and Pat
Now might be the time to consider the plant stall – if you are potting on seedlings or dividing perenials.
Clearing out? Books, Toys and Bric-a-brac always needed
Cakes for the cake stall needed on the day
Food Bank The Spearhead Trust has been grateful for contributions to their foodbank, collected at Hazelwell. Please bring your donations and leave on the table at the back of church.
Alternatively, consider donating to a local foodbank in the course of your weekly shop via local supermarket collection.
Reflection on theTrinity by Revd Dr Elizabeth Welch St. Andrew's URC Ealing
The Trinity is more than a doctrine, it’s a way of seeing God
1stly, there was the Creator God who brought all life into being, the God we read about at the beginning of Genesis, the God who is sovereign and yet who has placed responsibility for the earth in human hands. It’s this same God whom Jesus knew in his boyhood and ministry in a close personal relationship as Father.
2ndly, there was the incarnate God, Jesus the Son, who shared our human life, in all its frailty and vulnerability and fragility, even to the point of death itself. And then he was raised from the dead for the life of the world.
3rdly, running through the history of the people of God, there is the life-giving Spirit. This Spirit breathed over the waters of creation at the beginning of time, hovered over Jesus at his baptism, was poured out on the people of God at Pentecost. The Spirit – as wild as wind and fire and as gentle as a dove, opens us up to understand one another in different languages.
The Trinity reminds us of the different faces of God, yet the way in which these are held together in the one God..
At the heart of the Trinity lies the significance of what I refer to as ‘relational identity’. The three persons within God are their own persons, but they only exist in relation to one another. It’s not possible to so separate them out that they are different beings, each going in their own direction.
I believe that for our current age, and all that we are going through, relationality and mutual belonging are hugely important.
As Christians, when we participate in Christ, we share in that relationship with God. It’s not just an individual matter. By being taken into relationship with God, we are taken into relationship with each other.
One of the key challenges today is that of individuality – when ‘I’ comes first, without thought of the other. I’m not surprised that we have lonely young people and lonely elderly people; it’s not surprising we have racist divisions – if ‘I’ is all that matters, I don’t need to worry about connecting to anyone else, or understanding anyone else, or being on the side of anyone else.
Thinking about the Trinity brings us into a different way of thinking about ourselves and the world. Because we’re drawn into the relationship of love, the only way we can find fullness of life is to live in that relationship, especially with those who we might think are different from us – because they are older, because they are younger, because they’re a different gender, because they are of a different ethnicity. The Black Lives Matter protests comes as a reminder that there is no one group of people who are seen as of less value by God. When we enter into the mystery of the relationality of the Trinity, we can no longer exclude people. All are equally loved and valued by God.
The role of the church is to live fully in the life of the Trinity, in modelling a loving relationality and living this out in the whole of God’s world.
The good news is that we are not left alone in all the ups and downs that faithful obedience brings. When Jesus commissions his disciples, he also promises his presence.
In these challenging and changing times in which we live, let us hold on to the truth and presence of the loving God in every part of our lives and the life of the world.
Amen.