Being the Church, No Matter What

Sermon from March 15, 2020
Exodus 17:1-7; John 4:5-42

If you’re looking for a word from Scripture to describe what it’s like to live in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, we heard it in the first reading this morning:  Making their way through the wilderness, “the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded” (Exodus 17:1); and they wondered, “Is the Lord among us, or not?” (Exodus 17:7).  Maybe we can forgive them for a little complaining, as well as for faltering trust.  They’ve been freed from slavery in Egypt, and they’ve celebrated the new life God’s given them … only to find themselves wandering in the desert with food and water scarce.  Just before today’s reading, they’re starving; and God provides manna, bread from heaven, to carry them through.  Then today, they can’t find enough water, and God empowers Moses to strike a rock at Mt. Sinai to bring living water that flows from barren stone. 

Wandering in the wilderness might be an overused metaphor for the confusing times of our lives, but it certainly seems to apply right now.  Answers are not coming easily these days.  I’ve sent you two letters in two weeks to explain how we’re working to manage the risk of infection here at church.  That’s not because I think you like getting mail but because the situation is so fluid. 

As of now, these are the most important ways we’re protecting you when you come to church: We’re greeting each other without touching, and it would be smart to keep a six-foot distance as much as possible.  We’ve stopped serving the common cup.  We’ve stopped passing the collection plates and the sign-in folders.  We’re not handling prayer books or hymnals.  We’re sanitizing surfaces more intensely.  We’ve removed the holy water from the font.  We’re serving individually wrapped snacks at coffee hour and serving meals without shared utensils. 

So, I’d like to end this list by saying, “There’s our response plan, and I think we’re good.”  But I have a strong feeling that we aren’t done yet, though I don’t know what this week will bring.  In the past week, just in the small world of The Episcopal Church, we’ve learned of six rectors of large congregations who’ve been diagnosed with coronavirus infection, effectively closing their churches for a time.  And, even more drastic, at least three dioceses – Virginia; Washington, DC; and Lexington in Kentucky – have shut the doors to all their congregations for at least two weeks, closing more than 300 churches.  Plus, as you know, many Kansas City churches, including Church of the Resurrection and Village Presbyterian, are worshiping only online today, and our bishop may move us that way for next Sunday.  Worship online is great, and thank God for it, in this moment.  Yet, it is deeply sad that churches are having to ask people not to come at a time when we’d most want churches open, a time when people are uncertain and afraid.

So, as we’re thinking about what happens next, the guiding principle is this:  We are the church, the Body of Jesus Christ in this place and time; and we will keep being the church, no matter what.  As individuals and as a congregation, we’ll continue to live faithfully even in uncertain times; and we’ll live trusting that God is with us and will bring us through this.  In your day-to-day lives, wherever you are, you’ll continue to love God and love the person in front of you – even when that means staying away from the person in front of you.  As you make your way through this coronavirus wilderness, you can keep going on your Lenten journey, reading your Bible and saying your prayers. 

And, it’s our intention that you’ll be able to “come” to worship, too, even if we can’t all come together to worship in this room.  I know worshiping at home is not ideal.  Just as you miss receiving the Body of Christ when you can’t be here, you miss physically gathering as the Body of Christ, getting to talk with people you love and being energized for this life God gives us Monday through Saturday.  I get that.  But we’re blessed that we can still be the church as we gather virtually.

In fact, we’re starting that on a daily basis, as of tomorrow morning.  Several of you saw our Facebook posts offering the service of Compline over the past couple of nights.  Beginning tomorrow, we’ll offer live prayer on Facebook three times a day.  It’s easy to remember:  8-1-8.  We’ll be on Facebook Live at 8 a.m., 1 p.m., and 8 p.m. each day, gathering with you for beautiful prayers from our Anglican tradition.  We’ll use the framework of the Daily Devotions for Individuals and Families in the Book of Common Prayer, though you won’t need a prayer book to take part.  All you’ll need is your phone or computer and a few minutes out of your day to stop, and breathe, and remember that God is God, no matter what.  And you’ll be able to be part of the experience in real time, too, typing in your prayers in the moments of silence.  Through that brief witness, three times a day, we can pray for ourselves, our friends, our family, and our world, commending our common life in this difficult moment to Jesus’ healing touch.

