An Incarnational Moment

Because there is one loaf, we , who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf. The bread which we break is a sharing in the body of Christ. (United Methodist Hymnal, Word and Table Service 1, page 13)

Some of my favorite memories from my teenage years were those where I spent an entire day and night reading a book. My clearest memories of these nights involve books written by Stephen King. Once I started them, I was compelled to get to the end even if it meant spending a sleepless night and garnering my parents wrath the next day. There was either something so scary that it had to be resolved or my imagination was so taken by the narrative that I had to finish in order to rest. Either way, I would give in to the compulsion to read.

There are a lot of things on my “to do” list for today. I had hoped to finish and record my Sunday sermon this afternoon. (Not going to happen.) I still have some work to do to prepare for a Zoom Bible Study this evening. (Will definitely happen somehow.) We are recording parts of the Sunday service today so I can edit them tomorrow. (That’s scheduled…so it should happen.) And yes, I still have hopes of doing some recorded mid-week meditation for the people of First Church. (This one is still unknown.)

Some may say that I don’t know how to prioritize, and that may be the case. However, over the past couple of weeks I have had so many conversations about Communion and the “Pandemic Virtual Church Time” we are now immersed in, and I have read some thought provoking articles about the topic, that I find myself compelled to put some words down as well. Priorities or not, I’m at a point of compulsion here.

If you didn’t watch the video that I posted last week of a conversation Rev. Jennifer Williams and I had, I would recommend it as background for this. She’s an incredibly insightful pastor. I also cannot recommend enough a blog post by Rev. Hannah Bonner found here. Rev. Bonner references several other pieces that have been done about the subject of Holy Communion in this time, and if you like, read those as well. She treats them fairly from my perspective. She also gives a much deeper sense to the social justice aspects of Holy Communion than I have experience in giving.

An observation that I have taken from both the conversations and the reading is that parts of the Church have, from time to time, taken respites or fasts from celebrating Holy Communion. Sometimes for a season of discernment. Sometimes from the necessity of having someone available to serve. And sometimes, like right now, when we cannot possibly partake of the Sacrament in person without risking the spread of a disease. Granted, the disagreements about what Communion means – and whether you should even capitalize it – are as varied as the regularity it is celebrated, even within the same denomination.

One thing I can say for certain about the Sacrament – it must be a mystery because we sure as hell can’t figure it out.

Yet, despite the mystery and the problems we have right now with snow in May, murder hornets, COVID19, and the general failure of nerve among our national leaders, I am, as the pastor of a real community of faith wrestling to figure out how to lead as the one who presides over the Sacrament of Holy Communion.

With all the wrestling I have been doing in heart and mind, I finally came to the place where I have found peace about what I am going to do. During worship – both while we remain apart and until we can safely partake of the Sacrament again – I am going to set the Table with both bread and juice. It will be there as a reminder to us of the moment in which we live. It is not a moment where I believe we are “giving up” or “fasting” or “hoarding” (for those who are performing virtual communion). For me, it is a token of the Incarnational Moment for the community of faith to be the Body of Christ, broken and shared.

When I had this thought of it being an incarnational moment, I thought, “Cool! I’ve come up with something new!”

Alas.

I was beaten to this centuries ago by none other than my own favorite crazy Dane, Soren Kierkegaard. Although he is not speaking about Communion, per se, the idea of an incarnational moment seems to have originated with him as he wrestled with some of the Pauline letters. He writes:

The moment is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other, and with this the concept of temporality is posited, whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time.

and

A moment as such is unique. To be sure, it is short and temporal, as the moment is; it is passing, as the moment is, past, as the moment is in the next moment, and yet it is decisive, and yet it is filled with the eternal. A moment such as this must have a special name. Let us call it: the fullness of time. (Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, ed. Reider Thomte and Albert B. Anderson (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), 89ff)

I believe that we as a Body have arrived at an Incarnational Moment – where past, present, and future have come together – so that in that confrontation with the elements we are allowed the honor to live out the brokeness of both loaf and body because we cannot partake of the Sacrament that embodies them for us. In the absence of the Sacrament, we are confronted even more plainly with becoming that Sacrament. We need to be confronted by the broken loaf and be that incarnate body for the world as we safely find ways to both be the church and someday(?) gather in someway(?) to celebrate that which we have been living out. But only in the fullness of time. (And right here, I call on us to define that “world” as my colleague Rev. Bonner does with a full understanding of who is not at the Table with us.)

Well, that compulsion is done. It’s not the most scholarly assessment, but hey, that’s not my way. I’ve put some thoughts out there, folks, and you are welcome to comment. I’m just on the journey home and would love to have your company.

