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The Paradox of Prayer in a Time of Pandemic

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The Paradox of Prayer in a Time of Pandemic

James F. Kay

Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey

Praying is basic to Christian discipleship. The Scriptures “urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone” (1 Tim 2:1). Jesus even commands us to “pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:44). The Book of Hebrews invites us to “approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and ﬁ nd grace to help in time of need” (4:16). The Book of Acts describes the earliest Christians as those who “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). So it has ever been when Christians gather together: “Let us pray,” and so we do every Sunday, and so we should every day. Not surprisingly, the onset of the corona virus pandemic has prompted Americans to pray more frequently and more fervently. For the ﬁ rst time since the inﬂ uenza pandemic of 1918-1920, the world has been overtaken by a new “pestilence” of biblical proportions.1 What is newly experienced by millions today as unprecedented, if only in their living memory, is not that in times of pandemic people continue to die daily. What is experienced as unprecedented is that pandemics dramatically increase that number. Moreover, the interlocking structures of business, commerce, government, and health care, ordinarily taken for granted and sheltering populations from the ravages of epidemics, themselves begin to wobble and even buckle under the pandemic weight of multiplying numbers of the sick and dying which outpace society’s mitigating and alleviating capacities.2 Amid the resulting social and political pressures fueling further fear, panic, worry, and anxiety, people may understandably intensify their praying. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, some 55 percent of adults reported in the spring of 2020 that they had already prayed the pandemic would end. This ﬁ gure included “73 percent of Christians and 86 percent of people who ordinarily prayed daily.” What is more, even the “less religious became somewhat more religious; 15 percent of people who seldom or never prayed and 24 percent of those without religious afﬁ liation also prayed for an end to the pandemic.”3 Thus, the practice of prayer incumbent upon all Christians is hardly conﬁ ned to their ranks especially in times of pandemic. Nevertheless, if praying is something which the Scriptures call upon Christians to do, it is also something the Scriptures say we cannot do: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes [for us] with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Rom 8:26-27). Commenting on this text in his sermon “The Paradox of Prayer,” Paul Tillich writes, “This passage…expresses the experience of a man who knew how to pray and who, because he knew how to pray, said that he did not know how to pray.”4

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I Our inability to pray on our own without the intercession of God on our behalf points to our “fallenness.” The very thing the Scriptures urge us to do, namely, to pray, and invite us to do “boldly,” can itself become the occasion for what Paul calls the “power of sin” (Rom 3:9). By not acknowledging this power “we only deceive ourselves” (cf. 1 Jn 1:8) about our inability “to pray as we ought.” Ironically, our prayers can thereby become words or opportunities for thanking God for our moral or religious superiority over others (Lk 18:9-14). After all, we are praying! The very power that deﬁ es God and refuses to recognize God as our Creator, this power can insidiously worm its way into our words, onto our lips, and into our lives. The “rhetoric of prayer,” taught since the Middle Ages by learned handbooks and updated for popular consumption by a plethora of today’s self-help books, can, as with quoting the Bible, become more about us parading our piety or “spirituality” than about interceding for our neighbors in need or unburdening before God alone about our own needs. In relying upon our own prayerful spirituality and its cultivated habits and comforting routines rather than the Holy Spirit of God, we are not immune from exchanging “the truth about God for a lie and worshiping and serving the creature rather than the Creator” (cf. Rom 1:24). Religion, its rules, its laws, its practices, and its prayers—however worded or however wordy—cannot defeat “the power of sin.” Why? Because all of our piety, as much as our profanity, can unwittingly, even unwillingly, be taken over by the power of sin that deﬁ es the Creator and thereby deiﬁ es the creature. Our prayers, no matter how eloquent or how fervent, cannot give us “a clean heart”; they cannot put within us “a new and right spirit” (Ps 51:10). The moral integrity and obedience integral to true communion with our Creator is simply beyond the capacity of our words or our practices to create or sustain. In other words, to live as rectiﬁ ed in the sight of God is simultaneously and paradoxically to acknowledge that we remain unrectiﬁ ed in many respects, until with “the whole creation” we will ﬁ nally inherit “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom 8:21-22). In the meantime, any assuredness that our own thoughts and words are up to the task of truly praying only illustrates that we do not know how to pray at all—book-jacket endorsements notwithstanding. The power of sin, suffering, and death also reveals the frailty and inadequacy of our words alone. To live in this world is to encounter, sometimes at ﬁ rst hand, such horrendous evils that they simply reduce us to speechlessness. Professor David Fergusson as a young pastor visited a terminally ill parishioner so ravaged by a tumor in her jaw she could not speak. Taking a pad of paper to communicate, she wrote just one word: “Why?” Fergusson recalls, “Though I had received more than a decade of training in philosophy and theology, all I could say to her was ‘I don’t know.’ The only thing that lame answer had going for it was that it was true. She was decent enough to squeeze my hand…and there we remained, both speechless though for different reasons.”5 One of my seminary students named Greg once shared the time he and his wife Melanie visited the site of the former Nazi concentration camp near Dachau, Germany. After their visit, they re-boarded their tourist bus, and Greg started chatting about all they had seen. Animated, Greg went on and on. But all Melanie could ﬁ nally say was “Greg, I can’t talk right now.” After Greg shared this story with me, he ended by saying, “I had been to a museum, but my wife had stood in hell itself.” Sometimes

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our words and prayers never make it out of our mouths. They simply stream down our cheeks as tears. “Greg, I can’t talk right now.” Notice how I have been speaking of the impossibility of praying primarily by regarding prayer as a matter of consciously formulated words. Tillich, however, raises further doubts whether conscious words alone can adequately convey our deepest longings and hopes. True praying would seem to require awareness of something we do not possess as ﬁ nite creatures, namely, knowledge of “all the unconscious tendencies out of which our conscious words grow.”6 If we understand ourselves and others as only consciously rational creatures, we fail to recognize “that the small light of consciousness rises on a large basis of unconscious drives and images.”7 If Tillich is correct, it would follow further that even if we do recognize that the source of our drives and images is unconscious, then we still have no conscious way to know or express them completely. So there is no way fully to know ourselves, and therefore, fully to know our real needs, let alone those of others for whom we may make intercession . In short, any claim that we can manage or take charge of a life of prayer could only be true if we were not fallen, frail, and ﬁ nite. We do not know how to pray as we ought!

II If our human inability to pray is one side of the paradox that is prayer, how should the other side of the paradox be expressed regarding the activity of God in enabling us to pray? Tillich’s homiletical interpretation of the Pauline paradox of Romans 8 admittedly interprets Paul through the language of psychodynamic theory amid its growing cultural and intellectual currency in the 1950s. In this way, Tillich’s account of the dynamics of divine revelation exchanges the customary images and metaphors of divine transcendence and omniscience. Rather than largely imagining God as seeing or overseeing us “from the heights,” Tillich correlates biblical and psychodynamic language to reimagine God as one who is “searching” us (Ps 139; cf. Rom 8:27) and hearing our cries, our “inward groaning” in “the depths” (Ps 130; cf. Rom 8:23). While “depth” language suggests that our relationship to God is deeply personal, Tillich is not suggesting a symmetrical encounter of parity between two distinct individuals having a one-on-one conversation—even one in depth. That’s why whenever we pray, “We do something humanly impossible. We talk to somebody who is not somebody else, but who is nearer to us than we ourselves are. We address somebody who can never become an object of our address because [that somebody] is always subject, always acting, always creating.”8 In other words, God is not just another created someone, an unmoving ﬁ xed “object” of our own projection. Rather, God as our Creator is the living Subject in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28a). The reality of the Creator encompasses that of the creature and not vice versa. Thus, God’s all-encompassing knowledge of us points to how it is that we can pray. God’s knowledge of us is prior to and greater than our knowledge of God. What is more, God’s knowledge of ourselves is prior to and greater than our own. Therefore, our not knowing how to pray even though we are commanded to pray is actually a hopeful paradox and not a hopeless conundrum: “It is God Himself who prays through us, when we pray to Him. God Himself in us: that is what Spirit means….Something in us, which is not we ourselves, intercedes before God for us.”9 Prayer can be said to enact faith in the afﬁ rmation that God, “who searches our

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hearts” (Rom 8:27), knows inﬁ nitely more about our needs and motivations, our hopes and our fears, our successes and our failures, and our sin and our weakness than we could ever begin to fathom and articulate. So, we no longer have to think that we must ﬁ rst prepare to pray with the right words or the right disposition in order to gain a hearing from God. No, anticipation of “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom 8:21) is the power to pray that is given in the gracious event of prayer itself by the presence of God “in us.” God’s grace elicits and activates our praying so that we can truly and freely pray “in the Spirit,” “in the Lord,” as utterly human partners in communion with God’s own intercessory and transforming work for good on behalf of the world. If we open the lens on Romans 8 a bit wider, Paul is clear that we are always in a situation that cries out for rescue, redemption, and release from the enslavement and tyranny of the reign of sin and death that brings so much suffering not only to human lives but to the creation itself. With poetic power, the apostle sees the human condition and the destiny of humanity as integral and parallel to that of the “whole creation” itself (v 22). The creation is “waiting” and with “eager longing” (v 19) for God’s ﬁ nal act unveiling redemption. Its “groaning” or “sighing” like a woman in childbirth (v 21) will end with creation sharing “in the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (v 21). Likewise, there are also “the sufferings of this present time” (v 18), which come within creation to all humanity, including Christians. So even we “who have the ﬁ rst fruits of the Spirit” also “sigh” or “groan inwardly,” while awaiting “the redemption of our bodies” (v 23). Thus we join “the whole creation” in which we are embedded in awaiting amid these “birth pangs” of God’s ﬁ nal revelation, the glorious freedom of transﬁ gured—not simply resuscitated—life, which is nothing less than “a new creation” (Gal 6:15). Until then, and in relation to our “momentary” bondage to death (2 Cor 4:17), we can only confess our “weakness” when it comes to praying (v 26). But now, astonishingly, “another” appears in Romans 8 who is “groaning” or “sighing” with us and with the ravaged creation: the Spirit, too, “groans” or “sighs,” and they are “too deep for words,” as the Spirit wordlessly intercedes for us within the dynamics of the divine life (v 26). As Tillich notes, whenever we speak of the “Spirit,” we are saying “God present.”10 The Spirit is none other than the “Spirit of God” (v 9), which is why “God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, and because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (v 27). The Holy Spirit, who “dwells within us” (v 9), identiﬁ es with us in our need and in our weakness. The presence of the Holy Spirit does not exempt us from the sufferings of the world. Rather the presence of the Spirit links us to God’s promised and incontestable ﬁ nal gift of transﬁ gured life that is coming to meet us amid so much distress about us. So, we do not evade the inevitable signs of our impending biological demise, but we can endure them with the Spirit’s gift of patient hope (vv 24-25). The “sufferings of this present time” surely include the ravages wrought throughout the world by disease and not least by the coronavirus pandemic shaking the foundations of American life. We can agree that “the thing above all which the Church should be doing at the present time is praying,” even as we also acknowledge paradoxically that when it comes to prayer, “we are at a loss!”11 We may be at a loss because we have no logically coherent explanation why our

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good and loving God permits evil here and now. The late Marilyn McCord Adams, in her inﬂ uential reﬂ ection on Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, reviews attempts by philosophers and theologians to give an adequate account of this perennial problem in classical theism. In her view, it is not logically necessary either to deny there are horrendous evils in trying to preserve the goodness of God or to deny the goodness of God amid undeniably horrendous evils. So, instead of asking “Why does God permit horrendous evils?” she asks, “What does God do to make our existence a good for us in a world where there are horrendous evils?” Here Adams ﬁ nds in the story of Jesus the God who extends friendship to human beings, a friendship that still brings great good to their lives even amid adversity and evil. This same pattern found in the narratives regarding Jesus, Adams sees repeated in the friendship that was extended to patients suffering from AIDS. Amid this epidemic which began about 1980 and resulted in the social ostracism of its victims by a panicked public, these otherwise abandoned patients were often undeniably accompanied with extraordinary acts of friendship extended to them in extremis by members of the gay community.12 Such a response does not, of course, prove God’s accompanying friendship in a suffering world, but for faith it is a credible parable of how human beings can embody the pattern of that accompanying presence. In a similar vein, N. T. Wright notes that the ethical initiatives taken by the followers of Jesus are “the answer, not to the question Why? but to the question What? What needs to be done here? Who is most at risk? How can we help? Who shall we send? God works in all things with and through those who love him.”13 Just as the earthly Jesus prayed to the Father at the Last Supper for his own disciples and for those who would follow Jesus in their steps (Jn 17), he continues to do so as the risen Son of God (Rom 8:34). In this way, “we, the followers of Jesus, ﬁ nd ourselves caught up in the groaning of creation and we discover at the same time God the Spirit is groaning within us. That is our vocation: to be in prayer, perhaps wordless prayer, at the point where the world is in pain.”14 In this way, God’s work of intercession continues in us and through us. For “the communion of the Holy Spirit” (2 Cor 13:13) indeed, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit takes place within both a groaning creation and within the groaning people of God. When we engage in intercessory prayer, we can do so only because the God who is Emmanuel, who is “with us” in Jesus Christ (Mt 1:23; cf. Isa 7:14), remains such as the Holy Spirit sent by the Father at the request of the Son accompanies us today. In this way we participate in the triune God’s mission to accompany a world in pain in bringing about undeniable signs of divine love as we and all creation await in hope the glory of new creation.

III Embedded in the Pentecost hymn “Spirit of God Descend Upon My Heart,” there is a one sentence prayer, “Teach me the patience of unanswered prayer.”15 As we sing those words, we cannot help but think of all the times we have offered or heard pastoral prayers “for the sick, the dispossessed, the war-torn, and the dying,” all arguably “intended to make some positive contribution not only to ourselves but to others, and not merely through our becoming more resolved to support those in need.”16 So, when those for whom we prayed did not recover or died despite our prayers, such might be taken as examples “of unanswered prayer.” And, ironically, any prayer asking for patience with unanswered prayer might itself, well, go “unanswered.”

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Nevertheless, are there any prayers that God does not answer? I think it might be more accurate to say that we may ask for things which God does not grant, so that what we call “unanswered” prayers are really God’s answer to those prayers. If so, we might call this “the paradox of unanswered answered prayer.” Likewise, the answers we sometimes receive for ourselves or for others may be other than the ones for which we asked. Moreover, the non-answers we have received or may ever receive in this life may be ascribed to the difference between our desired timing for immediate divine action and the inscrutable mystery of when God’s promised Kingdom will ﬁ nally come. True, we may join Garth Brooks in singing our thanks that we did not get that for which we once prayed. On the other hand, lamentably, we or those for whom we prayed may also suffer further or die before receiving the requested healing or wholeness for which we or they did pray. In either case, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask for what we think and feel either we or others need now. In the presence of God, we do not have to self-censor our prayers before we can pray them. We do not have to repress our desires by biting our tongues with noble Stoic rationality. Rather, “in everything” Paul writes, “make your requests known to God” (Phil 4:6). The writers of the psalms often “let loose” with their prayers of lament, complaint, and, yes, even in tones of anger or resentment (Ps 73), and not always sounding ethically admirable! (e.g., Ps 137:8-9). If that is true in the scriptural record of prayer, we can trust that God will take care of nuancing our prayers—and the timing of their answers.17 Some of Paul’s Corinthian detractors thought otherwise. They thought prayer was all about getting immediately a particular answer: that of elevated, ecstatic existence. And, yes, Paul could match their high-ﬂ ying spiritual experiences with a few of his own, and he bluntly, perhaps tactlessly(!), tells them so (2 Cor 12:1-6). Paul reminds these “high ﬂ yers” that true prayer is not an escape hatch from mundane life, a place where we can look down on others less fervent than ourselves. For Paul took a risk and shared with the Corinthians a time when he found himself brought back down to earth by a tormenting “thorn in the ﬂ esh.” Stubbornly, it just wouldn’t go away. We don’t know what that thorn was. It could have been Paul’s pain-wracked body. It could have been his sometimes cantankerous personality. It could have been the Corinthians themselves who were driving him crazy with their criticisms. It could have been the agony of “unanswered prayers.” Who knows? What we do know is that Paul brought this intractable problem to God. “Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me.” But it didn’t. And in this non-answer to his prayer, Paul ﬁ nally heard an answer from God different from the one he sought: “‘My grace is sufﬁ cient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness’” (2 Cor 12:7-9). The Lord did not remove Paul’s thorn in the ﬂ esh. The Lord did not alter the circumstances that were tormenting that preacher. But whatever those circumstances were, the Lord promised Paul that his grace would be sufﬁ cient, that the “power of Christ” (2 Cor 12:9) would dwell within him so that he could live in the circumstances —whatever they were—but no longer under the circumstances as if they were God. This is not wishful, willful magical thinking. This is the admittedly often unexpected, but ever new miracle of God’s grace. That power which breaks in upon us and re-frames impossible situations not as opportunities for ecstatic existence, but as opportunities for “eccentric existence,” to be “on hand” for others as agents of hope because “the Lord is at hand” (Phil 4:5).