And then, we have the question of Sunday mornings.  Although our bishop hasn’t stopped in-person worship yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens in the next few days.  And if it does, we will still have worship, and you can still be part of it through the livestream on our website.  It wouldn’t really make sense for us to celebrate Holy Communion if no one’s in the pews.  But, as some of you will remember from an earlier day, we have the beauty of Morning Prayer available to us.  We’ll bring together Dr. Tom and our singers and some blowhard to stand up here and preach.  And worship will happen, because we are the church.  We are God’s people, and we will praise him.

You’ve probably also wondered about classes, meetings, and other gatherings.  That, too, is a fluid situation.  For today, the Satterlee family cancelled Lois’ funeral, which was set for this afternoon.  Tonight, we’re cancelling our Third Sunday offering of Irish Pub Night, sadly.  But our Discovery class and our Sunday-night class, the Way of Love in Lent, will go on because we can offer them on Facebook Live, too.  So, tonight, people can come, and keep their distance; or they can “come” and be with us online.  Visit the St. Andrew’s Facebook page, or watch your feed, at 6 p.m. tonight.

We’re also having to think about major events to come.  It’s way to early to know how the coronavirus situation will look by Easter, but … Easter is four weeks away.  And a week after that, we’re planning to debut our new service at HJ’s, Trailside.  We may need to approach those events differently, so stay tuned as the weeks go on.

Obviously, there’s a lot that’s uncertain right now.  But there’s far more that is certain, now and always.  The living water of God’s love is there for us, even if we have trouble seeing it and touching it ourselves.  Think about the Gospel reading today, this meandering, disjointed conversation Jesus has with the woman at the well. 

You know, for most of their conversation, Jesus and the woman just aren’t connecting.  Actually, they’re not even supposed to be talking to each other.  Men and women who were strangers didn’t engage each other in public.  And in this case, they really shouldn’t have, because Jesus was a Jew and the woman was a Samaritan, and Jews and Samaritans were supposed to hate each other.  Plus, this woman had no social standing for a conversation with a strange man because she wasn’t married. 

Now, we hear Jesus say this woman has had five husbands and isn’t married to the man she’s with now, and we may think that implies loose morals.  Instead, most likely Jesus was recognizing her as somebody completely on the margin, completely powerless.  In that time and place, only a man could initiate divorce, and the divorced woman was left with virtually nothing financially or socially.  This woman had been through that multiple times and had no standing … but here she is, talking with Jesus, trying to understand why he’s so different, what he means about living water “gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14). 

So, she keeps at it.  She hangs in there and doesn’t let her confusion, or the violation of social norms, stop her.  She knows he has power she’s never seen or heard or felt before; and she’s going to keep asking, keep pushing, keep digging until she finds it.  And eventually, she pushes through the confusion and the uncertainty and the fear about “we’ve never done it this way before,” and she taps into that living water.  “I know [the] Messiah is coming,” she says, holding out hope that maybe she’s got it right (John 4:25).  There you go: “I am he,” Jesus says (John 4:26).  The wandering, the digging, the interrogating, the breaking of the rules – it’s all paid off.  And at the end, despite everything, even the Samaritans around her can say, “We know that this is truly the Savior of the world” (John 4:42).

Sometimes, faithfulness looks very different than we’d expect.  In challenging times – when we’re wandering in the wilderness, when we find ourselves in enemy territory, when we’re afflicted by threatening forces – in challenging times, faithfulness means keeping on when you can’t see where the path leads. 

You know, maybe the coronavirus threat will pass quickly; and in a few weeks, maybe we’ll all look at each other and smile and wonder what all the fuss was about.  Or, maybe not.  But whatever happens this week, and in the weeks ahead, we will be OK, because we are the church.  We are the Body of Christ.  We are God’s people in this place, however life looks in the moment.  And we will keep on the journey even though it’s complicated, even though it’s rough, because we know what awaits us at the end:  Bread from heaven.  Water from the rock.  The Savior of the world, walking among us.  And living water “gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:14).

