2021-06-14
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text
Scripture: II CORINTHIANS 5:6-10, 14-17
So here we are! And what a gift! It was on March 11 or 12 of the ignominious 2020 that church leadership decided, because of the COVID-19 virus, not to worship any longer in person but to worship virtually. On that first Sunday, March 15, I recorded an audio meditation which we made available on our website. The following Sunday, March 22, under Mark’s leadership, we conducted Federated’s first livestream service. And we were off on a whirlwind year of change and learning.
As we moved suddenly into this entirely new world, on many fronts we had to learn to do things differently. As we began to livestream, I made a call to my brother, Tim. Tim, as many of you know, was a TV sportscaster for forty years. I said to him, “How should I think about worship now that there aren’t people in the room anymore?” He gave me two pieces of advice, both of which I remember vividly. “First,” he said—and it was immediately obvious, but I was glad to have it stated anyway—“you can’t look around the room anymore. You have to focus on that camera and not on anything else.” That was something of a challenge for two reasons. First, for someone like me who’s used to looking around a room, that was a major change of focus. As Tim said to me, “When I go out and do a speech at a high school or some other setting, I have to make sure I look around the room, and not at just one static object. You have the opposite issue,” he said. “You have to go from looking around at people all over the room to focusing on that fixed lens.” So the first challenge was learning to look at a single point.
The second challenge that has come with looking at that camera, and it’s something you are likely not as aware of, is there is an enormous TV screen right next to that camera. It’s called a “confidence monitor,” and it lets worship leaders see hymn lyrics and watch worship videos. The trouble is it’s also showing me as I’m speaking. So the temptation, of course, is to look at the screen, as we do for so much of our day, rather than at the tiny and unobtrusive camera right next to it. No, you have to deny all your instincts and ignore the tantalizing screen that is screaming at you to pay attention to it.
That was the first thing Tim said to me. It was a technical piece of advice—important but practical: address the camera. The second thing he said was this: “When you’re talking to that camera, you have to remember that it’s people on the other side of that lens. You’re talking to people you care about. You’re talking to people you love. And even though you can’t see them, they’re there. And they see you. And you have to make your words a conversation with them.” The first piece of advice was technical: focus on the camera. The second was far more substantive: you are still deeply connected with your congregation.
So now here we are today, and things are new again, and that first piece of technical advice changes yet once more. Because now this congregation is both local and dispersed. And my speaking is both to you who are here in this room and also, at the same time, to you who are scattered potentially all over the world. The worshiping congregation is entirely different today from what it was just last Sunday. It is characterized both by you who share a physical space and by you who join us virtually. For some churches, this isn’t new. For us, though, it is.
So much of this year has been steeped in change, hasn’t it. That, in a way, has been its defining characteristic. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought with it change that is also incalculable loss. In the U.S., that virus has caused some 600,000 deaths, and in Ohio alone, over 20,000. Countless people have lost jobs or have had to give up their work to care for and teach children or grandchildren. We’ve learned to keep each other at a distance and to be suspicious of anyone who invades our personal space. We’ve wondered how effective the vaccines would be and whether it was OK to drop our masks and to hug each other. We’ve missed out on birthdays and anniversaries and all-too-often been unable to be present when those we’ve loved have died. We’ve seen notable increases in anxiety and depression. The toll COVID has left has been monumental, and we will continue to feel its effects for some time. We feel it today, with the masks we wear because we want everyone to feel welcome, whether they’ve been vaccinated or not. We feel COVID’s effects in our modifying the passing of Christ’s peace and in the collection of our generosity offerings and in forswearing our indoor time of hospitality and the cheese and crackers and fruit and cookies that so delight us. COVID has entailed a sizable cost that we will continue to feel, and to remember in our bodies, for an extended time. There’s no soft-pedaling the costs of this wildly replicating virus. Change has, in many ways, meant loss.
