Category: Sermons
shouting and silence – a sermon
There are several accounts in the New Testament of Jesus triumphal entry into Jerusalem. This morning. I read to you From Luke, chapter 19, verses 29 through 40, which differs in some ways from some of the other accounts and is the same in some ways. But please hear these words.
When Jesus had come near Bethphage in Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples saying, go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, why are you untying it? Just say, the Lord needs it. So those who were sent departed and found it just as he told them.
As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, why are you untying the colt? They said, the Lord needs it. Then they brought it to Jesus. And after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road.
Now, as he was approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of disciples began to praise God joyfully. With a loud Voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord, Peace in heaven and glory in the highest heaven.
Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, teacher, order your disciples to stop.
He answered, I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out, this is the word of God for us, the people of God.
Mark Twain, the author, famously said one time, it’s not the parts of the Bible that I don’t understand that bother me. It’s the parts that I do understand that trouble me the most. Now, I’m not here to agree or disagree with what someone from a couple centuries might have said. However, I can say that I think living a life close to the one who makes the words of the Bible come alive often puts us in very uncomfortable places. Okay?
Living close to Jesus often puts us in uncomfortable places, even when we read the words about him. On this Palm Sunday, when we’re looking at everything between shouting and silence, I want to offer at least a couple of questions that easily, easily this passage leaves hanging around for us in life.
First of all, how did they know to shout praise and honor to a king?
How did they know? How did they know that this was what they were supposed to do? Was it the miracles? Was it the feeding of the five thousand and all the leftovers? Was it the people who were.
Who were blind that he made see again?
Was it the miracles? Was it those who had demons that were cast out from them?
Was it the miracles that made them shout? I don’t know if it was the miracles or not, but that question does kind of linger. How did they know to shout at this one, to throw down their cloaks for this colt to ride upon?
Was it the teaching, maybe the parables? The. The Good Samaritan, the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son, that stubborn fig tree who wouldn’t produce figs?
Was it the parables?
Was it the other teachings, the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon on the level place, depending on where you read about it? Was it the big turnaround in that little guy named Zacchaeus?
Was it the teaching of the man named Jesus that made them shout and welcome a king? I mean, it was risky to do this kind of thing. You realize that, don’t you? I mean, standing where they were at that time, they were surrounded by an occupying army. An occupying kingdom watched over them, and they shouted out for their king.
This was risky stuff. It wasn’t as if they had to prove that they were citizens of this country and take risks or anything. They lived there, but they were in danger because they shouted out.
It was risky to welcome a king into the kind of life they were living. Risky indeed. So my first question is, how? How did they know to shout for the king?
And then there’s the second question. Maybe I was just in a kind of questioning mood this week or whatever. I don’t know. A question that I admit when you first hear it, sounds almost absurd as the first. But I’ve lived now in a world divided long enough.
I’ve lived in a world of haves and have nots. A world of people accepted and of people rejected. A world where some rule and some are the ruled. I’ve lived in this world long enough to come to my second question with a lot of honesty, and that’s this one. What if the Pharisees.
There was a few Pharisees, not all of them, but a few of them were told here. What if those few Pharisees who spoke out and said, everyone should be quieted here, what if they were actually right?
What if the crowd really did need to be silenced before something bad happened?
And yes, terrible things may have happened, may well have happened sometimes, you know, sometimes a crowd can bring out the worst of those who are supposed to be keeping order among people.
And those who are keeping order have to react or the crowd gets out of hand. In those days, it might have been with shields and spears and swords.
In our day, maybe it’s tear gas or water hoses or dogs or rubber bullets.
How can we be absolutely certain that that group of Pharisees were not just looking out for the good of the whole people, all their people? They weren’t just trying. They were just trying to protect folks.
What if they were right?
I’ve seen it happen.
I’ve had it happen.
I’ve said one thing in a sermon or message or in something I’ve written or said one thing in public.