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Through the event of prayer, we discover again and again, sometimes when we least expect it and when there is little evidence for it, that we are sought and found by the One who hears our deepest yearnings and grasps our hand. Even when circumstances do not change, God’s promised grace is sufﬁ cient for you and for me. Even when we have no idea in advance what enabling patterns grace will take and achieve in our speciﬁ c circumstances, the promise is that God’s grace will be sufﬁ cient for us. And because grace is real, our outlooks change, we begin to look up, to look ahead, and not just sidewise at the circumstances otherwise making us bitter or driving us crazy. Amid his “anxiety for all the churches” (2 Cor 11:28), grace brought to Paul the promised “peace of God which surpasses all understanding” (Phil 4:7). With that peace that Paul could not bestow on himself, he was enabled to rise with Christ above the worries of his missionary and pastoral work. And as our precious Lord again takes our hand, the peace of God, the all-sufﬁ cient grace of God, reframes our own anxieties. The power of grace puts them into a new framework and gives us a new perspective. We return to live and to work amid difﬁ cult circumstances—and to Paul’s list of “insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ” (2 Cor 12:10), we could add our current pandemic with all its attendant anxieties. When we bring everything to God in prayer, the promised peace of God quiets our minds so that they do not undo us. Our once anxious hearts, otherwise worn down and worn out, are again lifted up in praise and thanksgiving. With the Psalmist, we can say to the Lord who is near in every miserable, intractable circumstance, “Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand” (Ps 73:23).

Notes 1 Walter Brueggemann rightly cautions against ready transfers to the coronavirus pandemic of biblical responses to “pestilence.” Nevertheless, his reﬂ ections on how these responses “recontextualized” their historical situation are worthy of attention. See his “Pestilence . . . Mercy? Who Knew?” and “Praying Amid the Virus” in Virus as a Summons to Faith: Biblical Reﬂ ections in a Time of Loss, Grief, and Anxiety (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020), 21-27 and 35-45. 2 For anecdotal evidence for how “caste” distinctions in the United States have skewed unequally the allocation and delivery of medical care during the pandemic, see Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020), 353-355. 3 Nicholas A. Christakis, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live (New York, Boston, London: Little, Brown Spark, 2020), 262, citing, “Most Americans Say Coronavirus Outbreak Has Impacted Their Lives,” Pew Research Center, March 30, 2020. 4 Paul Tillich, “The Paradox of Prayer,” The New Being (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), 135. In using the language of paradox, “God” and “humanity” are viewed dialectically both in their oppositeness and their inter-relatedness but without proceeding to any conceptual synthesis. In approaching prayer dialectically, Tillich’s reﬂ ections mirror a similar dialectical treatment that Karl Barth gives to the “impossible possibility” of human beings speaking the “Word of God” and that Rudolf Bultmann gives of the “godless” impossibility of speaking “about God,” both of which are nonetheless prompted by the human encounter with God. In other words, the paradox of prayer (Tillich), the paradox of preaching (Barth), and the paradox of theologizing (Bultmann) are three aspects of the overall paradox of divine revelation. Thus, in revelation the Creator comes to the creature without obliterating the ontological distinction between them assumed by, and characteristic of, their true communion. 5 David Fergusson, The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 338. Such suffering inevitably raises the question of the efﬁ cacy of prayer, which Fergusson discusses with theological insight and pastoral wisdom. See esp., 322-330. 6 Tillich, “Paradox of Prayer,”137. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid.

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9 Ibid. See also Sarah Coakley’s formulation that “the dialogue of prayer is strictly speaking not a simple communication between an individual and a divine monad, but rather a movement of divine reﬂ exivity, as sort of answering of God to God in and through the one who prays.” God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 112-113. 10 Tillich, “The Paradox of Prayer,” 137. 11 N. T. Wright is expressing here the Pauline paradox of prayer in God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reﬂ ection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath (Grand Rapids, Mi: Zondervan Reﬂ ective, 2020), 44. 12 See Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca: Cornell University d d Press, 1999). 13 Wright, God and the Pandemic, 34-35, where Wright paraphrases Rom 8:28, taking God as the subject of the sentence as in the RSV, NIV, and NEB margin. 14 Ibid., 34-35, 45. 15 The Presbyterian Hymnal: Hymns, Psalms, and Spiritual Songs (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), 326. 16 Fergusson, The Providence of God, 324. 17 “Man might ask God for anything. The whole of human egoism, the whole of human anxiety, cupidity, desire and passion, or at least the whole of human short-sightedness, unreasonableness, and stupidity, might ﬂ ow into prayer…. But if God is not uneasy in this regard, we certainly need not be.” Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: Index Volume with Aids for the Preacher, ed. by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1970), 307, and commenting on Romans 8:24-30.

December 31, 2021
Preaching Stewardship

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Preaching Stewardship

Theodore J. Wardlaw

Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Austin, Texas

In April of this year, I received an invitation from Erskine Clarke to write this essay on “Preaching Stewardship.” It came to me most definitely in “the time of COVID,” but there was a sense that maybe things were getting better. For sure, most of you were not yet preaching and leading worship in embodied gatherings in your sanctuaries . If you were working in your office at the church, you were more likely than not the only person in the building. For Sundays, you were probably still pre-recording your services during the midweek or conducting worship from your living-room via Zoom. Nonetheless, at that time—a little more than a year into this frightening and deadly season that was still draping itself across our planet like a global blanket covering everything—it was possible for so many of us to sense light at the end of a tunnel. Up until late Spring, we had been living for over a year with the cumulative effect of so many deprivations and horrific scenarios piling up on top of one another. Quarantined and isolated, we had witnessed a national political meltdown, the painful demonstrations of ongoing discrimination, and violence toward people of color, the stress, the fear of getting sick (or perhaps the fact of being sick), the hundreds of thousands of deaths, the way in which every day felt like Groundhog Day, all of it accumulating into a feeling of lassitude. A state of mental or physical weariness, a lack of energy. It was still the case that you could walk into a room and forget why you’d gone in there and what you were looking for. You could still experience something like the wilting of muscle memory. You could still forget the names of people, forget the places and the names of streets beyond the tiny contours plotting out the shrunken dimensions of your physical environment. You could forget at night what you were supposed to do the next day, and you could forget on that next day whatever you had done the day before. Even if you had thus far managed to avoid the illness, you still could not escape the flatness, the solitude. Nonetheless, come Spring, some of us, at least, were beginning to feel that, maybe—just maybe—things were beginning to lighten up. There was a window when it felt that the time of COVID was beginning to wind down. So when Erskine Clarke extended his invitation to me to write a piece on Stewardship, I actually imagined pitching some ideas on stewardship to a regathered, re-embodied Church. Then came the next wave—the Delta variant. And now, as I write these words in late August, there is at least the whiff of an emerging Lambda variant. Consequently, many churches that were beginning to cautiously regather have returned to virtual worship. Stewardship, however, is still a relevant topic—especially in the midst of a deep sense of pessimism on the part of many pastors and other leaders serving churches across the denominational spectrum. Across recent months, I have heard from a number of them, and their predictions are dire. The Church is dying, they proclaim. Their assessment is that denominational offices and regional governing bodies are in disarray, parishioners are discouraged, the Protestant mainline is hemorrhaging

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members, the youngest adults are generally disinterested, the smallest churches in the land will surely wither and die; and we will all see the carnage for ourselves when that COVID-induced global blanket covering everything is finally lifted to reveal the evidence. Indeed, the Church has suffered during this time, and there is more suffering to come. But I am persuaded that, in the final analysis, the ultimate life of the Church is not up to these prematurely-certain prognosticators; it is, thankfully, up to Someone higher up the chain of command. When I now preach or teach in congregations or presbyteries—still almost always virtually in these days—someone often asks me a worried question: “Do you think the Church will survive?” The question is a COVID question, and the questioner is deeply discouraged. Many of us, perhaps, in some secret recess of the heart, are occasionally entertaining that question. “Do you think the Church will survive?” “Of course I do,” I answer, “because I believe that Jesus Christ still loves the Church!” Occasionally the follow-up question comes back immediately: “What’s your evidence that that is so?” And I respond: “Jesus took perhaps his most neurotic, dunderheaded disciple—the one who was often popping off and rarely got anything right—and said to him, ‘You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.’ And I don’t believe that, in this COVID season, Jesus has somehow changed his mind.” This conviction, by the way, is at the heart of my impatience with self-appointed prognosticators of doom with respect to their cynicism regarding the ongoing existence of the Church. Nonetheless, we will need to think boldly about Stewardship in this time. We would be wise to couch our approach to Stewardship in the context of Jesus’ deep and abiding commitment to the life of the Church and his presence within the Church’s life, whatever frightening times we happen to be living through. Further, we should start our thoughts about any Stewardship season not with small tweaks and gimmicks, but with the stout claims of God’s ongoing presence in the midst of the people of God. In my judgment, one of the great stewardship texts is from the book of Deuteronomy . In Deuteronomy 14:1, the Israelites are described as not just any nation, but “children of the Lord your God.”1 This description underlined the close and unbreakable relationship that linked Israel to Israel’s God. It was a relationship of holiness, as asserted in verse 2: “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; it is you the Lord has chosen out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession .”2 As God’s people, all of Israel’s life, as one scholar put it, “was set under a great umbrella of the sacred and this protecting shelter kept in proper repair because God’s name was attached to it.”3 In this context, bringing the tithe to the Temple was a matter of giving back to God in a relationship of holiness, grounded in the grateful notion that all of life belongs to God. It was a recognition of God’s endless and deep generosity. This Deuteronomic understanding of stewardship is mirrored many places throughout scripture, and certainly in the New Testament. One of my favorite New Testament texts—great food for thought when it comes to Stewardship—begins in First Corinthians 3:21: “So let no one boast about human leaders. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries.”4 It is important to note that the minister’s work is defined with respect not to herself, but

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rather with respect to someone else—Christ and God. Ministers, at their best, are not their own. They serve instead on behalf of Christ, to whom they belong. They unfold mysteries of their faith that derive from God, not from themselves. Another New Testament text which addresses the largeness and profundity of Stewardship is found in Hebrews 13: “Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” The text goes on to describe the great range of stewardship: remembering those in prison, “as though you were in prison with them”; remembering those being tortured, “as though you yourselves were being tortured.” Holding in honor the sacredness of marriage, keeping your lives free from “the love of money,” being content with what you have, remembering your leaders, staying clear from all manner of strange teachings, maintaining a clear conscience, acting honorably in all things, remembering to do good and share what you have.5 This is a comprehensive picture of how Stewardship is not just a season or a fund-raising program. Stewardship is an ethic as comprehensive as one’s whole life. In my role as a seminary president, I get to glimpse in our students the future of the Church’s life on a regular basis. I get to witness students at every Commencement event each Spring, and watch them—having been through three or four years of the furnace that seminaries can often be—watch them preparing to head out into the fields of harvest, committed to becoming servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God! This past spring, I pondered the faces of our latest pack of graduates as they populated our sacred space on Commencement Sunday. It wasn’t the sanctuary space in which we have been hosted in more normal years. It was the sacred space created by technology—the screens across which the faces of our latest graduating class had gathered. And in that moment, for some reason mysterious to me, I recalled something David Brooks had written about how this time of COVID has created not just a social problem, but a moral problem. “We say we feel a sense of purpose and mission when we are serving a cause larger than ourselves. But I’ve learned this year,” he said, “how much having a feeling of purpose depends upon the small acts of hospitality we give and receive each day, sometimes with people we don’t know all that well.”6 Those students across that screen on that day had, no doubt, great aspirations for what is next for them. But my prayer for them, and for us, is that we cultivate—as stewards of God’s mysteries—both the comprehensiveness of giving yourself away, and the habit of small, daily acts of hospitality for people whom we sometimes don’t even know. In my role as an active participant in the life of a particular congregation in Austin, I cannot wait to return to my particular pew when it is safe for us to gather, embodied, again. One thing I am sure I will feel will be the gratitude that that church is still here, that we are still here, that our mission in the world around and beyond us—and within often small, daily acts of hospitality—is still here; and thus the power of Stewardship flowing out of the sense that, thank God, we, all of us, are still here! Of course, as so many people are fond of saying, “some things are going to be different…don’t think it’s going to be the same old same-old.” Yes, for sure, some things are going to be different. But, even in its difference, the Church still belongs to God. We are entrusted, therefore, with an eternal gift—the God who, in every age, still gives us the Church!