That said, though, it’s also true that COVID-19 has in some significant ways changed us for the better. For some of us, it has enabled a more balanced lifestyle. I remember a man saying, a few months into the pandemic, that he was sleeping an hour and a half longer every night now that he no longer had to travel for work. Others have found a rhythm to their days that’s involved regular breaks and more exercise. Zoom meetings have, in many cases, been briefer and more focused. Eliminating commuting time from the daily schedule has, for numerous people, freed up hours that weren’t there before.
Not only that, but, in ways we’re still discovering, I suspect we’ve learned to be more adaptable. Things we thought we had to do one way we’ve discovered we can do in other ways. Here at Federated, we discovered, for example, that your generosity didn’t depend on an offering plate being passed down a pew part way through a worship service. You’ve continued your giving by mail and through our website.
Just as significantly, we’ve discovered that there are other ways to learn and serve than just by being in the same room together. Zoom courses have proliferated here. Commissions, committees, classes, and ministries have arisen, in some cases, and continued unabated, in others. Flexibility and adaptability have been the bywords of our congregational life. Resiliency has shaped us, perhaps unexpectedly, to be a stronger and more open people.
I can’t imagine any of us would choose to go through these last fifteen months again. The truth of the matter, though, is that, in some ways for ill, but in many ways for good, this pandemic has made everything new. It has certainly come with a price. But at the same time, it has also given birth to some maybe unexpected blessings of God. Here is some of what I see as gift enfolded in the strain and loss of the pandemic.
In the first place, as I say, I sense that we’re more open to change. We’ve been through immense upheaval, and look—we’ve lived to tell about it! It may not have been easy. But we’ve learned again, or maybe for the first time, that, as Glennon Doyle says, “we can do hard things.” That’s nothing to sneeze at! Some of us may have thought we needed life to be easy for it to be at all satisfying. What we discovered, though, was that it could be hard and still be good. People who have lived through challenging illnesses or eviscerating losses sometimes say the same thing: ‘I got through it and discovered I had more resources than I knew I had.’ We can say the same thing about ourselves, and about our culture, and about our church: we have strength and flexibility we didn’t know we had. So: you go! We are resilient! And it’s new. And it’s from God.
I suspect many of us have also discovered a new appreciation for the simple things of life. Mary and I were given some sourdough starter at the beginning of the pandemic. The very first week, I made a loaf of that bread, and it was delicious. And every week since then, Mary has made a delectable loaf of bread. Sometimes it’s been unadorned, sometimes it’s been maple walnut, or banana bread, or garlic and rosemary. Just talking about it is making my mouth water. When our boys were small, Mary and I used to bake all our own bread, but we had baked very little in probably twenty years. So we’ve rediscovered the simple gift of freshly baked bread: an ordinary, and special, treat! And it’s new. And it’s from God.
Others of you, I know, have prepared new recipes, or begun a flower or vegetable garden. Some have discovered new series on a streaming service. As some of you know, Mary and I have been enamored of “The Queen’s Gambit.” And of “Schitt’s Creek”: if you haven’t seen Patrick singing a love song to David, and David later lip-synching the same song back to Patrick, you have something to look forward to! Ordinary gifts in a stressful and in many ways painful time. And it’s new. And it’s from God.
So we have been reminded of our resilience, and we have learned to appreciate some of life’s simple and ordinary pleasures. The last, and biggest, gift of the pandemic, I suspect, is that we have deepened our appreciation for each other. Or if we haven’t, we have a wonderful opportunity ahead of us to do precisely that! This pandemic time has invited us to take in and celebrate the unique gifts offered to us by our families, our friends, our neighbors, our co-workers, indeed our sisters and brothers all over the world. I can’t tell you how many more neighbors I’ve talked to on my daily walks now than I ever did before the pandemic.
Now in some ways, of course, the evidence isn’t great for a new and deeper appreciation of each other. I need say no more than “George Floyd” or “January 6” or “Pulse Nightclub” or “anti-Asian violence” or “transgender discrimination” for us to be reminded of the ghastly ugliness and hatred that still pervade our world. Racism and intolerance have exacted far too steep a price. They have threatened to undermine the very fabric of our common life. Is it really possible to say that, during the pandemic, we have come to love each other more?