Some in the crowd walk away from their church, and then I hear it.
You should have kept quiet, preacher.
You shouldn’t talk about that ever again. Pastor.
Don’t shout that out anymore.
There have been times in my life and in my ministry where I’ve heard the words of those who say, you better get it quieted down.
And I do. I do.
Because how do I know this telling me to be quiet might be right in between shouting and silence, in between those times when people feel compelled by the moment and the spirit to cry out, and the times when people are not certain enough to know if what is happening won’t just make matters somehow worse.
In between those two extremes is. Well, at least in this story we read today. In between those two extremes is the man God, Jesus riding on a colt. Yes, Jesus is silent.
He’s not crying out. And yes, Jesus is complicit. He doesn’t quiet the crowd either.
He just sits there and lets all the wrestling and the wrangling about what’s the right thing to do here and what’s the wrong thing to do. All the shouting and the silence making.
He just lets it all go on around him.
See, I had those questions about this passage, but there’s one thing I do not question at all, and that is why Jesus did not participate in the shouting or in the silencing.
That’s because Jesus knew the way of the cross was looming before him. He knew he was getting ready to die for shouters and silencers alike.
He knew Jesus. He knew he would bear the weight of all of their. Of all of my.
Of all of your struggles to know the right way to go. Is it shouting or is it silence?
My siblings. I’ve taken moments of silence as a pastor held back after hearing warnings that to speak might cause trouble.
I’ve also shouted for justice, more than my fair share, I think, and prayed for God’s presence to reign in a messy world often devoid of the love that is abundant in Jesus Christ, my Lord. And I know you wrestle with when to do these two things too, don’t you? Don’t you?
But every time, there’s only one thing I cling to.
I cling to the cross of Christ, where I know there is someone who knows both my passionate heart that must shout at times.
And where I’m also known as the one who can be silent, not really because of warnings or fear, but because I truly believe that that one on the cross in his silent state can sometimes shout louder than I’m ever able to shout if I just give him the chance.
How did they know?
And what if they were right?
Just two questions that kind of lived there in between shouting and silence.
But they also live with each who wonders.
There also lives with each who wonders a cross of redemption. A king filled with love. An abundance of grace for all of us. For all of us who shout.
For all of us who are silent. For all of us who struggle with everything in between.
Amen.
righteousness and mercy – a sermon
I invite you to join me in prayer. Would you pray for me even as I pray for us all?
Lord, it is not by might, it is not by power, and it most certainly is not by the cleverness of this human’s imagination that your word is read or proclaimed. But it is by your spirit. So may that spirit come now. May it rest upon each of us. May it work through all of us that we find ourselves in the presence of the Living Word, Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen.
From Luke, chapter 19, verses 1 through 10.
Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man there named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd, he could not because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because Jesus was going to pass that way.
When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today. So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, he’s gone to be the guest of a sinner. Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, look, half my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.
Then Jesus said to him, today, salvation has come to this house because he too is a son of Abraham. For the son of man came to seek out and to save the lost. This is the word of God for us, the people of God.
Thanks be to God indeed. You know, folks, over the past several weeks as we’ve gone through this Lenten series entitled Everything in Between, we’ve been wrestling a lot and digging deeper into a lot of parables. You know, we had the Good Samaritan, we had the parable of the barren fig tree. We had a parable about lost and found sheep and a shepherd risking everything. And the one week here in Lent that we didn’t have a parable, we had to deal with the family drama between Mary and Martha as they tried to figure out who was doing the better thing.
So to tell you the truth, I was looking forward to dealing with some very straightforward up front story from the life of Jesus this week. Something concrete. Jesus walking through a town, a tree, crowds, something without all that having to dig into parables and find all the meaning that’s in those parables. Something besides all the family drama that we’ve had to deal with.
And then, of course, we get to Zacchaeus.
Zacchaeus. The name Zacchaeus means righteous or pure. Did you know that righteous or pure is what this man is named? I mean, really, a Roman tax collector named that?