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And, sure, it will be different. But the great mythic cycles of the Christian faith throughout the Christian year—the repetitive gifts that run, over and over again, from Incarnation to Resurrection—will still be the same cycles. Within those cycles are embodied the need to pray, the need to raise our voices in song and speech, the need to see again those fellow parishioners with whom we are embodied, the need to stand up in a pulpit and proclaim, the need to stand at Table and then go forward empowered by the Body and the Blood of Christ until we become sacraments ourselves of God’s stubborn presence in a fallen and needy world. We will be grateful for all of it! We will be grateful for what will be different as well as what is the same. All of it will be the ongoing gift of God, who is forever—even in this disruptive season—giving the Church to the Church, becoming, yet again, servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God; and being, often, the vessels who bear small acts of hospitality for people who sometimes we don’t even know. I remember a summer day back in the late summer of 2019, long before we had ever heard the word COVID. On that day, here in Austin, I gathered up my birth certificate and my social security information and all the other necessary documentation, and I headed off to that cathedral of broken promises—the Division of Motor Vehicles building. It was a drab green government building on an unremarkable industrial boulevard in north Austin. I got there at 10:00 sharp, and there were several hundred people standing in various lines or sitting in rows of seats. They looked a bit like cattle being processed. A small, unhappy-looking collection of uniformed employees barked at people who were not moving fast enough, and occasionally threatened to usher some people out into the Texas sun to do their waiting there. When I finally got to my first stop in this maze of broken bureaucracy, the man behind the counter wore a smile on his face that telegraphed: “Don’t read too much into this smile; I’m really not happy to see you.” He inspected my forms, typed me into the system, and handed me a ticket that said “S-2014.” I asked him, “How long will this take?” “Couple of hours,” he muttered. I took a seat in a row of metal chairs. “What’s your ticket number?” I said to the young woman sitting on my left. “S-1058,” she said. She was more than 950 spots ahead of me. I settled into my chair and pulled out my cellphone to read the news. Over time, I noticed this obnoxious loudspeaker blaring the progress we were all making. A computer voice would say, every few seconds, “Now handling ticket number S-1001 at Station Number Five.” “Now handling ticket number A-2001 at Station Number Twelve.” “Now handling ticket number W-5892 at Station Number Sixteen.” The hipster to my right finally turned to me and said, “Dude, Hell is a lot better than this!” I thought about that claim, and finally agreed with him. He said, “Think about it, Dude! In Hell,” he said, “at least you probably have Black Sabbath packing out one arena and killing it with their song ‘War Pigs,’ and then, on another stage, Slayer or Metallica…and then all the bars, Man! Hell is a lot better than this!” Eventually, the woman to my left got called up, and her seat was quickly occupied by a spry 95-year-old man who was there to sign over his car to his grandson. He started a long soliloquy about his service in World War 2—a gravelly narrative that didn’t seem to have any punctuation. “I just moved here from South Carolina to be with my daughter and her family in the war I served in the Navy under a lieutenant Commander named Richard Milhous Nixon don’t suppose you ever heard of him.” We got to talking, and every once in a while the ongoing countdown blared loudly,

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“Now handling ticket number S-1170 at Station Number Sixteen.” It had now been more than two hours, so I went back to the man behind the counter with the phony smile. “The system’s acting up; it’s probably a couple more hours,” he mumbled. Another hour in, the speaker blared: “Now handling ticket number S2013 .” “Yessss!” I said, and I high-fived my 95-year-old Navy friend. The speaker blared again. “Now handling ticket number S-2015. Now handling ticket number S-2016.” I went back to the man with the phony smile. “Sir, they just called out the ticket right before mine, and then they called out the ticket right after mine, but they neglected to call out my ticket. What’s going on?” “Oh, this happens sometimes, go back and sit down.” I sank into my chair and closed my eyes. Finally the Navy veteran poked me in the ribs: “Kid, they just called your number!” “No, they didn’t,” I said in despair. “Don’t be an idiot, Kid, go to Station Number Twelve right now!” The dear lady at Station Number 12 smiled broadly. “Welcome, Sweetie, let me see your driver’s license.” I was sputtering about the incompetence and the fact that it was now almost 4:00 p.m. “They do this all the time,” she said. “They’re bad. I’m going to help you.” She looked at me. “Are you a lawyer?” she said. “No ma’am.” “Well you look like a lawyer. What do you do?” “I’m the president of a seminary.” She lit up and said, “Oh, really, which one?” My confidence was immediately restored, and I held my head up and said, “I’m the president of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.” She said, “I’ve never heard of that cemetery.” I said, “No ma’am, it’s not a cemetery; it’s a seminary.” “Well, what’s a seminary?” she asked. I told her, and she said, “You prepare people to be priests?” I thought for a second about correcting her terminology, but finally just said, “Yes ma’am.” She said, “I had a priest in here two weeks ago; a very sweet man. He serves up at St. Margaret and St. Mary, a great church. He’s the real deal. If you train people like that, you’ve got a great job.” She said, “Stand up and look at this camera…[click]…Ah, that’s a nice shot. Here you go, Father. Look at the information and make sure it’s right. And Father, have a blessed day!” She smiled. It wasn’t a phony smile. “Think of us in this way,” wrote St. Paul: “as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries.”

Notes 1 Deuteronomy 14:1. 2 Deuteronomy 14:2. 3 Ronald E. Clements, “Deuteronomy,” The New Interpreters’ Bible, vol. ii (Abingdon Press, 1998), 397. 4 First Corinthians 3:21-4:1. 5 Hebrews 13:1-16 NRSV 6 David Brooks, “How COVID Can Change Your Personality,” The New York Times, April 1, 2021.

December 31, 2021
B.C. and A.C: Preaching and Worship Before COVID and After COVID

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B.C. and A.C.: Preaching and Worship

Before COVID and After COVID

Lisa Cressman

Backstory Preaching, Missouri City, Texas

Lent of 2020 was a mad scramble for preachers. The U.S. had entered lockdown , and preachers entered a crash course in technology, becoming—practically overnight—producers, editors, and an online preacher/anchor/hosts for live streaming, Zoom rooms, YouTube, and Facebook. Doing so while trying to include technologically disadvantaged parishioners, while managing failed internet signals, and while ﬁ nding security ﬁ xes for Zoom-bombing was enough to update the old phrase “build the ship while we sail it” to “build the platform while we worship in it.” It is likely Church will remain both an in-person and online reality even after COVID-19 is under control, not only because there are distinct advantages to both, but because today’s children and young adults have always lived in-person and online concurrently. They know no other way. The pandemic may have pushed us into this sudden experiment of digital Church, but I’m convinced it also spared a future epic challenge between younger leaders demanding online options and those existing leaders who would have continued to balk at the mere idea of church online for a few more decades. Assuming online church remains, it’s pushing us to examine our purposes for preaching and worship, and to replace our do-whatever-it-takes-to-survive-the-crisis approach with strategic, sustainable practices—for the sake of clergy and the church at large. Considerations around what deﬁ nes preaching and worship, accessibility, demands on clergy time, and ﬁ nancing additional technology costs must be addressed by leadership at every level. What of the B.C. Church (“before COVID”) will see us through to the other side? What practices are emerging D.C. (“during COVID”), and what might we see in the A. C. (“after COVID”) Church?

B.C. Preaching and Worship As to preaching, the reasons we preach and the components that constitute a sermon are unaffected by the medium. The word of God is transmitted just as efﬁ caciously whether told as a story in ancient times, read silently in a Bible a hundred years ago, or listened to in a podcast today. To understand which aspects of preaching remain steady regardless of medium, we can look at the purpose and essential components of sermons. For instance, John McClure says sermons are made by linking “four authorities or authors of the Christian faith: Scripture, experience, theological tradition, and human reason.” Describing preaching from the Church of God tradition, Yvette Flunder adds, “Good preaching meant good performance that included choosing a good text, a good reading of the text, good entertainment, believability/authority, identiﬁ cation, food for thought, power, humor and passion, and a super celebration.” Ruthlyn Bradshaw, writing from a Black, United Kingdom perspective in The Future of Preaching, articulates how the spirit of liberation permeates preaching,

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making a sermon a holy lifeline from one generation to the next: “Black preaching, born in the context of struggle and marginalization, must seek to be relevant in the same context today….Black preaching, fearlessly proclaiming the liberating truths of God to a sinful and unjust world, will efﬁ ciently serve the future.” Even from these few descriptions, a summary of the components of a sermon include: • Scripture • God’s relentless desire to be made known through words from the Word • An expression of the preacher conceived in ancestry and born in particularity through tradition • Humanity’s release from captivity • Celebration resulting from gratitude • Movement toward the liberation of all humanity from hatred, greed, sin, and lust for power • Reliance on the communion of saints who have preached before us Thus, a sermon includes such a deep knowing of the Word that it ﬂ ows from the preacher to liberate the listener, leading toward its purpose: praise, gratitude, celebration, and action. This description of a sermon holds true whether offered by the preacher outdoors, through a mask, standing at least six feet away from the ﬁ rst row of parishioners; by a preacher at a poorly lit kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a laptop with a bad microphone, speaking to square faces in a Zoom room; or by a preacher who records on Wednesdays because the production crew needs enough time to cut and paste the best of three sermon takes, edit the recording with camera shifts, add the subtitles, cut to the visuals, link the sermon transcript, and paste in the right number of seconds of transition music so that it’s ready to cue up at the exact moment in the live-streamed Sunday service. The purpose of the liturgy is also unaffected—to worship God. Liturgy as the work of the people continues whether they congregate in a church room or online room. We still worship together to praise God, grow in faith, and share the Good News with the world. That said, there are notable and painful exceptions to worship actions that are so fundamentally incarnational through the Spirit and physically gathered community that we can’t see how there could be an equivalency, including the consecration of sacraments. To transition from ecclesial altar to family kitchen table would be so great a shift it might only be compared to the transition from Temple to Shabbat dining table. Few are ready to ask this question in earnest. It is too painful and fraught with implications, and there is still hope that the question can be avoided altogether once we are back to physical worship. With online preaching, worship is here to stay. I suggest we put to rest any suspicion that prayers, preaching, or praise transmitted by digital ones and zeroes is “less than.” I will go so far as it say it’s heresy to claim that online preaching or worship is “virtual” because virtual means it’s almost real. If we claim a virtual preaching is almost a sermon, we’re saying the Holy Spirit can almost empower those digital ones and zeroes to be divinely infused—but is still a bit beyond the Spirit’s reach. This is arrogant presumption that arises with every new medium. This is the same argument people made when they said the Holy Spirit couldn’t be present in a printed Bible placed into the hands of a literate populace, or ride on radio waves into back seats,

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back yards, or back woods, or be wholly present in the utterances of women speaking from a pulpit. Let’s be done with limiting the Spirit’s capacity to act through any physical property God created, including waves of energy invisible to the human eye, known and unknown. The components of preaching and worship—Scripture, tradition , reason, theology, liberation, prayer, and praise—are not limited by the medium. They are the same B.C. as they will be A.C.

D.C.: Inclusion & Questions of Connection DC Now that preaching has taken up sudden residence in parishioners’ family rooms for worship, how have we adjusted, what are we learning from it, and what new challenges and questions have arisen?

On the Plus Side: Inclusion With rare exception I hear the same story from preachers: worship attendance is up. Parishioners who usually attended pre-pandemic are continuing online, and they are joined more often now by the “C & E’s” (Christmas- and Easter-only attenders), those who haven’t attended in years, former parishioners who moved away, family, friends, and people from around the world. Worship is easier to access for parents who don’t have to corral and dress children and get them out the door, the sick who don’t have the energy to leave the house or can’t risk germ exposure, and the elderly for the same reasons. As a result, more people than ever are worshipping together. The convenience of letting the kids attend church in their pajamas, of not driving through dangerous winter road conditions, and of gathering with coffee and bagels within reach has eliminated many Sunday morning hurdles to getting to church on time—or at all. That, of course, is excellent news! In addition, more people can take an active part in the liturgy, not only those who don’t live within proximity to the physical building, but those who don’t have ready access to be a worship leader. For example, parishioners in nursing homes can play their instrument or sing a solo, those who work weekends can offer pre-recorded Scripture readings, and children can lead breakout room conversations and at-thetable projects. As the Rev. Taylor Watson Burton-Edwards told me, “The screen is no longer for projection, but for inclusion of people from around the world with us, whether live or recorded.” Preaching can likewise include more people. For example, after the preacher gives the Scripture context and poses a question, parishioners on Zoom can offer the ways they see the Good News interacting and calling them individually and corporately. In addition, even though many pine for a return to physical proximity, there is an unparalleled intimacy when the preacher looks directly into the camera; it’s perceived that the preacher is looking directly into the viewer’s eyes. More than ever, the listeners can feel that the sermon is preaching right to them, deepening its impact. Preachers are including more visuals and learning to preach shorter, pithier sermons —about which few listeners complain! Preachers have learned that Zoom fatigue is real, attention spans are fragmented, and thus, short sermons are more effective. Many preachers report their sermons are 25-30% shorter than they used to be, and their skills have increased to discern and express the essence of their messages. They are learning to make every word and image count to praise, persuade, provoke, and empower.

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Another beneﬁ t is that the services are recorded, either in real time or in advance. Parishioners are now accustomed to accessing a service wherever they are and whenever they wish, repeating it as many times as they want, and they know how to ﬁ nd it on the parish website.

On the Downside: Reading the Room and Missing Connections One signiﬁ cant challenge is exegeting the congregation. Not only do preachers miss learning about those to whom they preach in those casual, in-person conversations when parishioners share what’s “really” going on, but worshippers may live three states or a continent away, leading to wildly disparate contexts. How do questions of local application of the gospel get addressed? Is it appropriate to invite members to get involved locally when the invitation, by virtue of distance, leaves many out? Or is it that those invitations need to be applicable regardless of context? In addition, gauging listeners’ reactions can be impossible in the moment because the reaction may not be seen. If the sermon is pre-recorded or live-streamed, there are no visual cues for the preacher. When preaching live in a Zoom-type setting, the tiny projections of faces (or even harder, whole households in one square) make facial expressions and body language too small or subtle to discern. Moreover, the preacher must always be making a choice: to look directly into the camera and thus the “parishioner’s eyes” or looking at their images, but never both. This means the preacher can’t adjust the sermon on the ﬂ y or before the next worship service. I’ve learned in my work mentoring preachers that “reading the online room” is a skill that often needs to be taught. It’s not necessarily a natural transfer of pastoral skills to sense the emotional content of those gathered online. Some clergy pick this skill up faster than others, some are aware and ashamed of their lack of skills, and others are oblivious to it. As a result, in some cases, pastors miss the needs of parishioners . This skill gap further increases the stress of those preachers who are otherwise competent pastors but lack conﬁ dence in this area. Perhaps more importantly, many preachers are losing an important source of their ministry fuel: the joy of connecting with those they serve through preaching. What will be the new ways to discover how the sermon is “landing”? What can accommodate for the missing joy when the preachers don’t feel they’re getting something back from their listeners? There is another challenge to leading worship and preaching online from home. This is a sticky subject because it’s inherently personal and judgmental, and yet this fool dares to tread. To put my comment in context, when I was in seminary in the early 1990’s, the female students were pulled aside and instructed about “proper” attire regarding our clothing, earrings, and hair, so as not to distract parishioners unduly from paying attention to God instead of our female forms. It was galling, sexist, and offensive. What I am about to say may also be galling and offensive, but I’m pretty sure I will at least avoid being sexist. While there can be a warm hospitality to leading worship out of necessity from the preacher’s kitchen table with coffee cup in hand, it is not so warm or hospitable, and not at all necessary, for the preachers to look like they rolled out of bed ﬁ ve minutes earlier, yawning, wearing a crumpled t-shirt, and in front of a background distracting all parishioners with cluttered shelves or their “cool” art. It’s not likely the preachers would invite parishioners so casually into their homes under any other circumstance.

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There is still a professional decorum that needs to set the stage for worship, no matter from where it’s led or by whom.

A.C.: Attendance, Accessibility, & Clergy Responsibilities Lent of 2021—the one year anniversary of our online church odyssey—will feel different than 2020. At the time I write this, Lent is six months away, and it’s impossible to guess the state of the pandemic, vaccines, protocols in place to gather in person, or the risks people will be willing to take by then. Will it be the A.C. Church yet? I doubt it, though I pray I’m wrong. Regardless, I have a lot of questions. What should we be prepared for? What should remain? And what should be jettisoned whenever we get “back to normal” in the after-COVID church? Here’s my ﬁ rst question. While increased attendance has been a gift for all, is the increased attendance we see now our Christian equivalent of the “atheist’s foxhole ”—where people attend because they feel under siege by the pandemic and other stressors? How much are these crises driving people’s increased attendance? How much is it the convenience that they can pop into worship effortlessly? Or both? If attendance drops post-pandemic, should we feel we have failed—or succeeded—in our mission to share the Good News? Will clergy be blamed when our prayers for an end to the pandemic have ﬁ nally been answered and people return to kids’ soccer games, weekend getaways, and Sunday brunch instead of worship? Returning to the blessings of easier accessibility for worship, online church is still not a panacea. We have to ask continually who has access? For online worship to be fully accessible, attendees need at least internet speeds fast enough for livestreaming , new-enough mobile devices or computers, and the ﬁ nancial means to pay for the above. If nothing else, our sudden foray into a national requirement for online public school education has revealed the poverty lines between the haves and have-nots. Moreover, we are keenly aware of geographic limits to broadband access. Those who live in nursing homes, remote locations, or without ready access to tech help may never gain access to worship. Further complicating the accessibility question, many of our church buildings are now ADA compliant, but there are additional considerations for online worship. Structuring online worship for the visual- and hearing-impaired is critical for them to be fully welcomed. These considerations include closed-captions, adequate lighting, simple backgrounds for worship leaders to enhance visual contrast and clarity, and framing the preacher close up to make lip-reading easier for the hearing impaired. Signlanguage and visual interpreters may also be necessary. What will be the mechanisms and funding for these to be as available as wheelchair ramps into the sanctuary? There is also a big question about the stewardship of sustaining online worship. To state the obvious, tech costs money—a lot of it. There’s the hardware for computers, lighting, and sound; telecom expenses for high-speed internet, streaming services, and online meetings; software and their updates for pre- and post-production; and people with the expertise to teach and/or manage the tech and organization. How will these expenses be factored into already tight budgets? One adage for clergy in congregational ministry is “never learn to run the dishwasher .” Why? Because if the clergy know how to run the parish dishwasher, they’ll be expected to take care of yet another task not listed in their letter of agreement. Learning how to run the tech for online worship should fall into the same category.