 

A Day of Thinking

Fridays are normally days off for me, but in this time of pandemic… Well, it’s just another Tuesday.

I did have time today to reflect with some colleagues about all that is happening and how Communion nourishes us even when we are not partaking. We decided to have fun and record the conversation. Believe me, there was nothing planned about this, so if it seems random, well, it is. But, it’s Thursday, so it’s a good day for random.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HIc9HGJN5Zs&feature=youtu.be

Enjoy!

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.

 

Summer Camping

The campsite was laid out in our usual Sears family way. The tent had been set up on the highest piece of ground my Dad could find in the rented campsite, far enough away from the fire area that no one had to worry about embers hitting the tent and far enough under trees as to provide much needed shade. My Dad would always bring extra stakes and ropes to secure the tent and rain canopy –  experiences of camping in heavy rains had apparently taught him to do this – which created a ready made obstacle course for my two brothers and me.

It was my birthday, but I don’t remember which one. Truth of the matter is that Dad’s vacation fell on my birthday so often in my early years that I thought camping was something you were required to do on your birthday. That is, until I realized that we were always home in February and October for my brother’s birthday celebrations. But this was normal for me.

It was still light out but we had eaten dinner and even a cake of some sort and were really just relaxing for the evening. My younger brother was making use of the obstacle course. Mom, my older brother and I were sitting at the picnic table playing a game of “Sorry!”. Why we took board games on camping trips was beyond me at that time. I’m guessing it cut down on the number of times Mom had to yell at us for chasing one another around the tent or fire. It was also a good time waster. Dad was working on getting a fire ready for the evening.

I don’t recall what we were snacking on, probably chips or pretzels, and soft drinks. It was my turn to move in the game and my older brother was getting impatient but my attention had turned to a squirrel in one of the trees near us. I had been watching a lot of squirrels simply because I was hoping to see a “flying squirrel”. To that point, I’d just seen a lot of acrobatic ones. Still my attention was in the trees when my Mom suddenly began slamming the table, knocking the “Sorry!” game pieces all over the place and spilling her bright pink can of TaB. She wasn’t really making any noise but it looked like she was coughing. Truthfully, I had no idea what was going on at the time.

Now, just to put this in it’s proper historical time, this was taking place before the widespread implementation of the Heimlich Maneuver. Heck, it might have even been before the maneuver itself was introduced. I don’t recall the exact birthday but it had to be around 1975. I might have been ten years old, but I doubt it.

So, here we are, a family of five, with one in obvious distress at picnic table in some state park in WV. One boy running around a tent and jumping over and crawling under the various sets of ropes holding down a tent and rain canopy. Two other boys looking stunned, glancing back and forth between a ruined board game, a dripping diet soda, and a mother acting very strange. And a father getting a campfire ready for roasting marshmallows.

My Dad stepped away from the fire building, walked up behind my Mom and said, “Do you need a hit?” and then without even waiting for answer, hauls off and smacks her in the back with the flat of his hand with so much force that she went sprawling across the table, the Sorry! board, and the spilled TaB. I don’t know if the pretzels fell victim to the sprawl or not.

Mom came up from the “hit” with just about the same force she had taken – proof to my young mind that every action has an opposite and equal reaction – and screamed at my Dad, “Well, what did you ask me for if you weren’t going to wait for an answer!”

Somehow, the whole thing became outrageously funny at that moment and both Mom and Dad began laughing and the rest of us stunned observers, who were still not sure what had happened joined in.

The evening went on. I got to have the first S’more of the night because it was my birthday. We sat around the campfire as always and were told “once, if not a thousand times” not to get so close to the fire. We laughed and sang and sometimes just got quiet. But every once in a while the breeze would snatch up enough smoke and billow it towards someone that they would cough. Inevitably someone else would say, “Do you need a hit?” and the coughing person would yell “NO!” and everyone would crack up.

In fact, it became such a joke in our family that I can remember my Dad, coughing in a hospital bed during his last week of life, smiling and shaking his head “no” when I asked him, “Do you need a hit?”

That little phrase seemed to carry us back to the woods, the tent, the sticky s’mores the squirrels, the wood smoke, and the fun.

Some words are like that. They evoke such powerful memory that they take us back to something that is more than just a memory, more than just a fading thought. They evoke time, place, event, with such Gemüt that reality itself is evoked anew.

In my family, “Do you need a hit?” still does that.

My other family, the one that I journey with towards that “home” we do not know yet, has a few too.

“This is the body…broken…”

“I was glad when they said to me…”

“Peace be with you.”

“He is risen…”

“In the beginning…”

And I thought it was just going to be another summer camping trip taking place around my birthday. Who knew?