I mean, let’s be real. What’s the one word that is literally connected with tax collector in the gospel? With the conjunction and tax collectors and sinners. Yeah, tax collectors and sinners, exactly. And this one is named innocent and pure.
Not much of a break there. And as I studied a little deeper into this parable, I discovered that there were some interesting problems dealing with the original language of the parable. The original Greek is not so clear as to when it was that Zacchaeus started all this charitable giving that he was doing. Now, I don’t want to get. I don’t want to get lost in the weeds here or the thorns or go climbing up my own tree here and end up having nobody see or hear what I’ve got to say.
But suffice it to say, Zacchaeus could have been doing this giving and repaying for quite a while. Could have, just because of the words that are used in the original language. But what we do know for sure is that Zacchaeus went public with it after meeting Jesus. He declares what he’s doing and will do, and that changes a lot.
But still, as I was preparing for this week, I had to dig down into the roots of those words. Like that gardener dug down into that fig tree. I had to search like I was looking for a lost sheep in the wilderness. I began thinking, you know what? This might as well been a parable.
There was no break here.
And then, of course, there’s Jesus.
Jesus, there he goes and singles out this tax collector from the crowd. Zacchaeus, the man too short to see and too despised to be seen.
Zacchaeus, hiding in a sycamore tree, a man whose name was, to put it as mildly as you can, just a touch at odds with his reputation.
A man everyone knew was making money by taking money.
I tell you what, this series of everything in between really has drawn our eyes to the dichotomies that we can find in the world and even within scripture itself, dichotomies sometimes that we love to see. I mean, things like righteousness, we like that we can look at someone or something and say, that’s righteous. We know that’s good. It may even be trouble, but it’s good trouble, so we know that’s good. Righteousness, something we can look at and define.
And mercy, we like that, too, because we want to show mercy to those who deserve it, right? I mean, someone needs to deserve mercy. If you don’t believe me, just ask any old court judge. Or you can ask a young one, too. We’ve only got old ones in here today, though.
I think we like to keep our categories like righteousness and mercy separated.
But Jesus, well, Jesus doesn’t care all that much for our categories.
Jesus doesn’t see like we do. Jesus doesn’t even look in the same places we do for what needs to be seen in the story. Jesus sees: Zacchaeus, sees him up in the tree, hiding.
But Jesus sees him not as a tax collector, but as a human being. Jesus sees Zacchaeus as a child of Abraham.
And then Jesus just invites himself right into that person’s house, into the mess that is a tax collector’s life, into that space, that space that’s seemingly miles wide between righteousness and mercy. That’s where Jesus goes.
And that’s just it, isn’t it? That space between – that awkward, uncomfortable space where we don’t know what to do, the space where we’re not sure if we should be angry, judgmental, frustrated, or just compassionate.
That space where we must wrestle with verbs, when it comes to how we act.
A space where we must wrestle with names and labels and all those things. That space, that uncomfortable space where we must deal with, well, people.
We want it to be nice and easy one way or the other. Righteousness, mercy. Are they righteous? Do they deserve mercy?
And Jesus?
Well, Jesus fills that space.
Jesus doesn’t choose. Jesus just invites himself in. He stops at a tree and looks up and says, hey, you, I’m going to your house today.
Here’s Jesus looking where we don’t even want to look.
And in that moment, in that space filled with Jesus, something happens, something transformative. Zacchaeus, this person whose life was only known as the one who took from others, becomes and shows the whole community that everything is being made whole, everything will be made right.
Zacchaeus wants salvation, connection, community, not as a reward for being good, but as a gift freely given.
And Zacchaeus gets it. The community gets it. And that, my friends, is good news. Not just good news, but the good news. That’s the Gospel.
Jesus doesn’t just offer mercy to the undeserving and commend those who are righteous.
Jesus fills up the space in between.
Jesus fills up the space that is unfillable and even uncomfortable for us to go there.