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Producers—those who organize and work with the clergy to manage the pre-production hardware and tech needs, run the tech during worship so the clergy focus on leading and preaching, and follow-through afterwards with downloading, editing, and online posting—are essential. These time-consuming endeavors can and should be delegated. Clergy must be reserved for those functions that only they can provide and for which they are called. Not included in that job description is producing online worship. Getting through the immediate crisis of this past year required many clergy to learn tech skills they never imagined they’d need. Now that the immediate crisis is over, however, clergy must have a frank conversation with their parish leaders: if clergy are expected to continue as the producers without the removal of other responsibilities, already overworked clergy will be utterly consumed by the demands. Compounding this challenge will be the backlog of weddings, memorial services, graduations, and signiﬁ cant parish occasions and celebrations waiting for our A.C. time. When we can gather in person again, these rituals—on top of ongoing parish life—will be vying for resources of building time, clergy availability, and volunteers from altar guilds, cleaning crews, and hospitality committees. Expecting clergy by default to continue to function as the parish’s “tech guru” will bring on a crisis in clergy’s health physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. The Church simply cannot risk this crippling expense. We must also consider duplication of efforts. If we have become clearer about the ministry that only the clergy can offer (and recording and video production isn’t included), then what are the ministries only they can offer? While proximity to a physical congregation is a prerequisite for parishioners’ regular involvement, no such requirement exists for its online counterpart. When people are free to attend any online worship service in the world at any time, live or on-demand, is it necessary for each congregation to produce its own online version? How will the stewardship of the resources required in time, money, and effort for online worship be discerned? Could this be an area where wise stewardship suggests the costs for online worship be shared with other congregations or a denominational region? Frankly, I also wonder what future training for preachers will require. Just as there are different skill sets needed between broadcast and print journalism, and broadway and ﬁ lm acting, there is a different skill set required between in-person and streamed preaching and worship leading. Similarly, how will young people—raised on digital multi-tasking and the fast-action and complex story lines of the online gaming world—ﬁ nd the slow pace of online worship (especially worship that is not designed from the ground up to be online)? They may have ready access to online worship, but will that worship translate to the world they inhabit?

Conclusion: My (Cloudy) Crystal Ball With all the above in mind, and taking the following with not just a pinch, but a box, of salt, here are my predictions for the future of preaching and worship in the early years A.C.: • Online worship and preaching will continue, and we’ll wonder how we ever thought we could fulfill our mission without an online component. • Akin to today’s “traditional” and “contemporary” services, some services will be geared to the “locals,” and others will be geared toward people we only know online and with whom we have less of a personal connection.

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• Seminary liturgy and homiletics classes will add broadcasting skills. • Parish membership, stewardship, and funding streams will be redefined. • Some parish buildings will be sold for lack of use and others redesigned for dedicated online worship. • Worship attendance and congregational membership will decline to pre-pandemic levels. • Imaginations will continue to expand the ways online worship and preaching can be utilized. • It will be harder to keep children and youth engaged in worship because we won’t have adjusted dramatically enough to their context, but youth involvement will increase through parish online fellowship and outreach opportunities. • Sermons will continue to be more visual, shorter, and pithier—and will still preach God’s Good News for the world.

Notes 1 John McClure, Preaching Words: 144 Key Terms in Homiletics (Louisville, London: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2007), 125. 2 Ruthlynn Bradshaw, “Preaching in the Black Church,” in The Future of Preaching, ed. Geoffrey Stevenson (London: SCM Press, 2010), 61. 3 Yvette Flunder, “Managing the Thorn,” in Birthing the Sermon: Women Preachers on the Creative Process, ed. Jana Childers (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001), 70.

December 31, 2021
Preaching on Easter

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Preaching on Easter

Ronald J. Allen

Indianapolis, Indiana

Although Easter is one of the most important days in the Christian year, preaching in Easter can be challenging. Many congregants come to worship thinking they know the Easter stories when, in fact, they have in mind a few details from the different empty tomb and resurrection appearances which the people have harmonized and to which they add some Easter platitudes from the local coffee shop or popular religious telecast. Such people often take their seats or tune in to the Facebook Live service already expecting a message in line with these preconceptions. Worship planners, buoyed by the singular character of Easter Day, plan extra elements to the service—anthems and solos, instrumental music, bells, liturgical dance, chancel drama, PowerPoint meditations, and the like. These things often lengthen the service and prompt the preacher to reduce the length of the sermon. How does a preacher address the “more” of resurrection when having “less” time to do it? Even if the Easter crowd does not overﬂ ow as it did a couple of decades ago, the worship space is fuller than usual, and when combined with the awareness of the theological signiﬁ cance of Easter, preachers ﬁ nd their adrenaline racing and feel an extra nervousness about the service. Over it all hangs the fact that someone coming back from the dead is likely outside the experience of preacher and congregation. This article cannot resolve the many issues that intersect when preaching on Easter. But it does provide some background to the end-time notion of resurrection, and it can consider how the empty tomb story, Mark 16:1-8, functions in the Gospel of Mark. Along the way, the article sets out some theological and hermeneutical possibilities the preacher might consider in this incredibly complex moment of history: the pandemic, the bizarre political situation and its hyper-partisanship, the movement for justice that took to the streets in the summer of 2020, a signiﬁ cant number of people unemployed, a struggling economy, and the many other uncertainties and tensions ranging from working at home through e-learning to lines getting longer at food banks. But ﬁ rst, two prior considerations. For one, I put this together after the Presidential election of November, 2020, but before the inauguration in January, 2021. Who knows what might happen between writing and publication? For the other, I am aware of the many criticisms that have been leveled against historical criticism over the last decades, but I continue to think a chastened approach in this mode can work with literary and theological criticism to help us respect the otherness of the biblical text.

The Notion of Resurrection in the World of Mark The Gospel of Mark is apocalyptic in orientation, like the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the writings associated with Paul, the Book of Revelation, and many other pieces of Jewish literature roughly 300 BCE to 200 CE. While Christians have sometimes viewed end-time literature as escapist or “pie in the sky by and by,” it is important to realize that the apocalyptic hope emerged as a way to afﬁ rm the promises of God in the midst of intense social struggle.

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The ancient apocalyptic theologians reasoned that after the Fall (Gen 3), history proceeded in a broken fashion with Satan and the demons playing prominent roles in disﬁ guring humankind and nature. This old age is a time of idolatry, injustice, fractiousness in human community, exploitation, sickness, violence, and death. In order to keep the divine promises, so the thinking goes, God would destroy the old world and replace it with a new age—often called the Realm of God—in which God’s generative purposes would shape every heart, relationship, and social system. The new creation would be a time of true worship, mutual care, the reunion of divided peoples, health, peace, and eternal life. The transition from the old age to the new would take place by means of an apocalypse—forces from God would invade the present world, destroying the old and replacing it with the new. In a turn of thought with strikingly contemporary resonance, apocalyptic thinkers imagined the powers deforming the old age inhabiting social systems. Satan and the demons, for instance, could work through empire. The Book of Revelation, for instance, thinks of the Roman Empire as something like the body of Satan in a way analogous to the church as the body of Christ. From the end-time vantage point, the suffering of the old age—and, in particular, the suffering of the innocent and the witnessing community—is an injustice and a challenge to the idea that God is faithful . God moves towards the new age as a matter of justice and to demonstrate God’s faithfulness. In the ﬁ nal and full manifestation of the Realm of God, the faithful would have resurrection bodies. To my mind, the best description of the resurrection body in antiquity is in 1 Corinthians 15:35-58. The resurrection body is a material entity that, unlike the human body in the old age, will never decay. The resurrection body and its larger context of end-time theology is not “pie in the sky” but is part of God’s re-creation of the cosmos so that all things manifest God’s purposes of love and community . Before leaving this section, we should note that apocalyptic literature typically includes not only the Realm of God but also a place of punishment, referred to with names and expressions such as hell, Gehenna, place of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. At the apocalypse, a great judgment takes place with those who have witnessed faithfully to God being welcomed into the Realm while those who have served idols, have exploited others, and have engaged in wanton violence are consigned to punishment. Popular language today can refer to almost anyone who is suffering as “being in hell,” but in the ancient literature, hell is speciﬁ cally a place of punishment for the disobedient. Over the course of preaching and teaching, ministers need to help congregations think about what they really believe about this apocalyptic world view. Some Christians accept it outright. Many set it aside in favor of a quasi-Platonic notion of the soul ascending to heaven at death, keeping in mind the possibility of a later cosmic destruction and reconstruction. Some Christians view apocalyptic language as metaphoric . Still others contend that the modern and postmodern worldviews do not allow for apocalypticism’s bifurcation of history with an apocalypse as its climax, and they seek other ways of relating God’s purposes to history (e.g., process theology). The Easter sermon is probably not the place to take up the believability of the apocalyptic world view as the focus of the message. But as a matter of integrity, the preacher should respect the apocalyptic otherness of the biblical text and bring that

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otherness into conversation with the theological worldview of congregation and preacher.

The Gospel of Mark in Apocalyptic Perspective Mark likely wrote the Second Gospel about the time the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple in 70 CE. Mark tells the story of Jesus to speak to a community of Jesus’ followers living in the chaos that resulted from the Roman malevolence. Mark narrates the Gospel through an apocalyptic lens. John the Baptist frames the ministry of Jesus as bringing about the Realm of God in apocalyptic terms (Mark 1:2-11). Jesus announces his ministry in this very language in Mark 1:14-15. Most scholars today think that Jesus’ message in Mark has a present-future time dimension: Jesus brings some aspects of the Realm into expression in the present, but the Realm will ﬁ nally and fully come only at Jesus’ apocalyptic return (Mark 13:24-27). Many interpreters today regard Mark 13:1-37 as a window into the historical setting and theological purpose of the Gospel. Mark sets the discourse as if Jesus spoke it during his own lifetime to foretell the future. But Mark uses the discourse in the mode of “prophecy after the fact” to interpret the situation of Mark’s community in 70 CE. The social conditions Mark describes in 13:1-20 are the social conditions of Mark’s own world: the appearance of false messiahs (Mk 13:6, 21-22), war (Mk 13:7-8), conﬂ ict between the disciples and the Jewish and Roman authorities (Mk 13:9-11), conﬂ ict within families (Mk 13:12-13), the Roman desecration of the temple (Mk 13:1-2, 14), and uncertainty about what to do (Mk 13:15-16). All of these things occur in a context of suffering. These chaotic and destructive circumstances seem exactly opposite of circumstances associated with the Realm of God. Indeed, the oppressed situation of Mark’s congregation is the epitome of conditions of the old age. Consequently, many members of the Markan community are in danger of giving up. They are tempted to turn away from faithful witness in order to get away from as much of the struggle and suffering as they can. They look at the world around them and essentially think, “The Jesus tradition told us we would be part of the coming of the Realm of God. We did not expect this suffering. Perhaps the tradition is mistaken, and we would be better off returning to our previous religious commitments, Jewish or gentile.” Beginning in Mark 8:31-9:1, Mark seeks to maintain the loyalty of the congregation —and to encourage their continuing witness—by emphasizing that Jesus’ witness to the Realm leads to conﬂ ict with the powers of the old age that eventuated in his suffering and death. The disciples can expect their witness to result in similar suffering (cf. Mk 9:30-32; 10:32-34). Mark offers this line of thought in the mode of pastoral guidance as if to say, “When you follow Jesus on the way to the Realm, you need to be prepared for struggle as the powers of the old age seek to repress your witness.” In 13:4-20, Mark makes a decisive interpretive move: the intense events of suffering in Mark’s generation are the deﬁ nitive signs that the apocalypse will occur soon, certainly within Mark’s generation (Mk 13:28-31). Although the community cannot know the exact time (Mk 13:32), they must continue to witness, for “the one who endures to the end will be saved” (Mk 13:10; cf. Mk 13:33-37). In the Second Gospel, “enduring” and “keeping alert” are not passive activities. The disciples are to announce the presence and coming of the Realm, to invite people to repent and

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join the movement, to live according to the values and practices of the Realm, and to demonstrate its power. This mission includes welcoming gentiles in the community as part of the great reunion of the human family (e.g., Mk 13:10; cf. 7:1-23). The preacher needs to be discerning when considering relationship between the kind of suffering Mark has in mind and churches today. Some congregations, especially in the historic churches, do experience tension with the larger culture when they witness to the Realm of God. Many preachers experience tension with parishioners when they speak and act in behalf of the Realm. In such situations, Mark’s narrative offers encouragement. Yet, other churches effectively identify with the values and practices of the old age. Indeed, these churches sometimes denigrate churches attempting to point to the Realm and contribute to the suffering of the world by reinforcing old age perspectives. Mark’s narrative is a challenge to such situations.

Mark 16:1-8 as Vindication, Motivation, and Guidance In today’s English versions, Mark 16 contains 20 verses. Scholars almost universally agree that Mark 16:8 is the original ending and that later editors added the “shorter ending” and the “longer ending” (Mark 16:9-20). The most likely reasons for the addition are that (1) while 16:1-8 tells the story of an empty tomb, it does not put forward a full-ﬂ edged resurrection appearance, and that (2) Mark 16:9-20 gives the later editor an opportunity to place the imprimatur of the Gospel over the practices of the editor’s community, including casting out demons, speaking in new tongues, handling snakes, drinking poisons with effect, and laying hands on the sick. I imagine a fair number of readers of this journal join me in being glad that snake handling and drinking deadly things are not part of the actual biblical record. But a preacher might take the editor’s additions as a jumping off point for reﬂ ecting on the fact that from the very beginning, the church has taken diverse routes in interpreting the signiﬁ cance of the resurrection. Mark calls attention to the fact that Jesus was dead. D-E-A-D. (Mk 15:44-45). Mark wants the reader to have no doubt that Satan and the rulers of the old age exercised power in the most deﬁ nitive way they could: they put Jesus to death. Death is their strongest weapon. The disciples received the body late in the day on Friday, evidently just in time to entomb it before sundown and the beginning of the sabbath, but not with enough time to anoint the body in accord with Jewish custom. Mark pictures the tomb as typical of burial places of the time—a room hewn out of rock with the entrance covered by a stone to discourage grave robbers and to limit the odor. The women come with spices to anoint the body, thus completing the burial according to the expectations of the old age. The narrator reinforces their old-creation perspective by recalling their conversation regarding who might roll away the stone. They expect to ﬁ nd a closed tomb and a body. This part of the story gives rise to a point that begs to be included in today’s sermon: many of us come to the possibility of the Realm of God with old-age expectations. The narrator had earlier told the Markan listeners—and by extension, subsequent generations including our own—to look for signs of the Realm in the world and to respond accordingly with witness. By way of personal confession, I have to say that much of the time I think of my own life, the lives of the people with whom I interact, and the larger life of the world in terms that expect little more than the old age. Most

