An Invitation to a New School Year!

So God created man in his own image,
    in the image of God he created him;
    male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Genesis 1:27-28

Last Friday our faculty and staff spent the morning at Aqueduct Retreat Center in a time of worship, prayer, and reflection, in preparation for the school year.  This was a time of recalibration of our hearts, before the onslaught of school.  

And one of the key recalibrations is from thinking of our work as a set of tasks to thinking of our work as an invitation.  God is calling us to join him in his wonderful work at Trinity School.

We often read a passage like the one above and think, "How awesome a responsibility we have as teachers and leaders of young people!"  Indeed.  Theologians have even named this passage in a way that highlights the obligation that we feel when we hear it: The Creation Mandate.  But it might just as easily be called the Creation Invitation.  God is calling us into the joy of his creation.  God is inviting us to join him in his wonderful work.  

Awe and gratitude are deeper than obedience.  Obedience is one of the ways that we show God our awe and gratitude, but only one way.  So don’t burn your task list, but try this: reread it as an invitation to come alongside God, to enjoy him, to play with him.  To sing with him and celebrate.  We have a model of this in Proverbs 8, where personified Wisdom says of God,

I was the craftsman at his side.

I was filled with delight day after day,

Rejoicing always in his presence,

Rejoicing in his whole world

And delighting in mankind.  Proverbs 8:30-31

What would Trinity School be like if we all found the grace, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to fulfill our obligations in this spirit this year?

I want to say one more thing that needs to be said just now.  This gracious invitation of God is for everyone.  We read from Isaiah 55; do you hear what the prophet says? “Come, all.”  Isaiah saw this vision of “all” in a way that strained the boundaries of his own ethnic and religious culture: it included the eunuchs, the foreigners--two groups who had been excluded from Israel’s covenant community.  In Isaiah 55:5, God promises that “you shall call a nation you do not know.”  In one of his most majestic visions, Isaiah saw the nations--the Goyim--streaming to Zion, singing the invitation that they had heard: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord” (Isaiah 2).  There are strong voices in our current cultural moment that insist that the invitation is limited to only a few--I am talking about the white supremacist groups that brought violence to Charlottesville .  The Good News of the Gospel runs in a completely different direction, and it is important for us to say so.  

In our time of prayer as a faculty, I asked them to consider this:

• To pray for these people who support racists ideas, who by definition of the Gospel, are our enemies, opposed to the deepest commitments we have.  Remember that Jesus calls us to pray for our enemies; it is one of the hallmarks of the Kingdom of Christ.
• To pray for those in our country, but especially for those in our Trinity community, who surely feel the fear and terror that these groups inflict.  Many of our Trinity families are families of color. Many families, whether of color or not, come from communities and networks outside of the most popular Trinity networks.  Let us pray (I’m inviting you!) that all will feel the welcome and inclusion of Christ from Day One.
• To pray for our leaders, to have wisdom and courage, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.