By Pastor Suzanne 
Scripture:  Exodus 17:8-13
https://youtu.be/JyEwrr-Ukrg

We are beginning a new sermon series here at Trinity, synching with a new Sunday morning group led by Jeremy Grossman on superheroes of our faith and what they can teach us about leadership. If you go to the bookstore or browse the Web for tips on leadership, you’ll quickly find that our culture is saturated with how-tos for successful leadership. Leadership is a really hot topic. In this series, we will be discerning how leadership looks from a Christian viewpoint. How do we understand what it means to lead when we examine the stories of our faith? How does looking to God, trusting in God, and following Jesus reveal leadership to us? And then how do we apply this wisdom to our own day-to-day lives? These are some of the key questions we’ll be asking as we explore parts of the Bible together.
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By Associate Pastor Suzanne Clemenz
Scripture: Psalm 133

Over the past few weeks at Trinity, we have been looking at a specific set of the psalms in the Old Testament, the psalms of assent, which are believed to be songs or poems that God’s people would sing or recite when they were journeying together to Jerusalem to worship God at the semi-annual festivals that were part of their tradition. 

By Pastor Suzanne Clemenz
Scripture: Luke 13:10-17

​Our scripture for today tells us that the miracle that Jesus performed in healing the woman whose back was bent over for 18 years occurred on the Sabbath while he was preaching in the synagogue. Here was a woman, likely a faithful member of her community who could be found in church on any given Sabbath, suddenly and miraculously transformed in a way that was going to bless her for the rest of her life. I’m guessing that she was not expecting the events of that day to happen to her. In my imagination, she was probably toward the middle or back of the crowd, simply watching from a reasonable spot that didn’t call attention to herself. Unlike the person healed in other miracle stories in the Bible, she was not calling out to Jesus for mercy or reaching out to try to touch him. She didn’t have friends or family there trying to get Jesus’s attention on her behalf. She wasn’t trying to position herself to be seen; she may even have been like some of us who are uncomfortable when we get called out in a crowd. I don’t believe this woman was expecting to be on the receiving end of Jesus’s compassion in a way that was going to change the trajectory of her life. But that is exactly what happened.