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every morning, so to speak, I get up and reach for the spices to take with me to the tomb. When the women enter the tomb, they behold a young person dressed in a white robe sitting on the right. The color of the robe evokes the whiteness that was a sign of someone from heaven at the transﬁ guration (Mk 9:8). The right side is the side of power and authority and is associated with rulership in heaven in Mk 10:37, 12:36, and 14:62. The ﬁ gure in white in the tomb is a representative of the heavenly world! The women do not know the meaning of the presence of this ﬁ gure. No wonder they are alarmed, again. By beginning to address the women with the phrase “Do not be alarmed,” the heavenly messenger invokes the literary-theological genre of salvation oracle so common in the Torah, Prophets, and Writings. In the English versions, these oracles typically begin “Fear not . . . .” These rhetorical devices seek to assure beleaguered people that God will act to save them. Consequently, the oracles encourage the community to live in hope. Mark invokes this purpose with the words “Do not be alarmed.” The messenger continues, Jesus “has been raised.” The passive verb “has been raised” is an idiom for “God raised him.” I mention this because occasional Easter hymns, songs, and liturgical pieces imply that Jesus raised himself. More importantly, this use of raised refers speciﬁ cally to resurrection in apocalyptic terms. The mesd d senger does not refer to Jesus as a resuscitated corpse that has come back to the same body as in the old age. The messenger describes Jesus as a being who is transformed into the qualities of life of the new creation. The Markan Jesus announced that the time of the great transition from the old age to the new is here. He invited people from across the social spectrum to participate in the movement towards the completion of the Realm. This Jesus has demonstrated the limited presence of the Realm in miracles and exorcisms. Jesus has faithfully continued this witness through conﬂ ict, betrayal, and cruciﬁ xion. The resurrection is now the deﬁ nitive vindication that the witness to the Realm is true. The announcement that Jesus is risen means that he is now able to return as the Apocalyptic Redeemer (NRSV: “Son of Man”) of Mark 13:24-27. Beyond vindicating the claims of the Second Gospel, Mark hopes this evidence will persuade members of the community to endure so they, too, will share the resurrection life as part of the cosmic renewal that unfolds under the aegis of the Realm of God. In the backdrop is Mark’s belief, described above, that the apocalypse will be accompanied by the ﬁ nal judgement and the separation of those who have stood with God over and against Satan, the demons, and those who collude with them from those who align themselves with the values and practices of Satan. The latter will be “thrown into hell where their worm never dies, and the ﬁ re is not quenched” (Mark 9:48). The question is, which route would the listener rather follow—a present life marked by suffering in response to the witness to the Realm followed by an eternity in the Realm, or a present life marked by power and comfort at the expense of others and of the common good, followed by an eternity in hell? Scholars and preachers have spilled a great deal of ink over Mark 16:7. One reason for the ink is that many Christians are so accustomed to the reference to communicating the message to the disciples and Peter that we do not get the stunning quality of this statement (Mk 16:7a). Mark paints the disciples as thick and slow to understand the nature and activity of the Realm of God. Indeed, they often respond

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to Jesus and to the message of the Realm from an old age point of view. For instance, in Mark 10:35-45, James and John seek seats on Jesus’ right and left hand after the apocalypse in the hope that they can exercise power in the Realm in a way comparable to Roman ofﬁ cials and others in the present evil age. Jesus chastises them and offers them a revised vision of the exercise of power in community: the disciples are to be servants, i.e., they are to serve the purposes of the Realm. One of the twelve betrays Jesus (Mk 14:10-11, 43-50). When Jesus is arrested, they ﬂ ee (Mk 14:50). Peter actively denies Jesus (Mark 14:26-31, 66-72). They have stumbled. The directive to tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus has risen is a redemptive word of the ﬁ rst order. Given the ways in which many of us think and act in resonance with the disciples and Peter, especially in being reticent about witnessing to the Realm, this is a redemptive word for us, as well. The second point in Mark 16:7 occasioning discussion is the meaning of the phrase Jesus “is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as [Jesus] told you.” In Mark 14:28, Jesus himself said that after the resurrection, he would go before them to Galilee. Interpreters tend to see these statements referring either to a resurrection appearance that will take place in Galilee or to Jesus’ apocalyptic return that occurs in Galilee. The former—a resurrection appearance—seems to ﬁ t the narrative more than the notion of the apocalyptic return. The heavenly messenger in the tomb does not directly use language that refers to the apocalypse, as in Mark 13:24-27 and 14:62. Not only that, but Mark anticipated that the second coming would be a cosmic event which everyone on earth could see (Mk 13:24-27). The disciples would not need to be in Galilee to see it. While Mark indicates that the apocalypse would occur “soon,” Mark does not indicate that it will be immediate. Indeed, Mark says only that the event will occur before that generation passes away (Mk 13:28-37, esp. v. 30). In the meantime, while awaiting the cosmic transformation, the vocation of the community is to continue to witness to the realm. Seeing the Risen One in Galilee would help empower the congregation to continue to witness in the face of destruction, chaos, and death. Preachers, of course, quickly pick up on the notion of Jesus going ahead of the disciples as a way of speaking about Jesus going ahead of the church today. The resurrection , as we have noted, is not just something that happened to Jesus but represents the world-remaking power of the Realm of God. A resurrection appearance embodies the power of the Realm present and working in the world. This power is always going ahead of the church, manifesting the possibilities of the Realm in the world. A preacher can help the congregation identify ways in which the risen Jesus and the Realm are ahead of the church and the world today, that is, are offering the possibilities of the Realm to communities and contexts that currently live according to old age assumptions and actions. Every congregation has its Galilee. The preacher can help the congregation ﬁ nd it and move toward it. Toward this end, here are key questions for the preacher. Where is Galilee for our congregation? Where do we need to go to participate in the renewal that the risen, realm-initiating Jesus is already working towards? What do we need to do, that is, what witness do we need to make, and how?

A Key Question The Second Gospel ends in a way that causes many listeners to shake their heads,

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wondering whether they have just heard what they think they have heard. Mark 16:8 says that the women ﬂ ed from the tomb, having been overwhelmed by a combination of terror and amazement. They are afraid. In their fear, they say nothing to anyone. Why are they afraid? Why do they not do what they are directed to do? Preachers often get side-tracked by focusing on the emotions of the women as if they are historical characters. Mark’s purpose here is not to call attention to their interior lives but to use their fear and silence as a prompt for the listening community. Mark wants the congregation to consider how the women reacted and to ponder the question “Will we do the same?” Will we be overwhelmed by fear and immobilized from engaging in mission? Or will we do what the messenger says, namely go and tell those who, like the disciples and Peter, that life according to the qualities of the Realm is possible? Will we invite those who continue to live in the deformed and destructive old age into the possibilities of the Realm? In the world of Mark, this question was quite muscular. Judea, Galilee, and Samaria were in chaos from the Roman war. Judaism was splintered, its diverse groups vying with one another to be the leading Jewish voice in the post-Temple generation. The Romans ruled by threat of violence. Life was one great net of tensions. Satan, the demons, and their allies in the Roman Empire and in other institutions continue to rage against the possibility of the Realm. To continue to witness—to continue to invite others to repent and join the movement towards the Realm—is inevitably to walk into conﬂ ict. The words of the Markan Jesus of 8:34-9:1 continue to interpret the everyday experience of the community. The resurrection is not the end of the Gospel story but the deﬁ nitive sign that a power is in the cosmos greater than Satan, the demons, Rome, and all the rest. Mark wants listeners to come away from the Gospel in the conﬁ dence that the Jesus who is pictured in the narrative is still at work in the world. The Gospel invites the congregation to join in that witness. Today’s preacher might do the same.

December 31, 2021
What Are You Praying For?

This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

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What Are You Praying For?

Luke 11:1-13, Acts 1:12-14

Ben Dorr

Westminster Presbyterian Church, Greenville, South Carolina

In 1955, John Gaunt, Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize in photography for a picture that ﬁ rst appeared in the Los Angeles Times. It’s a picture of a young man and a young woman—they are husband and wife. Husband looks out at the ocean. Wife looks at her husband. But it’s not a romantic look in their eyes. The photo is titled “Tragedy by the Sea.” Moments earlier, their one-year-old boy had been playing by the waters, waded in, and was swept away. They’re standing in the sand as the waves roll in and out, with the unbearable knowledge that they are too late.1 The photo does not suggest that the couple said a prayer at that moment, but what if they had? If they had prayed to God for a miracle, would God have given them what they asked for? “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will ﬁ nd; knock, and the door will be opened for you.” That’s what Jesus says about prayer in Luke’s Gospel. Beautiful, hopeful words. And yet my hunch is that every person who has ever prayed to God has had the experience of asking God for something that was not granted, searching for an answer that was not found…, and frankly, the parable that Jesus tells his disciples on the heels of those words does not do a whole lot to clear things up. A friend badgers another friend into helping him in the middle of the night, as if God is asleep, and God doesn’t really want to get up and help us, but if we can just annoy God enough with our prayers, God will ﬁ nally relent so God can go back to sleep. What in the world is Jesus telling us?! Let’s not make one-to-one analogies with this story. What’s true in this story is that the friend who knocks on the door leaves with something he did not have when he ﬁ rst knocked on the door. He leaves with bread to eat. He leaves with food to share. The friend’s life is different because he knocked on the door. The friend has received a gift from the act of knocking on the door. I wonder if this is what Jesus is telling us about prayer. I’m reminded of that scene in Shadowlands, the movie about C.S. Lewis. Lewis has just learned that the cancer in his newfound love, a woman named Joy Greshem, is getting much worse. Not knowing how much time she has left, Lewis and Joy respond to this news by getting married. So when a friend (who knows that Joy has been sick) asks Lewis how things are going, Lewis responds, “Good news, I think. Yes, good news.” Lewis is talking about being newly married to Joy. The friend mistakes Lewis’s response for good news about Joy’s health. “I know how hard you’ve been praying,” says his friend. “And now God is answering your prayer.” “That’s not why I pray,” snaps Lewis. “I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need ﬂ ows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.” Maybe that’s the second thing we can say about prayer. If the ﬁ rst point is that prayer is mysterious and inexplicable and we don’t always get what we pray for, maybe the second point is this: Prayer changes things. Prayer changes us. According

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to Jesus, our lives will be different because we knock on God’s door, in prayer. If we turn to God in thanksgiving or bow before God in confession, God will change us. If we cry out in despair to God, God will be at work to change us. And someone says, Well, I don’t see it. But does it really matter whether we can see it? Because God’s ability to give us a gift is not dependent on our ability to see that gift or even to remember that gift. Think about the ﬁ rst gifts any of us were given. None of us remembers the ﬁ rst time we were fed. None of us remembers the ﬁ rst time we were crying as a baby and rocked to sleep at night. But someone gave us those gifts, someone showed us that love when we were too young to even say the word love.” And our inability to remember those gifts does not make those gifts any less real. We don’t always recognize or remember the gifts we receive in order to make it through this life. But that does not mean that God is not at work, always there to give us good gifts, always there to be generous with God’s love. In our text from Acts, the disciples have not yet received the gift of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, a gift that will send them throughout the world to show the world how much God loves the world. But Luke tells us that the 11 disciples, along with Jesus’ mother and brothers and a group of women, “were constantly devoting themselves to prayer….” What do you think they were praying for at that moment? For Jesus to come back soon? For God to restore the kingdom to Israel? For safety from the Romans? For certainty in the midst of an uncertain future? A church member, Mary Ann, once shared a marvelous story about prayer with me, something that happened years ago when she was just a girl. She says that when she was eight-years-old and in the third grade, she was in Miss Annie’s class at school. “In Miss Annie’s third grade, we played bingo on Friday afternoons. Months passed without my winning a single time. One Friday, I decided to pray: ‘Please, Lord, let me win just one game.’ Then I won! That afternoon, I won again and again, many, many times. Through the years, I pondered that experience of answered prayer but told no one. Statistically, it was a virtual impossibility for this to have been a random occurrence. The God who set the galaxies in motion had stepped into a child’s bingo game! The Creator knew and cared about the thoughts and wishes of his children.” She says it was an event that was very formative and helped shape her faith in God. Fast forward two and a half decades. “Twenty-ﬁ ve years later, my mother attended a celebration in the town where we used to live. Miss Annie was there also, and she related one memory to my mother. She said that when I was in third grade, my father went to school one afternoon and told her how much I wanted to win a bingo game. The following Friday, she watched my card and continued to call my numbers, letting me win over and over again.” Mary Ann says that her mother told her that story, “never knowing how that event had shaped my view of God’s omnipotence and love.” Then she asks an intriguing question: “Was it only a coincidence that Miss Annie manipulated the game after I prayed to win, or was the answer to my childish prayer orchestrated by the power of God even before I prayed it?” I don’t know how prayer works. What I do know is this: Prayer changes things. Prayer changes us. And perhaps…prayer even changes God. Not by convincing God to do something that God would otherwise not do, but simply by saying to God, time and again, “Lord, we are in your hands. We belong to you and are helpless before you,

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and love you and have faith in you, even when our faith makes no sense at all….” I believe God is moved by such prayers. And I believe that God responds to those prayers. Even when God’s response is not clear right away, I believe that our prayers reveal our hearts right away. Prayer exposes us. It uncovers our needs, our hopes—our r greatest joys and our deepest fears. All of which…is good news. Because that’s how God wants us. Not the cleaned up, pretend version, but the real version. The messy us. The authentic us. One of my preaching professors in seminary was a Baptist minister, Dr. Cleo LaRue. Before Dr. LaRue became a professor at Princeton, he had many years of experience pastoring churches in Texas. He writes, “As a young twenty-year-old pastor in my ﬁ rst church in Texas, I remember a family caught in a season of sustained adversity. A distraught mother, trying to hold her family together, lay desperately ill in the hospital after a bad car accident. Her husband was unemployed, her son was in jail, her daughter was pregnant out of wedlock, and her creditors were calling the hospital demanding that she pay something on her overdue accounts.” Dr. LaRue says that he went to visit her in her hospital room early one morning, “and after a brief greeting, she closed her eyes and stretched her hands toward me for a word of prayer.” At that point, Dr. LaRue says, “I thought I should do something more than merely pray for her. I thought it my place to give her some sound spiritual advice about life. So I said to her, ‘Mozelle, I’m not going to ask God to move your mountain. I’m just going to ask God to give you the strength to climb.’” Then, he says, “This very sick woman immediately put her hands down and opened her eyes. ‘Wait a minute, little preacher,’ she said. ‘Don’t you tie God’s hands this morning. If God wants to move my mountain, you let him. I’m not trying to climb over a mountain; I’m trying to get out from under one.’”2 This is, I suspect, the way most of us have felt during the course of the past year as we’ve muddled our way through a worldwide pandemic. Sometimes that mountain we’re trying to get out from under has come in the form of an unexpected job loss and unpaid bills. Sometimes that mountain has come in the form of a congregation divided over whether and when to return to worship. Sometimes that mountain has come in the form of mostly white congregations listening with shame to their own silence in the face of racial injustice and then struggling to ﬁ nd their voice for racial equity and justice. Sometimes that mountain has come in the form of real and raw grief, when an awful disease has brought someone’s life to an end much too soon. But far be it from us to assume what God will and will not do in the midst of this mess. “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will ﬁ nd; knock, and the door will be opened for you.” In other words, don’t stop—that’s what Jesus is telling us. Don’t stop praying, don’t stop asking, don’t stop revealing what’s on your heart and mind to God. Because even though we do not know how God will respond, we do know the God to whom we’re praying—a God of boundless generosity, a God of limitless love, a God who has triumphed over Death itself. The Rev. John Mulder is a former president of Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. “One might say I was predestined to be a Presbyterian,” he writes. “I was born, baptized , and conﬁ rmed in the Presbyterian Church. I was ordained to be a Presbyterian minister. I taught for seven years at Princeton Theological Seminary, and then I became president of Louisville….” Then, he writes, on September 11, 2002, “I crashed.” What caused the crash? An undiagnosed bipolar illness, “a pattern of drinking that

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had progressed into full-blown alcoholism,” and a horrible disregard for boundaries that violated the vows of both his marriage and his ordination. “I had to resign as president of Louisville,” Mulder says, “and in the following year, I struggled to deal with the physical, spiritual, and moral wreckage of my life.” Eventually, Mulder went to a rehab program. All throughout the program, he kept praying one prayer: “Please Lord, forgive me.” For months, he prayed that prayer. And nothing happened. He felt no closer to God. Finally, Mulder says he gave up that prayer, and without knowing why, he prayed a different prayer: “God open me up. Please open me up.” One morning, as Mulder was making breakfast for himself, by himself, he describes being surrounded by white light. “It was not blinding or frightening, but warm and embracing. At ﬁ rst, there were no voices or sounds, but as the light subsided, I eventually heard, ‘You are not alone.’ And then the light faded.” This experience, says Mulder, made all the difference. Later on, the staff at the treatment center told him that this event marked the beginning of his recovery. Mulder’s behavior before his crash was, by his own admission, terribly wrong and deceptive, completely inexcusable . And yet, despite all the anger and hurt and pain that he had caused for so many people, Mulder says that he was able to take steps toward making amends and reconciling with many of the people he had so grievously wounded. As Mulder puts it, “It all began with a simple prayer: ‘God, open me up.’”3 I cannot tell you that you will receive exactly what you’re praying for. I can tell you that according to Jesus, the most important part about prayer is our persistence. “Keep knocking,” says Jesus. “Don’t stop,” says Jesus. Because the one who stands on the other side of our prayers is not a disgruntled neighbor who wants to go back to sleep. It’s the God made known in the love of Jesus Christ. The God who spun the planets is the God who loves you and delights in you and is ready, eager—no matter how put-together or messy your life feels right now—to hear from you. What do you hope will happen the next time you talk to God? What will you say? Maybe a good place to start, in the midst of a year that has been so disruptive and deadly, a year in which it’s been tempting to lose hope in whatever God has in store for God’s Church…,maybe a good place to begin is with four little words: “God, open me up.”

