Trinitytide Pastoral Letter, 2026

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock.

If anyone hears my voice and opens the door,

I will come in to him, and sup with him,

and he with me” (Revelation 3:20).

Dear Parishioners of Trinity,

If you’ve seen our Main Avenue sign in the last several months, you’ll have noticed this verse of Scripture rather conspicuously making a statement. Many hundreds of people have no doubt driven by in their cars and seen it. Hundreds more walking up or down the street, through our parking lot, or along the trail beside the Church, will have seen it. But what kind of statement is it? How does this message fit our Gospel mission, and the legacy entrusted to Trinity for over 160 years? What is its meaning today? Of course, the difficulty with signs is that they have to be interpreted. The problem with quoting a verse of Scripture on a billboard, on a bumper sticker, or on social media, is that it inevitably lacks context, and therefore is very liable to misunderstanding and misapplication.

In fact, Revelation 3:20 is very commonly misused in evangelism to ask a non-believer to accept Jesus. Yet Jesus’ knocking here is not on the hearts of unbelievers who do not know him. Rather, it’s an image that comes at the end of one of the letters to the seven Churches, which conveys a scathing judgment upon the first-century Church in Laodicea. In it, Christ criticizes a Church that had become caught up in the riches and power of this passing age, such that it was completely unaware of its own spiritual impoverishment: that it was “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked.” Our Lord rebukes a Church that had become “lukewarm,” spiritually complacent, indistinguishable from the status quo of empire, and therefore without prophetic witness in the world. 

And yet this is a word not only for the ancient Church in Laodicea. As the late Rev’d John Stott, a great evangelical Anglican of our times, once remarked: “Perhaps none of the seven letters is more appropriate to the twentieth- [and, one might add, twenty-first-] century church than this one. It describes vividly the respectable, sentimental, nominal, skin-deep religiosity which is so widespread among us today. Our Christianity is flabby and anemic. We appear to have taken a lukewarm bath of religion.” What’s needful, today even as in the first century, is that the Church should hear the voice of its Lord calling her, that we who have been called should repent and return to our first love: Christians who have forgotten their true riches must be purified, and obtain from Christ gold refined in the fire; our shame must be clothed with the white garments of the saints, who put on the righteousness of Christ; our blindness must be anointed by the healing salve of Christ, that we might see with godly eyes. 

This makes me reflect on all the ways that I need to hear the Gospel and be transformed: how I have denied hospitality to my Lord, and left him standing outside – how I have shut out the very one who so loves me. What is the condition of my heart, that this should be so? How did this situation come to be? When God in Christ is knocking at my door, do I answer, “Sorry, I’m busy!” Or do I perhaps not answer at all, because I do not even hear the knock at the door of my heart, of my mind, of my conscience, of my life? Have I become so accustomed to the clamour of the world, or the noise of my own distracted thoughts, that I am unable to hear and discern the voice of Christ calling me?

This is also an opportunity for us to examine ourselves corporately as a parish. Are there ways that we take for granted God’s blessings to our Church, so that we have lived less than fully out of gratitude? How have we failed to welcome Christ in our neighbour and the stranger, in the downtrodden and needy person who comes knocking at our door? Christ Jesus promises that when we receive such a one, we receive him; when we open the door to the stranger, he himself will come in and eat with us: “Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? . . . And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:37-40). “If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him, and sup with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:20).

Trinity Season, the longest season of the Christian year, is about our hearing and heeding the invitation to dine with Christ at a most intimate feast. In our Book of Common Prayer tradition, we hear Christ’s invitation over and over again—his patient and persistent knocking on our hearts, his gentle and insistent voice calling us—to renew our communion with him. “Ye that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbours, and intend to lead the new life, following the commandments of God, and walking from henceforth in his holy ways: Draw near with faith . . .“ (BCP, 76). If we do so, he will come in and be our host and guest; then we will share with him the most intimate union of mutual indwelling: “that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us” (BCP, 84). Such is the corporate mysticism—the life of ever-deepening participation in the abundant, eternal life of God—of evangelical, Prayerbook Anglicanism.

It is my fervent prayer that as a Church we would together be renewed in faith and repentance, and know the joy of the feast prepared for us. It is my prayer that we would recognize the gracious presence of Christ who longs to make his abode with us, that we would be moved to live our lives by gift, as an act of thanksgiving. In view of that generosity to which we are called, please find enclosed a financial update from our Treasurer, and consider your gift unto the Lord with a cheerful heart.

Under the Mercy,

Father Benjamin+

On the Feast of St James, Apostle and Martyr (July 25, 2026)