05/30/2026
The God Who Is Not Alone
This Sunday we celebrate the Most Holy Trinity, and I want to give you a preview of what we will be exploring together at Mass before I turn to something that has been on my mind all week from our Thursday book study. The Trinity is the strangest doctrine in Christianity. It is also, I have come to believe, the most important one for a community like ours, and I will explain why on Sunday. The short version is this: the God we worship is not a solitary sovereign who issues decrees from a safe distance. The God we worship exists in eternal relationship. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: three persons, one divine nature, a community of love at the heart of all reality. What that means for how we treat each other, how we welcome the stranger, and how we resist every power that tries to reduce human beings to categories of belonging and not-belonging, is something I want to preach about from the ground up this week. Come Sunday. I promise it will not be a theology lecture. It will be a love letter. The Cost of Discipleship: What Session Five Is Teaching Us On Thursday evening we completed session five of our book study on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, and I want to share something of what we are learning, because I think it is directly relevant to everything happening in our country right now. By session five we have moved through Bonhoeffer’s foundational argument about cheap grace versus costly grace, through the call to discipleship, through the cross, and into the heart of his reading of the Sermon on the Mount. And the thread that runs through all of it is this: the Church that accepts cheap grace, the grace that costs nothing and demands nothing and changes nothing, is a Church that will be unable to resist when the powers of the world come for the vulnerable. Bonhoeffer was not writing in the abstract. He was writing in Germany in the 1930s. He was watching a Church capitulate to National Socialism in real time. He was watching pastors and bishops who had preached grace for decades find that when the actual test came, they had nothing in them strong enough to say no. Because they had trained themselves in a kind of Christianity that was entirely private, entirely interior, entirely about feeling forgiven rather than about living differently. "Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate." He wrote those words in 1937. They feel like they were written this week. What session five is pressing us to ask is the question Bonhoeffer eventually had to answer with his own life: what does it look like to be a visible community of disciples in a world that is moving toward authoritarian consolidation? What does the Sermon on the Mount require of people who can see what is happening and have been given the resources of faith to respond to it? The answer, Bonhoeffer argues, is not a political program. It is a way of being. It is the practice of costly grace: the grace that shapes you, forms you, costs you something, and produces in you the kind of person who cannot simply go along when the world demands your compliance. On Fascism, Racism, and the Call of the Church I want to be direct about something, because I think the moment we are in requires directness. What is happening in the United States in 2026 meets the definition of fascism. I use that word carefully and I use it having read its definitions across political science, history, and theology. The concentration of executive power, the targeting of ethnic and national minorities for removal, the undermining of judicial independence, the use of fear and manufactured crisis to justify the suspension of ordinary legal protections, the alignment of national identity with racial and cultural purity, the labeling of dissent as treason: these are not metaphors. They are the operational characteristics of a fascist political movement. And racism is not a side issue. It is the engine. The deportation machinery that separates immigrant families is built on the logic that some people’s bodies are more expendable than others because of where they were born or what language they speak or what they look like. The policies that restrict the civil rights of communities of color are built on the same logic. The erasure of the history of racial oppression from schools and public discourse is built on the same logic. The Church has faced this before. Bonhoeffer faced it. The Confessing Church faced it. And the lesson of that moment, which is the lesson our Thursday group is sitting with week after week, is that the Church that had been formed by cheap grace had nothing to offer when the test came. This is why what we do at Saint Francis Parish and Outreach matters. Not because we are important or because our voices carry particular political weight. Because faithfulness in a moment like this is formative. The practice of welcoming the immigrant, of affirming the dignity of every person regardless of who they love or how they identify, of naming what is happening by its right name from the pulpit and not softening it into comfortable abstraction: this is the work of forming people in costly grace. This is what it looks like to follow the Bonhoeffer thread from the page to the street. I am not under any illusion that this is without cost. We talked about that two weeks ago on Ascension Sunday. There are people who will choose to hurt communities that stand up. There are structures that push back. There are weeks when the weight of it is heavy. But the Trinitarian God we celebrate this Sunday is a God who is not alone and does not leave us alone. The God whose name is merciful and lenient and full of compassion and truthful is the same God who sustains communities that refuse to look away. We are not looking away. Augusta Pride: We Need Your Help by the End of June One of the most concrete expressions of what we have been preaching and studying is our booth at Augusta Pride 2026. Standing at a Pride festival as a visible, named, unambiguously welcoming Christian community is not a gesture. It is a counter-testimony to every person who has been told that the Church’s love has limits. We need to raise $775 to make it happen. Augusta Pride is at the end of June, which means we are running out of time. If you believe in what this community is doing, if the fifteen weeks of sermons and the Bonhoeffer study and the Blessing Bags and the open table have meant something to you, this is one of the most direct ways to put that belief into action. Give what you can. Share the information with people who care about this kind of ministry. Help us get to Pride. You can give three ways: Venmo: PayPal: paypal.me/saintfrancisparish Cash App: $saintfrancisparish Thank you. For showing up. For giving what you have. For being the kind of community that the Spirit is building in Augusta, Georgia, in 2026. See you Sunday.Pax et Bonum, Bishop Greer
https://oursaintfrancis.org/blog/the-god-who-is-not-alone
Parish News The God Who Is Not Alone May 30, 2026 This Sunday we celebrate the Most Holy Trinity, and I want to give you a preview of what we will be exploring together at Mass before I turn to something that has been on my mind all week from our Thursday book study. The Trinity is the strangest doc...
