Well, it certainly has been a busy September, starting with Worship Assistants’ breakfast (we now have 20 acolytes!), and the next day the homecoming picnic where over 200 people enjoyed good food, fellowship, games and a moon bouncer. The following weekend was the Altar Guild and Flower Guild breakfast, we baptized Margaret Adams and celebrated our ministries at the Ministry Fair. The next weekend our Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts met on Saturday morning along with Church School and Journey to Adulthood on Sunday. Whew! This 150th year is going to be busy!

The Trinity Vestry recently established a subcommittee which, while representing a mustard seed at this point, has great potential to both focus and expand our mission and ministry at Trinity. For some months now, the Board of the Choir School of Hartford, sponsored by Trinity but a separate 501(c) (3) non-profit corporation, has been considering expanding the academic aspect of the Choir School into a fully accredited, day school program. At the same time, I have been in conversation with founding staff at the Epiphany School in Dorchester, Massachusetts, about their school, grades 5-8, which was founded by a local parish in Boston. At the June Vestry retreat, nearly half of the Vestry members included some type of day school in their long range vision for Trinity. Then in mid-September, Louise Loomis and I traveled to Virginia Seminary for a day-long meeting with members of the Urban Schools Alliance of the National Association of Episcopal Schools, where we met leaders of some established schools and exploratory committees for anticipated start-up schools around the country.

At its September meeting, the Vestry established a committee to explore the relative merits of undertaking a day school program here at Trinity or at another site in the Asylum Hill neighborhood. The committee will consist of three members appointed by the Vestry (Alan Rice, Anne Green and Casey Rousseau), three members to be appointed by the board of the Choir School, and three members to be appointed by the Rector with the approval of the Vestry. The Vestry’s resolution charges the committee to make recommendations in at least 12 different areas. The first meeting of the committee will be in October, and it will report monthly on its progress to the Vestry.

When Trinity celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1959, the congregation made a commitment to education by building the education wing. Today that wing stands, only partially used on Sundays for its intended purpose. Please keep the work of this committee in your prayers.

A Dream and a Journey

The following was originally preached as the Sermon at the 8 a.m. Service of Holy Eucharist on Sunday, September 13, as Trinity kicked off its 150th anniversary celebration.

This morning we hear the beginning of what would become a 20 year sojourn for Jacob, out of the land of Canaan and away from his brother Esau, who was out to kill him. On the first night of his journey, he falls asleep and has a dream: There was a ladder that stretched between heaven and earth, and on it the Angels of God were ascending and descending, going back and forth between heaven and earth. (We have a beautiful representation of this dream created by our banner guild which hangs in the stairway by the library.)

In this dream, God stands beside Jacob, places himself in Jacob’s family line, and makes a promise. Hear again what God says: I am the Lord, the God of Abraham, your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south. And all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.
In the next twenty years, Jacob would gain wives, children, herds of goats and sheep and cattle, and accumulate great wealth. And his family would ultimately become the seed of the 12 great tribes of Israel, the forebears of King Saul, King David and King Solomon. Great indeed was God’s faithfulness to Jacob.

Today we begin the year-long celebration of the 150th anniversary of Trinity Episcopal Church as a parish in the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut. 150 years ago, almost to the day, 12 families gathered together and resolved to apply to the Diocese for recognition as a parish. It was a risky time: the nation was trending toward two inconsistent and incompatible systems of social expectations and mores, based in part on race but more especially on economics. Thus poised, the Union was on the road to the great War Between the States.

But the Episcopalians in Hartford had a different idea. Our parish founders had a dream for their community of faith: To establish one of the first “free churches” by not charging a fee to participate in worship. What’s more, they determined to build that community on the principal of the inherent equality of all of God’s children. One of the founders, Colonel Jacob Green, summed up this principal when he wrote: “Here no one is to be higher in right or privilege than another, this common and equal right being based on the common and equal need which each one has of divine help.”

These are the roots of this Tree of Life known as Trinity Episcopal Church. Like Jacob, our parish founders set out on a journey with a dream. Like Jacob, they could not be certain of what the future would bring, or how their vision for this fledgling church would unfold over time. Little could they have known that from a converted Unitarian meeting house would come what we know as Trinity Church today. Nor might they have expected that Trinity would be a welcoming place for refugees from around the world, people fleeing injustice and oppression and religious intolerance – places like Bosnia, Cuba, Liberia, and Burma. Nor might they have anticipated that through our commitment to bring God’s message of Love, equality, justice and compassion our mission, through the commitment of our own parishioners – would reach to such far-off places as Tanzania, Burma, the Middle East and South America – the east, west, south and north of which God spoke to Jacob. But it didn’t happen because they charted every step of the course. Like Jacob, they started with a dream, and trusted that God would be with them and would keep them wherever and whenever they walked in faith.

I suspect that if our founders could speak to us today we would hear that they are pleased to see the pictures of our 20 Tanzanian scholars from the Diocese of Tabora on the bulletin board in Goodwin Hall, and that they would like a lot of what we will be celebrating over the next 10 months. But God didn’t put us here to bask in the glories of the past or to be complacent about the possibilities that God still sets before us. As Christ insisted for the Temple, where he welcomed, cured and gave hope to the blind and the lame, so we must commit ourselves to continue Trinity’s tradition of welcome, hope and the healing of body, mind and spirit. These next months of celebration will also be months of discernment. With each event we celebrate we will be seeking wisdom – discerning what those events teach us about our core values as a community of faith, and where God is leading us to continue the work which was begun by our founders a century and a half ago. We have nothing to fear – we are not alone. For we know that God is with us and will keep us wherever we go, and that God will not leave us until His work is complete. May this 150th Anniversary celebration be not a bookend, but a bridge to the next phase of our sacred journey together. AMEN.

150 Years of Welcome, Hope and Healing

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ! I hope that you and those you love have had some time during the summer months for some time of rest and re-creation.

This month we begin the celebration of Trinity’s 150th anniversary as a parish in the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut. It was on September 10, 1859 when 12 families from the Asylum Hill neighborhood petitioned the Diocese for status as a new congregation to serve the Asylum Hill neighborhood and environs. The kick-off of our anniversary observance will be THIS Sunday, September 13, when Diocesan Bishop Andrew D. Smith will be our celebrant and preacher. This will be followed with our annual Parish Picnic in the Memorial Garden and a “moon bouncer” and other activities for children in the Sigourney Street courtyard. Our celebration will extend a full 10 months, culminating in June 2010 with a visit from the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Rt. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, as we mark the 150th anniversary of our official status as a parish in the Diocese.

From its very start, the core values of Trinity have been to seek and serve Christ in all persons, striving for justice and peace among all people, and respecting the dignity of every human being – all foundational tenets of our Baptismal covenant. These values have never been just words on paper – they are embodied in the decision of our founding families to be a “free church,” where “no one is higher in right or privilege than another, this common and equal right being based on the common and equal need which each one has for divine help.”

For nearly two years, a committee of the Vestry has been planning events and presentations which highlight the many ways in which the people of Trinity Episcopal Church have developed and lived out these core values over the past 150 years. But without more, such an observance could also be an extended obituary of glories past and archived only in memory. It is because of that the committee has also been working closely with our ministry teams to assure that the thrust of our 150th anniversary celebration is a look to the future – to consider and reflect on the ways that the people of Trinity are called by God to live out those core values in the 21st century.

I invite you to join with your brothers and sisters in Christ as we enter into what I pray will be an exciting and formative time of celebration, discernment and renewed commitment for the future.

Your brother in Christ,

The Rev. Donald L. Hamer, Rector