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,

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,

While we are experiencing stay-at-home directives and the church cannot physically gather, here is a voice that greatly adds to the conversation about virtual communion.  It is informed by biblical hope, the Lutheran confessions, and contextual relevance.  Doug Hill is the lead pastor at Abiding Hope Church in Littleton, Colorado.  He earned his MDiv at Trinity Lutheran Seminary (Columbus, Ohio) and his DMin at San Francisco Theological Seminary (San Anselmo, California). He leads The Anchor Church movement for the purpose of revitalizing congregations. He will soon have a book released by Fortress Press on intentional cultural architecture.

A Historic Time

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is a truly historic time for our world, our nation, and our church. The global pandemic of COVID-19 calls for all of us to stay home not only for self-protection, but in the name of love toward neighbor. Because we as a church support doing what is best for the common good, our denomination along with many others have called for congregations not to hold gatherings in person, including worship. This has necessarily led to the creation of online resources for worship, small group gatherings, at-home confirmation curricula, and more.

Whether to Engage in Virtual Communion

The streaming of worship has generated a conversation regarding whether to engage in virtual communion or to abstain from communion until the time when the church can gather again in person. I have read several documents from bishops’ offices and seminaries making cases on both sides of the question. As someone who is choosing to conduct virtual communion as part of our online worship experience, I have been troubled by much of what I’ve read. I believe that we need to be respectful and loving to one another as we engage in this discussion and so forgive me if anything I write crosses the line as I am very passionate about this topic.

Contra-Arguments are Troublesome

Many of the documents I’ve read do not even come close to representing the meaning, significance, purpose, or practice of virtual communion. I feel personally misunderstood and misrepresented by the innuendos presented by some that conducting virtual communion will degrade the meaning of the Eucharist. Such an argument utilizes a fallacious slippery-slope logic based in fear. Do we really believe that when this pandemic is over, everyone participating in online worship will stop attending churches and instead choose to have communion alone at home? The very reason that people are participating in online worship and virtual communion is to feel a sense of connection to their faith community through this time of forced isolation. 

What is the Church?

Article VII of the Augsburg Confessions, a core foundational document for Lutherans, states that the Christian church is where the Gospel is preached in its purity and the sacraments are administered according to the Gospel. What makes us church is the proclamation of the word AND the administration of the sacraments. Both are necessary! This means that WITHOUT the proclamation of the Word AND/OR the administration of the sacraments, we are not Church! 

The ELCA came to recognize that it was theologically flawed for American congregations only to conduct communion a few times a year (which is how I grew up in a large congregation in Pennsylvania) and so over the past thirty or so years, the ELCA has called for weekly Eucharist. If the reasoning about the sufficiency of grace through the proclaimed Word alone is valid, as some are attesting, then there would have been no need for such an emphatic emphasis within the ELCA.

Jesus and the Efficacy of the Meal

 If grace is sufficient without the meal, then why did Jesus institute it? Why not just preach and sing for worship? Because there’s something the meal does that nothing else can do as well. The meal joins us as One and points us toward a day when all will be included, tears will be wiped from all faces, death will be swallowed up, and we will be drawn into the new creation (see Isaiah 25:6-10a and Revelation 21:4). It’s the meal that draws us into lives of prolepsis in which the promised future is lived fully today. We are to live the eschatological feast (Oneness with God, humanity, and Creation) in all that we are and do.

Virtual Communion Live

When our congregation engages in virtual worship, the attendees are free to comment in real time. They greet one another, offer comments on the scripture, liturgy, music, sermon, offer prayers for one another, share peace with one another, and finally commune together. All of this occurs through the blessing of technology. It IS community. It’s not fake. It’s not a show or performance. It IS the assembly of God’s people.

Don’t we believe that the meal transcends time and space so that when we participate in the Eucharist, we are participating in the eschatological feast with all of God’s people across the globe past, present, and future? That’s what Dr. Walter Bouman taught us in systematic theology at Trinity Lutheran Seminary. If that’s true, then it transcends the space between computer screens, kitchens, and family rooms. And I believe, even transcends the time between the recording of the service and when someone receives it. 

The Confusion with Home Communion

Furthermore, some of the documents I’ve read advocate for us taking “home communion” to the sick or dying. Here in Colorado, even though churches have been deemed to be “essential,” we are not permitted to enter nursing homes, hospitals, or hospice centers during this crisis. We are forced to pray with people via Zoom or phone. We cannot deliver “home communion.” It’s forbidden.

A Great Time to be the Church

This is a great time to be the church, to stand as witness to a suffering God not in some palace light years away, but right here, right now. This is the witness of the Eucharist assuring us that regardless of what we might be facing, we are one with God, one another, and all of Creation. That IS the Gospel. May all be filled with hope and trust in this very good news!

With abiding hope,

Pastor Doug Hill