Painting in the Dark

Sermon from March 8, 2020
Genesis 12:1-4a; Romans 4:1-5,13-17; John 3:1-17

I don’t know about you, but I struggle sometimes with the implications of having faith in God.  It’s not that I doubt whether God loves me, or whether Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God for humanity – those ideas rest pretty well in my head and my heart.  Where I have trouble is with the next step: making it real.  If I have faith in God, what am I called to do?  How do I follow faithfully?

We find one answer in the reading this morning from Genesis, one of the most remarkable demonstrations of faith in all of Scripture.  We’re told almost nothing about Abram before this reading, other than his origin story.  He and his extended family were living in Ur of the Chaldees in lower Mesopotamia, present-day southern Iraq.  Abrah’s father, Terah, took Abram and his wife, Sarai, and their nephew, Lot, to go to Canaan, modern-day Israel, though we’re not told why.  But the extended family stopped their journey early and settled in Haran, in upper Mesopotamia, somewhere in northern Iraq or Syria. 

So, his father dies, and Abram apparently is minding his own business when he hears the voice of God calling him to complete the journey his father began.  God tells him to take the family and all their herds and possessions and go … somewhere – “the land that I will show you,” God says (12:1).  God promises Abram land, and worldly success, and descendants – that God will make of Abram “a great nation,” one so important that “in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (12:2-3).  And then comes the all-important next line, which is simply this:  “So, Abram went, as the Lord had told him” (12:4).  Really?  No questions?  No clarifications?  He just went.  And because of that, and because of Abram later formalizing his covenant, he became for us the paragon of right relationship with God, as Paul explains in the reading today from Romans.  “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” (4:3).

I love the Abraham story.  And, I struggle with it – because it might imply that if we really have true faith, then the directions for our actions are crystal are clear.  For me, at least, discerning what to do with our faith is a lot more complicated than that.  I think it’s like raising kids.  My mother has a great metaphor for raising kids, something that’s stuck with me for years.  She says, “Raising kids is like painting in the dark.”  You do the best you can; but in the moment, you really can’t see what the outcome is going to be.

Well, I do think God gives us some guidance in how to paint in the dark, how to follow the calls we hear faithfully.  For me, three suggestions, or maybe three “best practices,” come to mind, and I think we can see each of them playing out in our church family’s life right now.

Here’s the first best practice for following God faithfully:  Listen together.  Maybe, like Abram, some people get a direct order from the Almighty that’s so clear, there’s no need for questions.  But for most of us, and especially when the stakes are high, I think we do best when we take the risk to share our calls with each other and listen with more than two ears. 

There’s a great example of that happening among us here.  At this moment, we have four people from our congregation who are following a call toward ordination as deacons or priests – Rita Kendagor, Jean Long, Ryan Zavacky, and Adam James – and others are at an earlier stage in the listening process.  I think that’s amazing.  It’s a testimony to these individuals’ faithfulness in responding to God’s claim on their lives – and, it’s a testimony to the power of having others walking with you as you listen to discern what God’s calling you into.  They’ve each talked with me, or Fr. Jeff, or Mtr. Anne, or Deacon Bruce – or, more likely, all of us.  And they’ve each spent hours talking and listening with the members of our Discernment Commission, a group of powerfully faithful souls committed to helping others hear God’s call.  That community of listening hearts is essential, because I think when God asks something significant of us, God comes to us in the people around us, helping us hear what the next step should be.  So, when you’re trying to act faithfully, when you’re trying to paint in the dark, find other faithful folks; and listen to God, together.

Here’s another best practice, I think:  Act first in love.  As our presiding bishop, Michael Curry likes to say, “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”  And often, that means acting in ways that are going to cost us something.  We follow a God who came among us, as the Gospel reading today says, ready to “be lifted up” on a cross in order to lift all of us up into eternal life (John 3:14).  So, we shouldn’t be surprised that following that model of love is costly.