Notes 1 I became aware of this photograph through the book Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs , Cyma Rubin and Eric Newton, eds. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 34. 2 As told by Dr. Cleo LaRue in his sermon “The University of Adversity,” October 26, 2008, found at www.day1.org. 3 John Mulder, “Finding God,” The Presbyterian Outlook, June 18, 2013. Mulder also tells this story in the book Finding God: A Treasury of Conversion Stories, John M. Mulder with Hugh T. Kerr, eds. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2012), 394-396. Additional information is found in Peter Smith, “Fallen Presbyterian leader ﬁ nds path to renewal,” The (Louisville, Ky) Courier-Journal, November 26, 2012, Fallen Presbyterian leader ﬁ nds path to renewal (usatoday.com).

December 31, 2021
Preaching on Easter in a Good Friday Season

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Preaching on Easter in a Good Friday Season

Martin B. Copenhaver

Woodstock, Vermont

Last Easter—which seems like many Easters ago—was celebrated just as the ﬁ rst wave of the coronavirus was cresting and crashing all over the country. Because so many congregations conducted their Easter services online, we could choose to worship virtually anywhere. That is, we could worship anywhere virtually. I settled on First Congregational Church of Berkeley (United Church of Christ), which is served by pastors I admire. The service was so creative and engaging that I decided to drop in on other churches for their recorded Easter services. Over the next several days, I participated in seven Easter services, from California, to Chicago, to New York, to New England. It was a virtual movable feast of an Easter celebration. There was considerable variety in the sermons I heard, but they all had two noteworthy characteristics in common. First, the pandemic lent a certain urgency and gravity to the preaching. It was clear that this was not business as usual, not even Easter as usual. When I have taught preaching, I have encouraged preachers to imagine their sermon being preached in a prison or in a hospital ward for terminally ill patients. If the sermon would not hold up in those settings, it may not be worth preaching at all. Such reminders are not necessary in the midst of a pandemic. It is a time when more of us are experiencing conﬁ nement, and the threat of death hovers over us all. Matt Fitzgerald, preaching from the sanctuary of Saint Paul’s United Church of Christ in Chicago, said, “I am alone in this gigantic room because death is stalking us.” It seems, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, that the prospect of facing death in the morning wonderfully concentrates the preacher’s mind. Several of the preachers I heard had to pause mid-sermon to collect themselves. The experience of frolicking in the shallows does not have the power to elicit such a response; it is only when one wades into the depths. These times require preaching that is worthy of the moment. Another kind of preaching, more facile and clever, might be sufﬁ cient at other times, but not Easter, and certainly not this year. The sermons I heard reminded me of the best preaching at funerals, which often are very different from sermons delivered on a Sunday morning. William Muehl, who taught preaching for many years at Yale Divinity School, often admonished his students: “Just remember, most of the people you address on a Sunday morning almost decided not to come.” So, preaching on a Sunday morning is often to people who have their arms folded—ﬁ guratively, and sometimes literally. The preacher has to earn a hearing. In such a setting, often I ﬁ nd that I have to spend the ﬁ rst part of a sermon putting people in touch with their need for the gospel before addressing that need. That is not so at a funeral, where most in the congregation could not imagine themselves anywhere else. They feel an urgent need to be there, and they are looking for good news. The preacher in such a setting is not required to put the members of the congregation in touch with their need because they are keenly aware of it already. It is what brought them there. It is inescapable. That is why preaching to a congregation at such a time has always felt to me like feeding baby birds, their beaks wide open, waiting, in their own way demanding to be fed. The preaching I heard last Easter had

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some of that same quality. Preachers were serving up the gospel straight, no chaser. The second common characteristic of these sermons is that they all grappled, one way or another, with the jarring disparity between the day and the experience of the day. Easter—the ultimate liturgical celebration, a feast day, a day when we are used to joyous fanfares, altars festooned with ﬂ owers, communal singing, crowded pews, ebullient greetings to friends and strangers. Last year, the experience of the day, stripped of most of these familiar trappings, refused to yield to the dictates of the calendar. After all, we were gathering in isolation in a time shadowed with fear, suffering, and death. We were worshipping on Easter at a time that felt more like Good Friday. Some of the preachers articulated the disconnect. All at least alluded to it. The joyous proclamations of Easter had an anticipatory ring to them. Of course, the promise of Easter is both a present reality and a future hope. Those dimensions are always present at Easter, but in the sermons I heard last Easter, the emphasis on the future fulﬁ llment of the promise seemed particularly pronounced, begging the question: Is Easter delayed Easter denied? We are used to Easter following Good Friday according to a clearly established predictable rhythm. As the prophets foretold and as tradition dictates, God’s anointed one died and was raised on the third day. Our Holy Week celebrations reﬂ ect that immutable rhythm. But what if, along with everything else we are experiencing, that familiar rhythm is thrown out of whack, not in God’s dispensation, but in our experience of it? At such a time, can Good Friday be more like a season than a day? And we don’t know when this season of waiting will end. That is one of the most challenging aspects of this season. We are not following familiar rhythms. We have no idea how long this season will last. We do not know when we will be able to celebrate the Risen Christ unencumbered by lingering fear and unfamiliar limitations. In that sense, the current time may be more like waiting for the Second Coming. The promise is sure, but the timetable is anything but sure. We do not know the day and the hour of his coming, so we wait with patience—or, at least, we aspire to be patient. I also wonder if our celebrations of Pentecost might have a particular resonance this year. Before he ascended, Jesus told his disciples to wait in Jerusalem until they were “clothed with a power from on high.” And so they waited, in isolation as if in quarantine. They waited for the fulﬁ llment of the promise, not knowing what form it would take or when it might be realized. We know now that the Holy Spirit would infuse and empower them ﬁ fty days after Passover at the celebration known as Pentecost . But they did not know that. The disciples were not given a timetable. They were given a promise and a one-word instruction: Wait. The pandemic also has given a body blow to sentimentality. People often testify that they see God most powerfully in nature. Even aspects of our Easter festivities—all the luxurious ﬂ owers, the pastel-colored eggs, and adorable bunnies—are a celebration of nature. But the virus is part of nature as well, and it is not beautiful. We are not sentimental about the virus because—as sure as hell—it is not sentimental about us. Sam Keen, reﬂ ecting on the work of noted social scientist Ernest Becker, offered this quite unsentimental assessment: “Mother nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates.”1 During this pandemic I have gone back to Becker’s seminal work, The Denial of Death, a book that captivated me when it was ﬁ rst published (1973) and I was an

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undergraduate. The thesis of the book is that the fear of death is the animating force behind much of human behavior: “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the ﬁ nal destiny for man [sic].”2 Although I no longer think the implications of Becker’s thesis are as far reaching as I once did, during the time of the pandemic we have seen a good deal of supporting evidence for it. The denial of death has been on full display. In the Trump administration , the denial of death was elevated to something like national policy. We were told that the pandemic is not as bad as it has been portrayed. Any move to act decisively in response to the pandemic was undercut, in part because any concerted action would call further attention to the disease and to the attendant deaths. It was deemed better to follow a policy of see no COVID, hear no COVID, speak no COVID. And in various ways, we have seen the populace joining in the denial. One obvious example is the refusal of many to wear masks, in deﬁ ance of medical advice and, in the view of others, in rebellion against common sense. Some explain this phenomenon by pointing out that the wearing of masks has been politicized, which certainly is true. But that is not the only explanation. It is also an expression of the denial of death. Not wearing a mask is a way of whistling past the graveyard. After all, during the 1918-19 pandemic, in the immediate aftermath of World War I—that is, in a very different political environment from today—there were similar responses. During a pandemic that claimed an estimated 650,000 American lives (and over 50 million worldwide), President Woodrow Wilson never made a single public reference to it. There were large demonstrations against local mandates to wear masks. Anti-mask leagues were established. Newspapers gave extensive coverage to the end of the war, while devoting scant column inches to a pandemic that claimed over ﬁ ve times as many American lives as the war did. The denial seems to have reached into subsequent generations. The 1918-19 pandemic was not covered in any history class I ever took. My mother was born in 1918, and yet I never heard her make any reference to the fact that she was born in the midst of the most deadly pandemic in human history. Columnist David Brooks has suggested that this relative silence about such an enormous event can be attributed to the shame people felt in how they responded to their neighbors during such a time of emergency. But I wonder if straight-up denial also had a lot to do with it. There is another phenomenon, evinced both in 1918-19 and during the current pandemic, that is related to denial, and that is the tendency to blame someone, anyone —any individual or group of people—for the disease. We know how to respond to a human enemy and we are used to having them. In fact, it seems that we long to have an enemy, we are lost without one, and it appears that only a human enemy will do. So, we know how to talk about war, and we lack the same ability to talk about a pandemic. It is not enough to see disease and death itself as the enemy; there is a need to ﬁ nd a human scapegoat. In 1906 William James wrote about the need to address social ills as the “moral equivalent of war.” While decrying the horrors of war, James recognized the ways in which war can marshal the human spirit, unite people in a common cause, and invite sacriﬁ ce. James reasoned that we should be able to direct those same virtues in the cause of addressing urgent social needs.

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In that spirit, Lyndon Johnson declared a “War on Poverty,” Richard Nixon waged a “War on Drugs,” and George W. Bush introduced a “War on Terror.” In a 1977 speech, Jimmy Carter used James’s phrase, “moral equivalent of war,” to suggest that was what was required to address the energy crisis of the time. Although none of those endeavors were notably successful, the search for a “moral equivalent of war” continues. The ﬁ ght against the coronavirus often is described as a kind of war. But a pandemic is not war, and it does not elicit the same responses because we are not ﬁ ghting a human enemy. To be sure, Trump tried to ﬁ nd a human enemy we could blame by calling COVID-19 the “China Virus.” In a similar way, the 191819 inﬂ uenza epidemic was called “The Spanish Flu.” Ironically, Spain earned that ignominious distinction because it was a neutral country, so the press there was able to report on the pandemic, something that both the Allied and Central Powers nations forbade. In other words, blaming Spain for the pandemic was a “shoot the messenger” strategy on an international scale. Not wanting to be the only country without a human enemy to scapegoat, in Spain the disease was called the “French Flu.” This kind of scapegoating is a way to localize the threat, to make it seem smaller and thus less formidable. We can understand a human enemy, we know how to ﬁ ght a human enemy, and we know how to kill a human enemy. The idea that death itself is stalking us is overwhelming. So, we localize the threat and demonize the other. In this way, demonization is a form of denial. Of course, our celebrations of Holy Week are meant to include an unﬂ inching account of the power of death. Victory over death is central to the celebration of Easter, and it is no triﬂ ing victory over some meager enemy. In part, our celebrations of Easter are so rousing and exuberant precisely because we recognize that death is a powerful and fearsome enemy. Nevertheless, the denial of death can even sneak into our Holy Week worship if, as happens in many congregations, the sanctuary is full on Palm Sunday and on Easter, but much more scarcely populated on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. Those who follow that pattern go straight from triumphant parade to joyous fanfare, with nary a moment in the shadows, which can be an expression of denial. Perhaps this year, in this time that seems tinged inescapably with the characteristics and mood of Good Friday, we have a chance to get it right. In this dark time, sentimentality and denial are still in evidence, but they are harder to come by. Therefore, this year may be the time when we can dispense with those responses entirely and in so doing, receive the good news of Easter as never before. The Apostle Paul was chastised by the church in Corinth because he changed his plans about visiting them. Their feelings were hurt, and so they started to complain. (Sounds like church, doesn’t it?) They accused him of being a ﬂ ip-ﬂ opper: First he says “Yes,” then he says, “No.” When Paul writes back he says, in effect, “I changed my plans. That does not mean I am inconsistent. I don’t say ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ to you at the same time, any more than Jesus does. In Jesus, it is always “Yes.”’ He then goes on to offer this afﬁ rmation: “In him every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes’” (2 Corinthians 1:16-22). When Paul says that in Jesus, it is always “Yes,” he is not whistling past the graveyard because the story of Jesus is not over until he has spent some time in the graveyard. It is about life as it really is and will have no truck with denial. His story encompasses all of life—the shadows as well as the light; both the sin and the redemp-

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tion; both death and resurrection. Before the “Yes,” of course, there is a “No.” The human family used every way we knew to say “No” to Jesus. We betrayed him, we mocked him, we denied him, we killed him. We said “No” in every way we knew how. And in response to that “No,” in Jesus, it is always “Yes.” The resurrection is God’s “Yes” to the world. God wouldn’t take our “No” for an answer. Before and after, both under and above, our deﬁ nite “No” is God’s triumphant “Yes.” A famous book on negotiation is entitled Getting to Yes. 3 That could also be the title of the gospel story because, in Jesus, God always gets to yes. Or, as poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “After the ﬁ nal no there comes a yes, and on that yes the future world depends.”4 Once I was among a group of authors asked to summarize the gospel in seven words. Here is what I came up with: “God gets the last word.” (I know, that is only ﬁ ve words. I thought I would save the other two for another time.) If I had been asked to expand a bit, I would have said this: Our God is the kind of God who insists on having the last word. The second-to-last word, which can be very powerful, can be given over to something else—evil, disease, oppression, hopelessness, death itself. But our God is the kind of God who insists on having the very last word, and that is always a word of healing, a word of liberation, a word of hope, a word of life. If I were asked to summarize the Christian gospel in one word—not in seven words or forty words, but one word—it would be the word “Yes.” God gets the last word, and that word is “Yes.” This promise is nothing new, of course, but perhaps in this singular time, we will be able to hear it anew. I do not know what the world will look like this coming Easter. As I write this, vaccines are not yet available to the public, although it looks as if several vaccines are on the cusp of approval. So, by the time Easter arrives, our daily lives may be getting back to normal, or, at least beginning to. It is something we all long for, but my hope is that we will hold out for something more than normal. Going back to normal, or even trying to, itself may be a kind of denial. Instead, I hope our lives, and even our experience of Easter, will be transformed by what we have gone through. Obviously, Easter is not a return to normal; it is an upending of normal. Easter is not a return to life as we knew it; it is an invitation to a life beyond anything we have yet experienced. Even if there is a normal to go back to, the promise of Easter is that we don’t have to settle for normal, because God has so much more in store for us. This past year, we have been forced into a time of isolation, uncertainty, fear, and death. We have not been able to get our Good Friday ticket punched easily so that we can move quickly on to Easter. This year, Good Friday has been more like a season in which we have had to linger. And yet within this season, the promise abides. Even in this time, perhaps especially in this time, we have been invited to imagine, with poet e.e. cummings, “that yes is the only living thing.”