Jesus brings together that which is broken, you know? Here, in just a few moments, Jesus will offer himself to you again in the act of taking apart of the broken body of Christ, we will be brought together in community.
It doesn’t seem to make sense, does it? In brokenness, there’s community.
But that’s what Jesus does. Jesus fills the spaces between those things that we have trouble filling.
Salvation, my friend, my siblings, salvation is offered to you today.
Come, come on down and let Jesus go to your house today. Amen. Amen.
As you leave this place, may you find God in every messy middle. May you know that the world is bigger than any two sides. May you trust that you are made in the image of God. Therefore, you contain multitudes. So may you move through the world with an open heart, with a curious mind, and with the confidence that you do not go alone.
God is with you in the mountains, in the valleys, and everywhere in between. Believe this good news and go in peace. Amen. Amen.
Mary Pondered
It never fails. Really. People say that the only things you can count on in this world are death and taxes – but that’s just not true.
You can also count on people showing up for Christmas Eve worship.
Now before you get your stockings in a twist, I am not talking about people who show up just for Christmas Eve services. I have no complaint about that at all. No, what I am saying is that there is something about gathering on Christmas Eve that is attractive to people.
Maybe it is the candlelight, and we are all moths drawn to the flame.
Maybe it is the songs – both carols and solos – that we are all waiting to hear.
Perhaps it is just being together, as a family and as a community of faith that drives us to want to be here on Christmas Eve.
I can assure you of this, if I had to pick one worship service to attend every year – if for some reason I could only go to one service of worship – it would be this one.
So, believe me…I am incredibly happy that every single person is here tonight and was thrilled with everyone that I got to see at the earlier service as well.
Yet there is something about worshiping at 11 pm on Christmas Eve that just works for me. (Some think that it is because my family has a tradition of going to Waffle House® in between the early and late services that motivates me. But trust me, it is more than that. Really.)
I think it has something to do with wanting to recreate the experience of that first holy night so long ago. Yes, in a very truthful way we moved our main Christmas worship to Christmas eve a century or so ago because we wanted to give Christmas Day to families and friends. But at the same time, I think we wanted to try and recreate a holy night. We hope for some sort of star to shine bright for us or for the words of an angel to ring in our ears. Or maybe it is because during this hour when our energy is really starting to run low, we know that we are open to experiencing God in some new and powerful way.
So, we come. Expectant as the shepherds, we come.
And maybe that is the real reason you can always count on people to come to Christmas Eve services: they know that they have been invited not just by a church, but by the Creator of the Universe.
Shepherds were invited to the birth of Jesus and shepherds were about as low on the totem pole of human creation that existed at the time. So why can’t we show up to celebrate as well, regardless of how we see ourselves or others see us. I think that is perfectly good theology. The Creator does want you here.
Angels were there as well, and if you don’t feel like one of the ruffians that shepherds were in those days, perhaps you feel at least a little closer to the angels – not angelic – but at least someone willing to serve God as you can, following Jesus, doing your best. So why shouldn’t you feel invited by the Creator? I think that is perfectly good theology as well. The Creator does want you here.
Even preachers have a precedent for attendance from the first Nativity – well, at least according to some. Mary rode a donkey to Bethlehem, and we all know that a donkey is just another name for a, well, you know. So even preachers, or anyone we think a little less of in this world because of their obstinance or difference in opinion from us, have a standing invite to this service. I think that is perfectly good theology. The Creator does want me and you to be here.
But maybe we are here tonight because we know just how important this night is in the scheme of things. We realize that on this night long ago God chose to become Human, which started the move towards the cross and the resurrection. Those set loose the power for everything to be reversed for us so that we humans could be filled with the presence of God. Some would call it the circle of life…I like to think of it as the circle of re-birth. We celebrate a birth because we know that somehow this helps leads to our rebirth.
So, because we know how important this night is, we want to be here. We want to say we added something to our celebration of holly and Hallmark, presents and matching pajamas, lights and libations.