This morning, we’re experiencing an example of that kind of faithful action, of giving something up for the sake of others.  As you all know, our nation and our world are trying to manage the risks of infection with coronavirus as new cases appear in new places daily.  We know we can take important steps to keep ourselves and others safe, things like washing hands well and frequently, staying home when we’re sick, and coughing into tissues, not our hands.  But here in a church community, we have to discern how to act faithfully given the reality that some significant parts of our common life revolve around physical intimacy.  We hug a lot here.  We shake hands a lot here.  And every week, we share this deeply intimate meal of Holy Communion, where the sacramental mystery involves receiving God’s own self in our own hands, taking Jesus’ body into our bodies, and all from a common plate and cup. 

There’s always some risk of infection in that, despite the steps we take to use hand sanitizer before Communion, and to wipe the chalice carefully – and, for you, trying not to dip your fingers in the wine when you intinct.  So, we’ve had to discern how to act first in love as we respond to the risk of coronavirus infection.  We’ve decided – for now – to stop touching each other in the Peace and other greetings, to stop passing the collection plates, and to stop serving the consecrated wine during Communion.  I particularly don’t like that last one; and I’m guessing for many of you, it will be upsetting not to receive the cup of salvation.  But we’re taking this step in order to act first in love.  Here’s what I mean:  Honestly, many of us are at pretty low risk of infection.  But many of us – because of age or compromised immune status – many of us are at higher risk.  And we need to protect those at risk, even if it means giving something up.  That’s the loving action to take.

OK, here’s the third best practice for following God’s call faithfully, the third tip for how to paint in the dark:  Take the step.  Listening together is essential, and choosing the path of sacrificial love is key.  And then, we have to go, even though we can’t quite see where we’re going.  “You must be born from above,” Jesus tells Nicodemus.  What?  “How can these things be?” Nicodemus asks. (John 3:3,9)  I’m not sure how to do that, or where it will take me, if I step out and follow you, Nicodemus is thinking.  I’m a religious leader, and it might cost me a lot to follow this rebel who turns over tables in the Temple and claims to come directly from God.  I get it, Jesus tells him.  Take the step anyway.

If you want to see that kind of faith in action, you can look right across the street.  Six weeks from today, we’ll kick off a new worship opportunity at HJ’s called “Trailside,” a chance for people who probably wouldn’t be here otherwise to find their path with God.  The service there will start at 10:45 a.m., and the worship will involve most of the same things that happen in worship here: praising God in song, reading the Bible, hearing a sermon or a kids’ sermon, proclaiming our ancient faith, praying for ourselves and our world, and sharing Holy Communion.  But the music will be more accessible and familiar to modern ears, with keyboard and guitar rather than organ.  And the person leading all this won’t be an ordained person, at least not yet.  Jean Long, our minister for children, youth, young adults, and families – one of the four people I mentioned on the path to ordination – she’ll be the worship leader.  And the preacher here at 10:15 will go across the street after the sermon to preach at Trailside … with just notes, not a text, trusting the Spirit to blow hard enough to keep him from falling on his face.  

Now, if you know me at all, you can probably figure this is not exactly in my comfort zone.  Dr. Tom has done worship like this in several places, thank God.  But not me.  And certainly not Jean Long.  And not the people who will be serving as hosts for this experience that we’ve never done before.  We’ve heard a clear call, that now’s the time to create a new way to draw people into the loving family that is St. Andrew’s, to open a new door in a new facility into a new experience of praise and refreshment and thanksgiving.  Everything tells me the time is right … but … Jesus, how can these things be?  I get it, Jesus says.  Take the step anyway.

The direction God asks us to take is not always clear.  As Jesus tells Nicodemus, God’s call is like the wind: powerfully present but invisible, and impossible for us to control.  We don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going, any more than we can see the future that lies ahead for us, any more than we can see the picture we’re painting in the dark.  But, like Abram, we go ahead and take the next step.  We listen together, we choose the path of love, and we go.  We go without guarantees that each step is right.  But we go with the guarantee that the purpose is right, because the purpose is God’s and not our own.  And we go with the guarantee that what awaits us at the end of the journey is right and a good and joyful thing– in fact the very best thing: God’s embrace and God’s empowerment, forever.  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have everlasting life” (John 3:16).  With that as our promise, we can rest assured that, if the steps we take are faithful, the trail will take us there.