The Necessary and Possible Church - Part 2
All in This Together
Could the circumstances in which we begin “The Great Three Days” in the life of the church be more ominous? A microscopic organism that is about one thousandth of an inch in size has brought the planet to its knees. As such, there is one saying that is perfectly true. We are all in this together. As the hourly reports of rising infections, deaths, and the heart-wrenching stories of people – not just statistics – come at us, we realize that the microscopic terrorist has no conscience or boundaries. It will attack persons of any gender, age, social location, nationality, or ethnicity; and, as with everything else, the poor and marginalized are the most vulnerable.
Multiple times a day, I stop and pray for the health workers, grocery store clerks, mail deliverers, and others engaging in essential activities, as well as those in political leadership of both parties. But at night when I put my head on my pillow, I pray this very familiar prayer that I personalize:
Dear Lord, to whom my heart is open, who knows my desires, and from whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of my heart that I might perfectly love you…
And then I go through a familiar recitation of all the things from which I ask to be cleansed – my outrage and anger at the politicization of this pandemic, the lack of our health system and workers having what they need, and the blaming and scapegoating by people who should be leading us. I ask that my heart be cleansed from fear I feel for those I love, for my family, for the fragile and elderly in our little church, for our country and especially the poor in Haiti, who are exposed and vulnerable like no other. And then I move to the whole purpose of being cleansed from such thoughts and feelings: that I might perfectly love you… Lord, let my anger, outrage, and fear be transformed into love for you – a love that translates into a love and compassion for all people in these historic days.
The Necessary Church
In my blog two weeks ago, I began to address The Necessary and Possible Church by first attending to the possible church. It was New Testament scholar par excellence, Mark Allan Powell, who took the seemingly conflicting biblical positions of the whereabouts of Jesus and proffered the following: The presence of Jesus makes the church possible. The absence of Jesus makes the church necessary.
We need a story bigger than our politics, grander than our heroic relief efforts, and more powerful than the fear and uncertainty that have grasped all of us. It is precisely the church – yes, that frequently-criticized church, and often rightly so – who is the steward of such a story. It is a story that transcends the present day and yet lives in this day so that we might be grasped by its light and hope and have the courage to be light and hope ourselves in a time we are clearly at the mercy of things beyond our control. It is about a crucified messiah who would not stay dead because he loves us. For this reason, God’s stubborn love for all of us, God gave the world the church.
It does not take a whole lot of imagination to draw parallels that expose the human condition between the night in which Jesus was betrayed and living in a pandemic where the experts are telling us to “Get ready for Pearl Harbor.” Each carry more than enough dysfunction and evil mischief among political and religious leaders. And if we look closely enough today, we might recognize the same evil, fear, and self-preservation that drove those closest to Jesus to betray, deny, and abandon him. Little wonder that the story the necessary church tells was very early labeled “foolishness.” It has the audacity to proclaim that God’s tenacious love for the whole cosmos is infinitely bigger than our human willfulness, rebellion, and even death itself.
The Triumph of God
On Sunday the church proclaims, Christ is risen, alleluia! It is to proclaim the triumph of God over everything that would fragment us, cheapen us, or crush us. The future is in the hands of the One who raised Jesus from the dead. COVID-19 and what it has done to our lives, to the economy, and what it has exposed in our inadequate political and health care systems will not have the final word. God and God’s love and the life that God gives again and again and again will.
To be clear, Easter is not a one-shot deal where a tragedy in ancient Palestine – rejecting and crucifying God’s Messiah – happens to have a happy ending. It’s not a feel-good story that has become an annual springtime ritual to be celebrated and then forgotten until next year. Though there is a lot of feel-good emotions attached with the celebration of Easter, the proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection and its implications is an objective word that comes at us no matter how we feel. Whether we are confused, angry, doubting, depressed, fearful, or grieving, Easter yet comes to us as an unconditional promise by a God who will not quit on us.
A Gospel of Resilience
When Jesus’ followers encountered the risen Jesus and the Holy Spirit opened to them its meaning (cf. Acts 2), they were forced to re-imagine their lives and the future to which they were called. In one sense, nothing had really changed after Jesus was raised. The human predicament persists. There is no quick fix for all that is wrong, unfair, and unpredictable. Yet, everything has changed because we now know the outcome. Biblical poets give us astonishing images of how things will ultimately turn out – i.e. Isaiah 25 and Revelation 21. God gathers up all people – and all means ALL. Tears are wiped away from every eye. Death and everything else that would crush are swallowed up and are “no more.” We all feast on real food and well-aged wines.
Adversity does not build character. It reveals it. We are transformed through pain. Resiliency, then, is the ability to carry on amid adversity. It is the character that calls us to be our best selves when the world is falling apart and there are cacophonies of blaming, fear, and self-protection. It is the character that reveals us to be hopeful and find everyday meaning and purpose in a world gripped by the ramifications of this global pandemic. It is a character that can see what the world cannot see, dream for what the world cannot dream and work for what the world is unwilling to work because it has been forged by a delight in the fact that God has raised Jesus from the dead.
Communities of Anticipation
Not only is the church necessary during these days, its defining ritual in a meal of bread and wine is also. The wonders of cyber-technology enable us to celebrate this meal together even while under stay-at-home directives. It is in this meal that we eat and drink the cry of the church from the very beginning:
Christ has died! Christ is risen! Christ will come again!
In this meal we submit ourselves to both the night of betrayal and to the promised future. It was the late great theologian Walter Bouman who taught that the bread we break and the wine we drink are relics from the future. We know how the story ends. We know that there is no station so dark, no news so fearful, no station in life so devoid of hope that God has not already entered into it, changed it and opened up to us God’s future of love and life that win in the end.
No matter where you are or the circumstances in which you find yourselves, the saying of the psalmist (Psalm 118) calls us to resurrection lives today – right here and right now!
This is the day the Lord has made!
Let us rejoice and be glad in it!
In the abiding hope of the empty tomb,