So, we go where people have always gone.
Church. On Christmas Eve.
I think a lot of us do show up because we think we know what this is all about. We think we understand the babe in the manger as Lord of Creation. We think we understand the shepherds, the angels, the guy who married a woman already pregnant, and we think we even understand Mary. We think we get all these things.
It is God’s coming to earth – of course I am going to be here to celebrate that! Easy – peasy – God is among us, let’s worship and have good cheer! Our world certainly needs that.
But right there at that moment is where we all rub up against this story in the wrong way. We are told in such a way that you cannot make sense saying that you “understand it all.” One of the last verses we heard in that story was, “But Mary kept these things and pondered them in her heart.”
Folks, I have done my fair share of pondering – which means simply that we think about things that are puzzling to us – and some of you may even claim that I do far too much of my pondering out loud, from the pulpit. The truth is, pondering requires less than full understanding. If you fully understand, there is no need to ponder.
And Mary pondered. The one who knew more about what was going on that night than any other human or animal or angel present found herself surrounded with a baby given by God, a husband who loved her when he could have left her for dead, a birth in a strange town and a strange place, a bunch of lower class shepherds showing up to ogle her first born, talk of angel proclamations – something which with she had personal experience.
All these things – and Mary pondered them.
I believe that the greatest thing the church offers as we come together to worship on Christmas Eve is the opportunity to experience mystery! We can’t completely explain being fully human/fully divine. We can’t truly describe virgin birth, angelic hosts, shepherds who become proclaimers. We can’t explain new stars in the sky and anything else about this holy night.
However, we can invite you to the mystery of it all. We can aid in experiencing the mystery that goes beyond all mysteries. God and humanity created in One. You cannot explain that. But you can ponder the mystery of it.
And if you can ponder it, then perhaps you will decide to also follow that mystery. You can follow like the shepherds did. You can follow the mystery you ponder of the God/Human along whatever path you are walking.
Just don’t try to own the explanation of it.
Let it own you…so you too can have the peace that this holy night brings.
Amen.
Holy Disruptions
Reader…the following is a sermon manuscript that has had an interesting life. It started as a few notes for a Good Friday video devotion and then became a hopeful blog post for Holy Saturday (I hate that name), until finally becoming a sermon. If you can’t find all the pieces in this post, I will be shocked. I don’t like the messiness of posting a manuscript because the oral art of preaching transforms even sentence structures. But I share it with you anyway. (If a good editor wants to make some notes on it and send it back to me, no offense will be taken!)
Based on Matthew 28:1-10
At the beginning of the COVID19 outbreak, I had high hopes that I would find a lot of time that I could devote to writing and maybe even making my blog “alive” again. But alas, the learning curve on technology that I have had to master over the past few weeks, the new ways I have had to learn to adapt as pastor, husband, father, brother, son, and friend during this time just seemed to eat away what little creativity I had left. I started this in several forms, several times and failed.
But it kept building up this past Holy Week and I have to share it on Easter Sunday.
Matt was my best friend in first grade and for the first half of our second year of school. We were in the same class but first met during the walk home from school. Matt lived closer to Barrackville (there is no “s” in that, folks) Elementary, but it was on the same route I took home, so we would often walk together and talk. It wasn’t long till the friendship spilled over into school and recess. Our friendship would grow deeper because of the time after school. Occasionally, we would pass by his house, walk half-way to mine, and stop at a little “Mom and Pop” store to get some candy. Then we would go our separate ways.
Eventually, my mom and dad gave me permission to stop at his house and play after school. And we did the things first grade boys would do – climb trees, play games, and make stuff up to do, and, oh yeah, break things. Imagination and creativity in our 6 and 7 year old selves wasn’t limited by what other people might think of what we created or thought, or even by how much the other laughed at some silly creation, it was only limited by the time we had and the materials that we had at hand.
Boxes became spaceships and racecars.
