America Opening Back Up

A week from today the national social distancing initiative from the White House ends. Some states, like mine, have already begun to open. Others soon will be easing restrictions. Because the hastiness to begin opening is economically and politically driven, health care gurus are aghast. Yet, there are loud voices declaring, “We’ve got to get this country opened up again. America was not built be to shut down.” And, “Americans are very resilient people. We are ready to bounce back, and when we do, it will be breathtaking! The greatest and strongest economy ever!”

So, are we all ready to bounce back? Those of you who live in my state, Georgia, are you ready to hustle over to LA Fitness and get back to normal? Anyone? Buehler?

Questions

A few weeks ago, when social distancing and stay-at-home directives began throughout the country, I had a conversation with a colleague who asked about a study done on Abiding Hope Church in Littleton Colorado in the period following the Columbine High Schools shootings. (More on that report later in this blog.) This colleague is among the most gifted and respected pastoral leaders in the ELCA. The reason for his inquiry and the subject of our conversation was out of concern for the resilience of our congregational and church leaders on the front line of ministry. It has now been over a month since we had that conversation, and the carnage of this microscopic COVID-19 terrorist continues to dramatically spread. The daily reports not only tell us that the USA leads the world in deaths; they also remind us that we are way behind other developed countries in testing and contact tracing, things health experts tell us are necessary to even begin to think about loosening stay-at-home orders. The escalating daily toll is such that by this time next week, it is conceivable that we could be approaching 1 million reported cases and 50,000 deaths. At the same time, another Great Depression could be on the horizon if something is not done to restart America’s economic engines and get people back to work and buying things.

That America is beginning to open again does not mean that people are not wary and deeply concerned. I will not speculate on your challenges and fears, but I will share mine and believe there will be some resonance with you. These are in the form of questions:

Despite what the politicians are saying should we not continue the shelter-in-place? Will I get the virus? It is highly contagious and can attack in stealth from those who have no symptoms. If I get sick, will I die? I am in the at-risk category. Will our life savings go down the tubes? What about our friends and their economic health? People are losing their jobs. What about my family and friends in Haiti? What about our little church? Can it survive with reduced giving? How long will this last? When will I be able to hug my children and grandchildren? When will I be able to work out at the Emory outdoor pool complex? When will I be able to go fishing again? When can we travel again? My grand niece’s grand wedding at the end of May has already been reduced to a private ceremony of a handful of people; what about a destination wedding at which I am the officiant on the coast of North Carolina in July? What about the promised trips we have planned with two grandsons? What about rescheduling the family trip to the UK that had to be cancelled? What about the planned trip to the beach with my lifelong college buddies? When will my beloved Wolfpack take the field again?

Resilience by Definition

Resilience means the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. It suggests a degree of toughness and grit. When describing the elasticity of an object, resilience means the ability to bounce back or spring back into shape.

Does anybody believe that we will quickly bounce back? There will be some that do, and God bless them. But for me, you absolutely cannot have the deaths that we have had, the profound grief and troubling questions triggered by each death, the trauma experienced by families and health care workers, the devastation in nursing homes, the massive economic losses and peril of many, and the politically-motivated finger-pointing and scapegoating and expect to have a quick bounce back. Perhaps most importantly, if this microscopic terrorist is left to roam without a vaccine, I simply do not see how we can quickly bounce back. The virus does not respond to pep talks and hyperbolic rhetoric.

The Abiding Hope Study

The congregation I once served in Littleton, Colorado was a “ground zero” congregation with the April 20, 1999 shootings at Columbine High School. At the time, it was the worst school shooting in American history. And to be clear, in no way am I even trying to remotely suggest that the current national carnage and “Columbine” are somehow peer events. When Johns Hopkins University reports some 27,000 deaths over the last two weeks, that is the equivalent of 1,800 Columbines. But death is death, grief is grief, and shock is shock; so, the study done of Abiding Hope is instructive.

Within a few weeks after the shootings, experts from Lutheran Disaster Response gathered ground zero congregational care givers for an all-day retreat. They began their equipping of us for the landscape that would lie ahead by saying, “In two years, none of you will be here.” They went on to say that with every community disaster, especially one as shocking as a high school shooting, congregations implode, and their pastors and other ministers move to new pastures. The profound grief, the sea of need, the daily amplification in the media, the incriminations and misdirected anger, the lawsuits, the theological questions,  other powerful dynamics associated with communal and individual grief, and the inability to escape the non-stop fallout inflict great stress on congregations and their ministers. In Littleton, the prognostication of the experts turned out to be true. Congregations imploded. Staffs left. Some still suffer from PTSD.