Notes 1 Sam Keen, “Foreword,” in Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (London: Souvenir Press, 2011), xii. 2 Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1073), ix. 3 Roger Fisher, Getting to Yes (New York: Penguin Press, 2011). 4 Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poetry and Prose of Wallace Stevens (Boone, IA: Library of America), 224.

December 31, 2021
Coming, Ready or Not: The Character of Advent Hope

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Coming, Ready or Not: The Character of Advent Hope

Sam Wells

St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London, United Kingdom

Some while ago I got on a train from London to Yorkshire. It was a good opportunity to see family and, given the self-absorption of central London, to check that the rest of the country was still out there. But the real reason I went was to have a chance to see my friend. We’ve known each other 40 years and seen each other at least once a year all that time, even during the season I lived in North Carolina. He’s one of the most dynamic people I know–mountain climber, high school head of department, jazz pianist, poet. But the last 20 years have been different. He’s been struggling with a debilitating post-viral fatigue syndrome. He had to give up work. For much of those years he’s largely been housebound. I was really looking forward to seeing him and comparing notes. But just as I set foot on the train, I got a text that said, “I’m sorry, I feel I’m letting you down, but I can’t see you tomorrow. I’ve been sleeping till lunchtime every day, and I haven’t got energy to share even a short conversation.” I still went to Yorkshire, and saw a bit more family than expected, but I had a big hole in my heart all weekend. I got up to Yorkshire to see him a few months later. That’s not the point. The point is, this man is 55 years old and he’s had the heart and soul torn out of his life these last 20 years, and there’s no upward curve. Right now he’s so weighed down he can’t even see an old friend for a half-hour chat. What can we say in the face of this long imprisonment? What do we believe? What sense can we make of it all? I say we because it feels like all these last 20 years, he and I have struggled together to put some meaning around his experience, and what truth we’ve found has come through his courage, his honesty, and his willingness to share hope and despair. I share his story because it feels like the whole world has had post-viral fatigue syndrome. Long-planned festivals dismantled, hard-yearned projects destroyed, life plans ruined, sickness abiding, regular life perpetually postponed. It’s hard to get your head round what’s happened to the world. If it popped up in Isaiah or Jeremiah, it would be a forewarning of the disaster to come with the climate catastrophe–a way to teach us that we can’t save ourselves, we sink or swim together. But we’re not in Isaiah or Jeremiah right now, and the extent and dimensions of the pandemic are tough to comprehend. So what I’m offering here is a small way to imagine a bigger set of issues. It’s what the rhetoricians call synecdoche–where one small part becomes a token of a much bigger whole. When I returned to London from my weekend in Yorkshire, I picked up the phone to compare notes with my friend and share sadness and the multiple ironies of life. I share now what we discussed then. It could be you can identify with what he’s been going through–whether because it resembles your long covid, or your experience of the pandemic, or some other intractable facet of your life experience. The search I’m engaged in is, where we ﬁ nd Advent hope. The hardest thing of all to say, and the word I still hesitate to utter, ten years on, is, “I wonder if this illness will ever end. Do you think you’ll be like this–weak, often

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Journal for Preachers housebound, sometimes bedridden–for the rest of your life–maybe another 35 years?” Occasionally I do have the courage to say those fearful words. And he has the grace to say “Yes, I do often wonder this.” He says it in such a beautiful way that makes me feel better for naming it and tells me he’s glad to have someone in his life who isn’t constantly pointing him to miracle websites or telling him about a cousin or a friend at work who had something similar and experienced an amazing cure. Someone who can call it what it is. You can’t discover hope until you’ve at least glimpsed despair. Hope is not to be trivialised. It’s not positivity or optimism. Hope is eschatological, not teleological. The difference is this: teleology works from now to the future; it asks what actions now best accord with the ﬁ nal goal we’re working towards or the ultimate purpose we were created for. It stretches the present into the future. Eschatology works from the future to now. It brings the future into the present. It regards the future as more real than the present and evaluates all present actions to the degree they accord with the future that will come to the present. Teleology is anthropological–it’s something humans do. Eschatology is theological–it’s something God does. Advent hope is eschatological. Wherever we’re going, however far away it seems or impossible it is to get there, Jesus is coming to meet us. No one ever gets to ﬁ nish their own story. Civilisation never gets to a place of completeness. Jesus will come to meet us before we’ve ﬁ nished. Jesus says, “Coming, ready or not.” And it turns out, we’re never ready. My friend isn’t ready. But the truth is, he’s no less ready than I am. In the kingdom of God, nothing bad lasts forever. It may be terrible; it may last a long time. But in the kingdom of God, nothing bad lasts forever. Or to put it another way, for Christians, the future is always bigger than the past. However much we suffer , however much we hurt, however much we regret, God will always be able to take our fragility, our failure, our foolishness, our grief, our bitterness, and our sorrow, and gather it into the kingdom. The past is limited; the future is eternal. The past is ﬂ awed; the future is beyond bounds. For Christians, the future is always bigger than the past. So yes, it is possible to say “I wonder if this illness will ever end.” And it is also possible to say, without being trite or superﬁ cial, “I know it will end. It may last for the rest of your life–but it won’t last forever.” Everything that is incomplete or unfulﬁ lled in your life Christ will meet and transform and gather into the kingdom. Nothing is irredeemable. That’s the Advent hope. And because of this Advent hope, we can have the courage to go to the very bottom of the pond and name our worst fear and speak it out loud. When the Archbishop’s envoy to the Middle East, Terry Waite, was taken prisoner in Beirut in 1987, for what turned out to be four years of mostly solitary conﬁ nement, he immediately realized how serious the situation was. He made three resolutions: “No regrets. No self-pity. No false sentimentality.” In other words, don’t dwell on how the past could have been different, don’t tell a false story of the present that makes it all about you, and don’t take refuge in a fantasy about the future. Those convictions got him through four years in captivity. They’re a pretty good guide for life. They certainly constitute a pretty good motto for my friend struggling with a debilitating sickness. Because regrets, self-pity, and sentimentality are all methods of dwelling on ways things might be different from how they are. They’re all inhibitors to facing the reality before us.

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They’re all forms of lack of faith in the promise of Advent–that however bad things are, Christ is coming, and so we can face it. Terry Waite’s resolutions are not a million miles away from ancient Stoicism. The former slave Epictetus said it’s not what happens to you that counts, but how you respond to what happens. So long as we focus on keeping control of our reactions, he said, we’re free. Nothing, not even a pandemic or four years as a hostage, can defeat us. It’s a wise approach, and a lot of Christians say if they weren’t believers, they’d be Stoics, because Stoicism teaches you to stop criticising, blaming, and accusing others, and look inside yourself to ﬁ nd peace. Terry Waite’s motto can be our guide when we get from the hospital the test results we most fear, when we hear on the telephone the news we deeply dread, when we discover a message that conﬁ rms what we’re most scared to admit. No regrets. No self-pity. No false sentimentality. But there’s one thing missing from Stoicism, and that’s the quality Paul highlights when he faces his own lockdown. Writing from prison, Paul lists no fewer than 17 forms of trial: hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword, death, life, angels, rulers, things present, things to come, powers, height, depth, and ﬁ nally anything else in all creation. Paul uses this comprehensive list to say “Nothing whatsoever can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus.” Many of us in the face of the pandemic have just felt powerless. Unlike a Stoic, Paul embraces that fragility. He accepts he’s going to be overwhelmed sometimes. So instead of making himself impervious to adversity, Paul invests in relationship. He decides that the heart of the universe is connection with God and one another. He spends his lockdown pondering the one relationship that’s more enduring than all the others. He turns from a teleological to an eschatological mindset. He’s not a Stoic with a stiff upper lip, nor is he taking refuge in a fantasy world of make believe. Paul believes Advent saves us in the real world of betrayal and loss and anger and hurt. It’s only because of Advent hope that he and we ﬁ nd the strength to name and face how bad our situation really is. James Stockdale was a commander and pilot in the US Navy during the Vietnam War. He was a prisoner of war for seven years. During that time he was regularly kept in solitary conﬁ nement, tortured, and beaten. Later he talked about the difference between him and some of the other American captives who experienced the same cruelty at the hands of the North Vietnamese guards and died in the prison camp. Those prisoners, he said, were optimists. They looked on the bright side of life. They said, “Christmas: we’ll be out by then.” And when it wasn’t so, they simply said, “Easter: we’ll be out by then.” They died of a broken heart. What Stockdale’s pointing to is the difference between hope and optimism. Optimism looks at the facts and chooses to put a positive spin on them. Advent hope recognizes how bad things really are but knows God is always bigger. But Stockdale said another thing that goes even further: “I never lost faith in the end of the story; I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the deﬁ ning event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.” That’s the crucial dimension of Advent hope. That this experience I’m going through, far from something I seek to suppress or erase or delete or forget, will come to be the deﬁ ning experience of my life which, when I look back, I would not have had any other way. I wouldn’t have the temerity to suggest such a thing if it were not a man like James Stockdale, and a person of daily cour-

December 31, 2021
No Longer Sitting on a Rack

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No Longer Sitting on a Rack

Isaiah 25:6-9, Mark 16:1-8

Angela F. Shepherd

St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, Atlanta, Georgia

Home improvement stores have a certain section that draws me like a magnet. Sometimes hard to ﬁ nd, usually buried within the garden center, off to the side, may be found an aluminum rack with a few shelves holding houseplants that have passed their prime. Perhaps the regional buyer overestimated and purchased too much inventory , or some plants just not that appealing, overlooked in favor of a new hybrid. For whatever reason, these plants end up on a rolling cart, marked half-off or less, one step away from the graveyard. Sometimes a quick assessment can be made noting which ones should have already been discarded, wilted and decaying. However, I have found, if arriving at the right time, hidden jewels waiting to be rescued. Some folks like to rescue animals. I rescue plants! I have found plants discounted due to a loss of vibrancy, bloomed out, or browning leaves, and I have delighted in being able to turn many around. This happened last year at the beginning of Eastertide when I happened to ﬁ nd Easter lilies, white blossoms with heads bowed down and turning brown—for just $1.00. I would take a chance. Easter began in mid-April, and we were already in pandemic mode. I started a vegetable garden and thought nothing of digging a hole and placing the pruned Easter lily bulb there for an anticipated appearance in 2021. To my surprise, in a few weeks a green shoot began to pierce the soil reaching for the light of day and rain from the sky and my water hose. In a short time three blossoms emerged and opened, revealing the beautiful ﬂ ower long associated with new life. The Easter lily bloomed a second time, bringing great joy! And from the metal discount cart of outcast houseplants on its way to the morgue, to the depths of the earth, rejuvenated and showing itself to be down but not out. We have surpassed a full year of COVID-19. Best practices, guidelines, and restrictions settled. Unprecedented sickness and death, along with stresses among many identiﬁ ed as essential workers has added to a year of dismay. Everyone from the Uber driver to those who stock shelves in grocery stores, to all health care workers and ﬁ rst responders, each has carried the brunt of this load. Pandemic induced unemployment has led to food insecurity and the threat of homelessness and eviction realized by far too many. Early on I identiﬁ ed the impact of this pandemic stirring around as COVID-19 fog—an invisible haze that has taken over and enveloped the entire globe. So much death and sickness and division, more than humanly possible to manage or control. Some still say, “Wake me when it’s over.” Vaccine distributions continue, and a dim light has been spotted up ahead. Nonetheless, there are more months to suffer through. Although it is Spring, the theme of Advent, a restless waiting, remains saddled to us like a backpack. It only takes a slight stretch of the imagination to tune our ears to words of hope and expectation from the prophet Isaiah:

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Easter 2021 On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death for ever. Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken. It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the LORD for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation. Isaiah 25:6-9

We wait for the shroud of pandemic to be destroyed. We wait for a day when food insecurity will be no more. We wait for God to extend a handkerchief to wipe away all the tears that accumulate silently in the night. Many have said the pandemic will change people, change lives, change perspectives, that we would suddenly realize what is profoundly important. I thought “yes” that could be possible, but only if it lasts a long time, long enough for folks to forget a former way of being. Predictably comfortable routines, transactional theology, and a cultural individualism all stand in the way of a God proven to be anything but static and ordinary. Instead of straining like a stretched rubber band ﬁ ghting to return to its resting place of origin, why not let it break and look forward to God’s call toward something new? The tension of breaking through is uncomfortable but necessary to reach new heights on a holy mountain. Our routines have been disrupted, liturgical rites and sacramental liturgies have been abandoned or changed. Has it been enough? Has it been long enough for one to investigate the image reﬂ ected in a mirror and determine if one’s own soul has shifted and perched on higher ground? Only time will tell. Until then, we hold on to our existential theological realities deeply rooted in soil not bound to a nave, choir stalls, or parish hall. We follow the story of Jesus, from the cradle to the grave. We join “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome” and carry spices to anoint Jesus’ dead body, following tradition as we are supposed to. How surprised were they, like we, when the destination is reached, and the one we sought is not there?

As they enter the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. 6But he said to them, ‘Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was cruciﬁ ed. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.’ So, they went out and ﬂ ed from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Mark 16:5-8

Their spices were not needed. No dead body to anoint. The women join us in looking for Jesus in places where we think he should be: in a tomb, in a church, a human-made image painted on a canvas, a stone carving. A Jesus portrayed by an actor, blond hair and blue eyes, emaciated body pinned to a cross. No. Jesus has gone ahead to Galilee, a place where he awaits our arrival. Walking in that direction, we

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must ﬁ rst lay down the spices of death carried in our backpacks, spices that say all hope is gone and rigor mortis has settled in. Discarding the unnecessary makes room for the anticipated oils of gladness: hope, peace, joy, and love. The themes of Advent dissolve and change into a balm to heal all wounds of the world as we approach the risen Christ who has overcome the terror of life, a horrible death on a cross, and emerged from the tomb a new creation. John’s gospel tells us Mary of Magdala did not recognize the risen Christ at ﬁ rst. Only after he calls her name “Mary!” are her eyes opened to see the unimaginable. Jesus is alive! Life has changed, not ended. We are no longer like houseplants sitting on a rack wearing labels and waiting to be discarded. Jesus has come and set us apart for good. Be still and listen. You will hear him call your name. Then, do not be afraid to carry the oils of gladness and wade through the Great 50 Days of Easter. Tis the season to renew and refresh our faith.

We believe in God, Creator of all: The two-legged, the four-legged, the winged ones, and those that crawl upon the earth and swim in the waters. We believe in God, One Who Walked with Us: Our Brother Jesus born in humility, who lived and died for us and who will come again to bring us to glory. We believe in God, Spirit with Us: Ever present and ever guiding, upholding us and showing us the principles to live by. We hear God’s voice through the prophets. Creator, One Who Walked with Us, Spirit with Us, Holy One: We are named in the waters of baptism as your own, all of us related, all of us your children. We watch for signs of your homecoming and thank you for this sacred circle of life.1

Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Amen.

Notes Scripture references, New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, 1989. 1 Afﬁ rmation, “Daily Prayer for All Seasons” (New York, Church Publishing, 2014), 4.