Clouds could be anything.
We even took the time, perhaps in the summer between first and second grade, to come up with an entire new monetary system which we called “Funny Money”. We made billions and billions of “Bucks” on that idea. The only problem was that no one else would accept it as legal tender. We always had hope that it would catch on some day, but just didn’t know how to manipulate the system to make that happen. Our parents would not even buy in.
Somewhere near Thanksgiving of that second grade year, my Dad let us know that the temporary job that he had been working in Beckley was soon to become permanent. We would move over the Christmas holiday.
I went to Matt’s house for the last time on the day school let out for Christmas break. We made sure we had each other’s phone numbers, addresses, and exactly half of the Funny Money each. We promised to stay in touch with one another. There weren’t any tears, because, first of all, we were boys and we didn’t do that sort of stuff. But deeper still was the overriding belief that this was just some little interruption to our friendship. We’d be back at it in no time.
My family moved what was at that time six hours away. You can do that drive in half the time now that I-79 is complete and the bridge over the “Big Ditch” (I’ll explain why I call the New River Gorge that some other time.) are complete and Route 19 is basically a four lane highway now. But in 1972, the trip took six hours.
I remember talking to Matt one time after that. It was a phone call. I can’t even remember what we said.
And, of course, I don’t have any Funny Money. Not even sure what I spent the last of it on. Probably used as a bookmark and eventually threw it away. It may be buried in a box somewhere near the house in Mt. Hope where I grew up. I might have used it to paper some creation or another. Maybe I burned it all. I just don’t know.
Something has been churning in my head for a while now. I’ve talked about it with a few trusted friends. I’ve tried to give voice to the words in a video recording that I could share, but somewhere in the midst of talking, my thoughts got jumbled from the notes I had made. So, I tried to use my blogging muscle, but even that got distracted. In the end – it is this, a sermon for Easter. The story of my short friendship with Matt and the way he and I both looked at my family moving away from Barackville as an “interruption” to our friendship is just a way that I’m able to imagine what I want to say.
COVID19 is not an interruption to our lives. It is a disruption of life itself. Or, at least, it could be. I feel quite certain that there will be powers at work to try and get everything back to just the way it used to be, but in my heart of hearts, I both think and hope that they will fail miserably. I hope we come out of this thing not just shaking off the dust and going back to making Funny Money or whatever it is that we do but instead we step out into a world made new by the disruption of some respiratory virus that is so novel that it makes everything novel.
An interruption is a phone call from some sales person during dinner. I might be irritated a bit, but it doesn’t spoil a good meal. A disruption is a phone call from the hospital telling you that “You need to come now. Your son was in an accident.” Life isn’t the same, the world isn’t the same after a disruption.
And COVID19? This little bug has disrupted everybody. Think about it. Even the President of the United States, who was never very fond of the press, has spent extended periods of time with them every single day. Think about it. There was a time when if you heard two people in a grocery store, one of them passing gas and the other one coughing, you’d have kept your distance from the former rather than the latter. Think about it. I walked outside about a week ago and I could smell the aroma of baking bread coming from the Heiner’s bakery that is over a mile away. (Go ahead, Southsiders…give it a try. It’s wonderful!)
Think about it. This is no mere interruption. This is a disruption.
Forgive me, but I have to remanence again. This time, I’m not going quite so far back.
When I was in seminary, I actually took a course on Preaching. Yeah, they offer those there and despite what my congregations are subjected to on a regular basis, I took one and passed. I didn’t get an “A” but I didn’t fail either. But, I did come close.
We all were assigned passages to preach on that appear in the Lectionary. I lucked out and got the gospel lesson for Easter that just so happens to be the same passage that comes up this year in the Lectionary, Matthew’s account of the women coming to the tomb. That had to be the luckiest draw in preaching that anyone could get in seminary – the equivalent to winning the lottery. I mean, come on! Preaching on the Resurrection? Piece of cake.
