Rector's Blog: Church Right Now

Dear Church,

First things first: I love you and I miss being with you. We believe in a God who is mightily present in our lives and in our world – a God who not only keeps watch over us when we work or watch or weep, but also shares with us in our friendship and loneliness, in sickness and in health. We believe in a God who has not left our human destiny up to us, but who stands in the breach alongside us, ever inviting us to participate in the healing and reconciliation of the world.

All things considered, and in all honesty, I most readily find this God in a church building on a Sunday surrounded by my community. It’s cliché, I know. I also experience God in sunsets and on bike rides, and in the giggles of my children and the warm fur of the family dog. But if I’m being honest, I have the easiest time acknowledging God’s presence, sensing and embracing God’s existence, when I’m physically with all of you, hearing Scriptures, sharing prayers, singing songs, and partaking in Holy Communion with you and with our God. So right now is hard for my Christian heart.

We joke about me being an extrovert – and you know how very much I am one – but it’s not just extroverts I see on Sundays. Sundays at Redeemer are filled with extroverts and introverts, the shy and the boisterous, the awkward and the charming, the joyful and intimate and scared and distant. Every week we come together, whoever and however we are, and we share our selves with one another in Jesus’ name, and we give our love up to God, and I have to tell you that it changes my life. It changes me. I am transformed by the time we share together, because I am renewed by and reminded of our utter interconnectedness, our mutual belonging in Jesus Christ.

So right now is hard.

I’m not telling you this to elicit sympathy, but because I suspect I’m not the only one who feels the weight. As Christians, we have been trained to recognize God’s presence in our lives. But for most of us, our training ground is our church building, and our nourishment for the work is the shared meal of Holy Eucharist. And right now we can’t go in our building, and we can’t share our meal. While I fully believe that we are church right now, that we are part of God’s mission right now, that we have the capacity to give and receive blessing, to recognize and foster and develop love right now – I also want us to have permission to openly grieve what we are missing.

You probably guessed this already, but it’s time to officially say that we will not be worshiping in person for Palm Sunday, for Holy Week, or for Easter. I had so hoped we would be in each other’s presence for this time, but it would not be the loving thing to do.

Right now it is the church’s job to participate in saving lives, and the way we do that is by staying home. This pandemic isn’t interested in our liturgical calendar. And our faith in God is not meant to shield us from scientific fact, nor is it license to act in selfish ignorance. We know too much about the preciousness of life and our capacity to save precious lives right now by staying in our homes to choose anything else. The prophets of Israel reserve their sharpest condemnations for the religious people who privilege the act of worship over the practical love of neighbor. We will love our neighbor as ourselves. This is how we will be church right now.

That doesn’t mean we’re giving up worship, and it does not mean we’re giving up being together. We are not being forced to choose between our love of God and love of neighbor. Even while sheltering in place, I believe our worship and our connection to one another have the capacity to nourish and equip us for the work of Love we’ve been given to do right now. We will have online worship opportunities on Palm Sunday, and throughout every day of Holy Week, enabling us to observe Jesus’ passion. We will gather online on Easter and proclaim and celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, whom we follow even when we are staying put. In Joyce’s blog last week, she mentioned our creation of neighborhood teams, so every one of us can stay personally connected in real and practical ways during this time of social distancing. We will continue to develop these teams and build relationships. We will study Scriptures and continue our engagement with Martin Luther King’s sermons in our Zoom meetings.

The church is not closed. The church is not shut down. The church is not on pause. We are the church right now.

I know it feels different. It’s supposed to feel different. It is different: Being church right now is not meant to mimic or act like a stand in for “real church”. This is real church, right now. Of course, none of our current measures can fully or accurately replace the power of our in-person interactions. They’re not meant to, and we don’t need to pretend. But the way we experience togetherness right now is not fake. It counts. The love we see counts. The love we experience counts. The ways we reach out right now count. The connections we engage in now are just as lifesaving as our decision to stay home. We’re not skipping Holy Week, neglecting Jesus’ passion, ignoring his death, or shying away from the glory of his Resurrection. We are experiencing them all differently. We are being transformed by all of this.

One last thing: Priests of my generation have often been told that we missed the Golden Age of the church in America – that there was a magical time when everyone was a Christian, where everyone went to church, where all you had to do was open up the doors and people showed up and believed and tithed and all manner of thing was well. Well, I never knew that church, and I have no desire to. I don’t want to be Christian any time other than right now. I don’t want to be church any time but right now, because right now is the time when we see Jesus at work in the world more powerfully than ever.

It’s right now that we’re recognizing just how important we are to each other. It’s right now that we are choosing, like the Samaritan on the Jericho road, to save stranger’s lives. It’s right now that we are holding each other so fervently in prayer. It’s right now that we are acknowledging the fullness of each other’s humanity and being bound together in common purpose for the Love of God’s creation. It’s right now that we can identify most fully both with Jesus’ loneliness and his eternal abiding connection to the God of all things.

I thank God for these interesting times. I thank God for you. And I thank God that we get to be church right now.