And while we dare never acquiesce to a kind of Pollyanna-ish pretending that everything is OK in spite of the evidence, and while we dare never deny brutal forces of tyranny and systemic oppression, I still believe in a love that is relentlessly transforming us and making us new. On the micro level, the languorous conversations with neighbors, the intentional connecting with family, the purposeful reaching out to our fellow church members and friends—all that is testimony to a love that refuses to die, and that, in some ways, blossoms in tough times. On many fronts, love has grown. And it’s new. And it’s from God.
And on a macro level, we are all clearly much more aware of the yearning in the world and in ourselves to connect across all the lines that so commonly divide us—race and gender and class and orientation and identity and nationality and all the other artificial and less-than-salutary divisions we erect and parochialisms we perpetuate. Love is insinuating itself into our brokenness and sin.
In an email this week, Cameron Trimble, our consultant in the Visionary Action Planning in which we’ve been engaged, reflected on why there should be congregations in this world going forward. What’s the reason for churches? And she says, as our old friend Judy Bagley-Bonner has often suggested, that churches are at their best when they’re “schools for love,” that that’s why we’re here in this place, to learn to love the way God loves. COVID has reminded us of that, and it is in many ways new: God loves us, and we’re to love everybody as God loves us.
If we didn’t know it before, COVID has exposed the striking and stirring truth that every moment, in God’s world, is new. This is what the apostle Paul tells us in one of those luminous, almost breathless, passages of his writing. He can evidently hardly contain himself as he reminds the Corinthians of the stunning freshness of what it is to live, every millisecond, in the heart of Christ. As we trust in the presence of Christ, we come to see “that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life emerges! Look at it!” (II Corinthians 5:17, The Message).
And as we take in that love that is constantly making us new, we are nudged to make that love our byword and to embody it wherever we go. The apostle Paul makes it clear that, when we look at other people, we’re not to see just the surface, just the façade, but that we’re to see beneath that surface to their core. “We don’t evaluate people,” he says, “by what they have or how they look . . .. Now,” he says, “we look inside” (5:16, The Message). If this church is to be a “school for love,” this is the standard that presents itself to us: see the heart, see the core, see the wonder of everyone. And as we see in that way, all of God’s world becomes new.
Two examples. Some time ago, I received a note from a woman after her father, a Federated member, had died. He had had a strong streak of intolerance in him, and had written off a gay nephew. And this woman wrote to thank the church for giving her father a home. And she finished with this: “[The church] had such a profound impact on progressing his views, and for that I am forever grateful.” It’s all new. And it’s from God.
And second, this. Cameron Trimble recounts a conversation the astronomer Jill Tarter had with Krista Tippett on Tippett’s show “On Being.” Tarter has spent her entire career “searching for signals sent from technologically advanced cultures on other planets.” And Tarter says one of the best things we can do as human beings is to think of ourselves first as “earthlings.” Doesn’t sound like much, does it? But listen to why she thinks that is so crucial. What she wants to say to people is, “See, all of you? You’re all the same when compared to something out there that [has] evolved independently.” Tarter wants to change people’s perspective by helping them to trivialize the differences among human beings. These are the differences, she says, “that we’re so willing to shed blood over when, indeed, we are all human. We are all earthlings. We are all the same when compared to [everything] else. And if you see yourself as an earthling before you see yourself as a Californian,” then we see ourselves as one, as connected, as part of a common thread and a shared life (https://convergenceus.org/2021/06/10/why-congregations/?inf_contact_key=7764c6a083bb5cb7f59d954ed7f433ee4dfbc39d7283b2cb89d5189540b69330). That love—God’s for us and ours for each other— that love finally makes us entirely new. It is in process. And it’s new. And it’s from God.
Today we gather, and we make this major step toward resuming a life of profound connection, that intertwined life, in this “school of love” that makes us who we are. And it’s spectacular! “See, everything has become new! Look at it!”