It was not true for Abiding Hope. The congregation deeply grieved and still holds countless stories of the individual toll it took on its members, but it also thrived. Some would argue that it was resilient, but I prefer today to say that it had the capacity to weather extreme adversity. The vitality of Abiding Hope after the shootings drew such attention from many places that think-tanks and doctoral students from different locales wanted to study the congregation. One study conducted five years later (see A New and Right Spirit, pg. 35) concluded that Abiding Hope weathered and thrived not because of it had a unique “emotional health” per se but rather because of “theological health.” The theology embedded in the congregation was a result of intentional congregational cultural architecture. It was a culture developed whereby the congregation’s members were found to be deeply grasped by the gospel of God’s crucified Messiah, Jesus, who would not stay dead because he loves us. Efforts over the years to shape and form the congregation through liturgy, congregational practices, and even the actual architectural construction of the worship space, forged the congregation into a worldview seen through the lens of the empty tomb.

The Abiding Hope form of resilience was not a quick fix. The 21st anniversary of the shootings were last week, and I still weep. My wife knows that the days surrounding the anniversary have always been difficult for me, as it also is with her. We, who shared the Columbine experience together, communicate with each other. Even as I write these words, my eyes are moist. But my eyes are also moist because the theology of the cross tells us that Jesus too took a bullet in the halls of Columbine on that day, that Jesus has joined in our own suffering and alienation and has risen beyond it. My eyes are moist because I believe in the astonishing promises of God wrought by the resurrection. Not only do love and life finally win but also Jesus has me in his grip right now. Because the tomb is empty, we weather adversity because of a lifelong orientation of courage and vision where we “fight the good fight and finish the race” (2 Timothy 4:7). What was it that Paul once wrote? “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us…” (Romans 5:3-4a)

Bounce Back to What?

In Luke’s Gospel, ten lepers approach him and cry for mercy (Luke 17:11-19). Lepers suffered from a grossly disfiguring skin disease with the added pain of being isolated in leper colonies and losing all sense of their human dignity. So, when they cry out to Jesus, they need more than just a dermatologist. They need restoration and deep healing from the physical and emotional toll being a leper. In this encounter, Jesus keeps good social distancing and directs them to go show themselves to the priests. It was the priests and not the Mayo Clinic who determined if one was clean. The story says that while they were on their way, they were indeed miraculously cleansed. But only one of them, a Samaritan, decides to not go to the priest but rather to return, gripped by profound gratitude and shouting hallelujahs at Jesus’ feet. This prompts Jesus to ask a rhetorical question about the whereabouts of the other nine. The story ends with Jesus declaring to this one cleansed person, “Get up and go your way, your faith has made you well.” The word for “made well” is a from the Greek, sōdszō, which is often translated “has saved.” Its form is in the perfect, active, indicative mood, which means that the being made well or saved is an accomplished fact.

This pronouncement Jesus made raises a question: saved from what? From what was this one cleansed leper saved? Were not all ten cleansed? The answer partly lies in the whereabouts of the nine. They are hustling down to see the priests – to offer up the same old sacrifices and go through the same worn out rituals so that they can bounce back to their business-as-usual lives just as before. Obviously, Jesus saw something in the one that was more than just his dermatological cure. Perhaps he saw that the one cleansed giving thanks also bore the marks of some good cardiology and ophthalmology work – a new heart and new eyes. Maybe Jesus is commending him for his faith saving him from going back to business-as-usual because he has been impacted by the living Messiah. “Go,” Jesus says to him. But, go where?

Where do we go when we emerge from the present state of things? Back to business-as-usual? Or will this eye-opening and heart-rending experience of seeing how COVID-19 has exposed the severe brokenness of the American “system” send us to new places? Will the good lessons learned from doing church differently in these days send us to imagining new ways of being church? I pray that our faith – our faith in the gospel of the risen Messiah – will give us the capacity to endure and to be of good courage during these days. I pray that this adversity has been such a great teacher that we emerge so differently that Jesus can say to us, “Your faith has saved you.”   

In the abiding hope of the empty tomb,