December 31, 2021
A New Community from Frayed Edges

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A New Community from Frayed Edges

Acts 2:1-21

Chris Currie

First Presbyterian Church, Shreveport, Louisiana

Here is the scene: flaming tongues of fire coming to rest on the gathered throng, creating a situation that begins to take on a life of its own. The whole community is filled with the Holy Spirit, enabling them to speak in languages that were not their own, and to be understood by people gathered to Jerusalem from a multitude of ethnic and national backgrounds. No dominant racial group, no language or culture exercising domination over another, but room is miraculously made in Jesus Christ and the community he forms by power of the Holy Spirit. From the beginning breaths of the Holy Spirit, the church of Jesus Christ is not a cultural church or a church of one nationality or race or class or interest group, but a missionary church, an alien church, a church that does not submit to the lordship of one particular culture or race or national or regional religious cult, but only to the lordship of Jesus Christ. The early Christian confession that Jesus is Lord was not in itself a reason for the Christian community to receive attention or disdain from Rome. It was the implication of their confession and their way of life indicated not only that Jesus was Lord, but that Caesar was not Lord. The crucified, dead, and resurrected Jew from Nazareth transcended the strength, might, and domination of Caesar and Pax Romana. The historian of church mission Andrew Walls reminds us of what is right before our eyes in this passage from Pentecost, that Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, Judeans, Cappodocians, Asians, Africans, Arabs, and yes Romans were already part of Israel and the church’s mission by virtue of their belief in Jesus Christ, and “did not require the accompanying markers of the law, nor any other cultic or purity signifiers .”1 More relevant to our own time, perhaps, he then makes the following point: when the gospel of Jesus Christ is reduced to one dominant nation, ethnicity, and cultural form, Christianity dies and cannot be revitalized from within but only by what he calls a “cross-cultural diffusion.” “Every threatened eclipse of Christianity [has been averted],” Walls reminds us, “by [a] cross-cultural diffusion. Crossing cultural boundaries has been the life blood of historic Christianity.”2 From its beginning, the church of Jesus Christ is a community that at its best is not representative of one single nation, ethnicity, or race. And when the church becomes less than its best, defining the gospel of Jesus Christ according to the norms of one nation, one race, and one establishment identity, it is at risk of losing its vitality and its witness. Again, here is the scene: flaming tongues of fire come to rest on the gathered throng filling them with the Holy Spirit, enabling them to speak in languages that were not their own, and to be understood by people gathered to Jerusalem from a multitude of ethnic and national backgrounds. Out of the chaos of many heartlands, homelands, and racial hues, the tongues of fire forge a community tethered together in Jesus Christ that transcends everything else. Here is the scene: flaming tongues of fire coming to rest on the gathered throng, creating a situation that begins to take on a life of its own, as it laps at and subsumes an abandoned police precinct building in midwestern Minnesota—nice Minneapolis.

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Pentecost 2021 People gathered to protest the unjust killing of an unarmed black man in the streets of Minneapolis by a local policeman as his colleagues stood and watched. Protestors possibly mixed with and were bated by outside agitators in the streets more than happy to take advantage of the problems of race in the America of 2020 and to stoke the fires of hatred, chaos, and distrust. These are the flames of fire that greet us this Pentecost, these are the flames of fire that we cannot turn away from, and these are the flames of fire that threaten to engulf us. Craig Barnes, president of Princeton Theological Seminary, in a recent statement on the death of George Floyd puts it this way:

For centuries our white dominated society has systemically made it so hard for blacks to breathe fully. Systems of oppression manifest in marginalized neighborhoods where children grow up with severely limited opportunities and boundless reasons for despair, in disproportionate rates of incarceration , and as we just saw again, in some being shot or strangled by those who took an oath to protect them.

Barnes continues, “As a white [person], I cannot fully understand or know the depth of pain that this creates. But I can acknowledge my own complicity in these systems, and join with black siblings in Christ who have had to fight far too long for justice and dignity.”3 One of my favorite Taize’ chants that we often sing in Taize’ worship goes like this: “The kingdom of God is justice and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit, come now, and open in us, the gates of your kingdom.” But the kingdom of justice and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit cannot include an ideology that excuses, ignores, or justifies killing unarmed black men in the name of law and order. When we lived in Scotland, we had some neighbors who were serving as Christian missionaries in China, and the wife, herself Asian-American, recently reminisced about a trip she and her family made to attend a special organ recital in London at Westminster Abbey , on of all days, Pentecost, and the piece being placed was a contemporary organ piece inspired by the Pentecost story in Acts. She recalls that she “briefly noted the organist’s name—something typically English and male (hidden from view high above us, playing). At the end of the amazing, passionate playing, we all looked up to see the organist emerge to take his bows, and to [her] great surprise, a young black man popped his head over the edge and grinned to the congregation. And in that moment ,” this Asian-American woman writes, “I had two very quick realizations—1) I had automatically been expecting to see an old, white man, and 2) I was racist for being surprised that he was not.” She recalls that it was not a sin of omission as much as ignorance. She assumed her narrow, biased view of who could participate in the world of great church music in distinguished places would only include a certain group of people. She confessed that she had not taken the trouble to learn about who truly is writing and playing and creating this music right now. She recalled a sense of surprise and delight at being wrong. “[And] I hope I will continue to be delighted to have planks taken out of my eye.”4 Here is the scene: Flaming tongues of fire come to rest on the gathered throng in a situation that begins to take on a life of its own. The church of Jesus Christ has always been at its best not when it walls itself off from the problems, trauma, and its own complicity in the racism of its host culture, but when it listens to the voices of

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the unheard, stands with those who suffer at the hands of injustice, and works and voices public support for the dignity and fair treatment of every human being. One of my favorite sayings about the church comes from an Anglican, the Archbishop of Canterbury during the 1940s and ecumenical leader for the larger church, William Temple. About the church, he says, “The church is the only society on earth that exists primarily for the sake of those outside of it.” The purpose of our being here at all as a church, he reminds, argues, and maybe challenges us, is not primarily for our own edification, but primarily for the sake of those outside of our walls, outside our community, and outside our fellowship. We exist for them. Pentecost gives us the gift of the Spirit not just to certain individuals, but to all creation. To be filled with the Spirit is to be able to breathe fully, to be able to realize our God-given purpose, vocation, and calling in this world, and to work for changes in society that ensure that more people of color, more people who grow up in poverty, and more people who are warehoused in our system are given opportunities, openings , and on-ramps to become creatures fully alive, fully able to breathe, fully able to offer God their best. The second century theologian and church father Irenaeus declared that the “glory of God is a human being fully alive.” It is not enough to chase after that for ourselves or only for those close to us. When black members of our society are limited at the start in their breaths, when we turn our eye to a system that does not work to ensure that everyone has good opportunities to breathe fully, we risk not only limiting their breaths, but we risk thinking that their breaths are not our problem or that we have responsibilities only for ourselves and our own spiritual edification. In doing so, we risk losing, sacrificing, and forfeiting our reason for being as a church. To be the church is to exist for the sake of those outside of the church; to be the church is to be filled by the Holy Spirit so that we are sent, commissioned, and given the task to work that all members of our community are treated with dignity and have every opportunity to fully breathe, to be fully alive, and to reflect the glory of God. 2020 is turning out to stand on quite the eschatological precipice. We are living in a fragile ecosystem. A bat bites a pangolin, and before long hospitals are overwhelmed with people who cannot breathe. A police officer doesn’t let up on a black man who cannot breathe, and we realize we all have some complicity in a society set-up to limit his breaths. But it is often in times like this when the church awakens to its particular task and particular responsibilities in this particular moment, entering into the frayed and ash-covered edges of our society, helping to form a new community, fully alive and fully able to breathe. Now more than ever, come Holy Spirit.

Notes 1 John Flett, “The Calling of Witness,” in The Witness of God (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, d d 2010), 283. 2 John Flett, “The Calling of Witness,” in The Witness of God, 283. 3 Craig Barnes, “Statement on the Death of George Floyd,” Princeton Theological Seminary, May 29, 2020. 4 From Heather Kaiser, Taiyuan, China.

December 31, 2021
Two Stories

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Two Stories

1 Corinthians 15:13-22

Sam Wells

St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, United Kingdom

I’ve heard a lot of people in the last month say the pandemic has changed everything . For many it’s turned the world upside down. I was talking with a friend with chronic fatigue syndrome who said, “It’s like the whole world has chronic fatigue syndrome and has to be in the house 23 hours a day. Now you all know what it’s like.” And again, a neurodiverse person said, “I ﬁ nd touch difﬁ cult, and I like to crochet through meetings, and these zoom platforms are great, because I get to meet people on my own terms and they can’t see me crocheting. Finally the world’s set up for the beneﬁ t of an autistic person like me.” So we’ve been experiencing a change in the balance of power, and some of the people in charge feel disabled and some of the disadvantaged feel, “At last there’s a place for us.” While for many people there’s been profound change, for some catastrophic, for others healthy, one thing that seems universal is that this season has intensiﬁ ed existing traits in our characters. The impatient have become more impatient, the lazy have gotten lazier, the hyperactive have gone off the scale, the indecisive have put things off even longer. More precisely, the most poignant parts of life have grown even more signiﬁ cant. It’s like these weeks of conﬁ nement have become a microcosm of our whole lives, and all the unresolved questions and wonderings have come into sharper focus. It’s an uncomfortable experience, but it could be the most important gift of this troubled time. The questions about the virus–why is it here, what do we do about it, how do we balance public good with our own needs, how do we survive, what do we owe one another, how can we ﬂ ourish–are intensiﬁ ed versions of life’s big questions. The way we tell the story of the virus is the way we tell the story of everything. I want to suggest there are two ways we can tell the story of the virus and of everything. I want to explore each of them with you in some detail. Here’s Story One. The universe began with a big bang. It took a few billion years for things to settle down. The real bang crash was still going on zillions of light years away, but by a strange collection of circumstances, one planet in a minor galaxy developed the conditions for life to begin. A principle emerged called the survival of the ﬁ ttest, and in a ruthless and brutal sequence of visceral contests, those forms of life gradually became more sophisticated until they started to develop self-consciousness. Once they’d done that, they started to plan, reﬁ ne, reﬂ ect, and make meaning. But such meaning as they made had no larger purchase. It was simply their attempt to recognise and value those features of their existence that rose above their raw animal condition, in which shelter, food, clothing, company, reproduction, and death set the template for life. Unsatisﬁ ed with the mundanity of things, and overwhelmed by the paradox that while individual life ends, life in general continues, these self-conscious beings started to put their existence in the context of something greater, richer, deeper, and more enduring. They talked of a life-force that lay above and beyond the earth and

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Easter 2021 their existence. They sought ways to communicate with this life-force and discern its purpose. But these were in the end sad, doomed, and tragic ways of failing to come to terms with their accidental, purposeless lives. In truth the only value they reliably found in the years that came between birth and death was the sense of achievement in asserting themselves over one another, and the sense of belonging they felt when they knew they were appreciated, desired, or understood. Everything else in life was a conspiracy of busyness, designed to keep hearts and minds so preoccupied with small battles, easy comforts, and manageable projects that they would never reﬂ ect in despair at the pointlessness or meaninglessness of it all. That’s what I call Story One. The virus has been devastating for those who have become very ill, terrifying for all who are most at risk, and disastrous for the many whose livelihoods have been ripped away from them almost overnight. But what I sense has been most deeply troubling about the pandemic is that it’s laid bare Story One in the rawness of its struggle for survival and the emptiness of its attempts to rise above that struggle and make meaning and purpose. The busyness and urgency and all the paraphernalia of a full and active life have been stripped away, and there’s now no shield from the uncompromising necessities of survival and the unrelenting approach of death. I say that with no schadenfreude—no sense of taking pleasure in another’s misery: because we all know Story One very well, and spend large parts of our lives in it. When we panic, feel the weight of anxiety closing in, sense despair or depression in our bones, Story One seems to be the only story. That’s not the pathology of a few: that’s a regular reality for everyone. But I want to suggest a different way of telling the story. It starts in a different place and it ﬁ nishes in a different place. Story Two goes like this. There’s something called essence. It’s outside, beyond and largely incomprehensible to existence. It’s made up of three persons in utter, devoted, and dynamic relation to one another. It dwells in forever, eternity, beyond time and space. It chose to create time, space, matter, shape, life, energy, consciousness—what together we call existence. It did so not as an experiment, a game, a challenge, or a breeze—but for one reason only: because it desired to be in relationship with something, someone, outside itself. It created the universe, from one explosive start and waited until all the constituents for life had come into focus: since it’s outside time, the odd 14 billion years were as a day. Once human beings had taken shape, relationship began to take on a different dimension. The Trinity, as we call the three persons, began to interact with human consciousness. Eventually it settled upon one people, Israel, with whom to be in covenant relationship. But the whole purpose of the story was that the Trinity could become known and be in relationship with humanity and the creation in person. In the fullness of time this happened. Honouring the covenant, one person of the Trinity took human ﬂ esh as a member of the people of Israel. This fulﬁ lled all the hopes of Israel, and the whole design of the Trinity. That person brought the entirety of humanity face to face with God and the entirety of God face to face with humanity. Yet the virus that had beset humanity from the beginning, the fatal ﬂ aw that poisoned existence, dismantling trust and distorting love, got to this relationship too: humanity rejected the utter-human -utter-God and killed him in the most gruesome manner imaginable–the way it disposed of slaves, as a fearsome example to others who might rebel. And this is the crucial moment in the story. At this point the Trinity might have

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abandoned the relationship. Humanity was ﬂ awed, its allergic reaction had rejected the purpose of its existence. It had chosen Story One. Despite all its despair, depression , and denial in the face of Story One, when offered Story Two, it had turned it down as comprehensively as possible. And see: if the Trinity had left it there, there would be nothing, nothing at all to stand against those who said that speculation and exploration of transcendence and meaning was just a tragic failure to come to terms with the limitations of existence, and in the end sadder than the cynicism of mechanistic determinism. But the Trinity didn’t leave it there. The Trinity kept the story going, kept the relationship going. The Trinity not only restored the second person to existence, but when that second person, Jesus, had restored relationships with those who’d panicked and ﬂ ed, the third person, whom we call the Spirit, came to shape all people in the ways Jesus had offered. And when existence ﬁ nally comes to an end, not just for each one of us but for all things, Jesus will be there again at the threshold of time and eternity, when our consciousness will be suffused by essence, and, with the Trinity, we will ﬁ nally be taken into the wonder of forever. That’s Story Two. See how Easter is so crucial in this story. Christmas is fundamental , but Christmas was in the DNA of existence from its very inception. There could be no existence without essence, and essence resolved to be with us in Jesus, so there’s no existence without Jesus. But Easter’s different. Easter comes at the moment that the whole Story of Everything could be lost. Easter reveals God’s utter commitment to be with us, however determined we are to reject the offer of love, the source of life, and the purpose of all things. Those who are convinced there’s no reason to think beyond or outside Story One would be perfectly justiﬁ ed if it weren’t for Easter, for without Easter, God would be like a beautiful sail on a ship that was nonetheless headed for the rocks. It’s Easter, not the coronavirus, that changes everything. It’s Easter that shows God will never give up on us. It’s Easter that demonstrates that this relationship, for which God created the universe and because of which Jesus died, is ﬁ nally, ultimately, eternally unbreakable. The virus is a terrible thing which has killed some, damaged many, and impoverished almost everybody. But most of all what it’s done is to lay bare the difference between Story One and Story Two. For Story One, the virus is an intense, bleak, and almost unbearable demonstration of what’s ﬁ nally true for us all–that we live short, troubled, and incomplete lives with no abiding value or purpose. For Story Two, the virus is a truly scary example of what life could feel like if Story Two were not true. When Mary turns round from the tomb to the risen Lord, she turns from death to life, from grief to restored relationship, from despair to the one who will ﬁ nally never let us go. She turns from Story One to Story Two. This Easter, let’s do the same.

December 31, 2021