Well, I found a way to screw it up. Somewhere in the midst of my sermon in front of classmates and professor, I started referring to the “miracle of the Resurrection” and made repeated mentions of it throughout the sermon. I noticed the first time I said the phrase that my professor shifted in his seat and I thought, well, that got his attention.
Oh, it did.
When I got my sermon manuscript back, it was marked with a big ugly letter grade that rhymes with the letters “C and B” but has a much harder sound at the beginning, and underneath it in very legible writing, that really didn’t need the double underlining to draw attention to it, were the words, “The Resurrection of Jesus IS NO MERE MIRACLE! IT IS AN ESCHATOLOGICAL EVENT THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING!!” (Now, I could tell you what eschatological means. I do know. I even knew it then. But I’m gonna have more fun imagining you at home Googling it. E-S-C-H-A-T-O-L-O-G-I-C-A-L) The fact of the matter is that my professor was absolutely right. The Resurrection wasn’t about some miraculous event. It. Did. Change. Everything.
Or at least it is supposed to change everything. The problem is that we have to realize that it changed everything and like good little humans, we can choose not to do so.
The resurrection is a disruption – not an interruption. It reverses the power of death. It sets us free from the bondage of law. It changes everything – past, present, and future. (That’s a hint for those of you who both didn’t know the meaning of eschatological and were not willing to Google it because you knew I thought it would be funny.)
COVID19 is also a disruption. Not on the level of the Resurrection, mind you, but it is an incredible opportunity for us as individuals, communities of faith, families, nations, and yes, even the whole world, to accept that things have changed and allow God to introduce new life into these mortal bodies and mortally built systems that we describe as “normal.”
As I wrote earlier, I have been working this out in my brain for a little while. I thought I would write it out on Good Friday, because, the way I see it now, we are still too close to the event of COVID19 to know exactly what will change and what won’t. Lots and lots of people will predict. Lots and lots of people will be wrong. It’s sort of like standing and staring at the Cross of Jesus knowing that this is bad, but the best thing to do is run and hide. Good disciple.
But I finished this out yesterday on the day known as “Holy Saturday” – a name that is further proof that Christianity is woefully disconnected from our culture. A better name might be “Woah! This is the most different Saturday ever!!!” Because, it is the most different Saturday ever. The Son of God is dead and in a tomb. If we thought things were bad on Friday, then the unknowing of this time is even worse.
And that is where I think we are right now as Homo Sapiens. We are at that Saturday mark following a major disrupter of history.
So, what comes on Sunday? What is Easter going to be?
I don’t know for this event. We can let God recreate us and everything we hold onto, or we can blink, stretch, and go back to normal. I don’t want to do that. I want to use this time as a jumping off point into whatever new thing it is that God would allow to happen. I don’t want rescued from this virus. I want resurrected! I want the church resurrected – not just with ‘new people’ but with a whole new way of being church! We are figuring it out now when we have to, why can’t we figure it out in the not so distant post-COVID19 world as well?
We’ve done one heck of a good job fighting back against a “novel” virus. The real question is “Can we fight for a ‘novel’ world in a post-virus age?”
The women came to the tomb, felt the earth quake, saw soldier fall stupid with fear, and then had a angel say to them – “Don’t be afraid. I know you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He isn’t here, because he’s been raised from the dead, just as he said.”
Sometime in the future, we are going to walk out of this social isolation, feel the earth quake, see people around acting strange out of fear, and maybe, just maybe, if we have the faith and grab hard onto the hope that Resurrection offers, we will hear an angel say to us, “Don’t be afraid. I know you are looking for normal that got locked up during this pandemic. Normal is not here. Normal is being recreated by Resurrection people like you, just as Jesus said.”
P.S. – Matt, if by some chance you happen to read this…sorry about the Funny Money. We really should have been bright enough to figure out cyber currency instead. And Dr. Lischer. Thanks. I know better now.
Not Quite Home 