Covid Pastoral Letter #9

 May 28, 2021

Friends in Faith,

This is a letter I have been wanting to write for 5 months now. Back in December when Council first decided we would move our worship services online-only the longest anyone thought it might last was maybe March. Each month we would look at where things were at and each month the number of active cases in Grande Prairie and area was higher and so we kept extending the decision to keep worship online only.

By April some of us were starting to think that maybe the time was coming soon. But then case counts really spiked – peaking at over 500 in the city alone. Still we knew that vaccinations were occurring and with those shots came a promise of hope. At our May meeting we looked at vaccinations and decided maybe it was time. At that point the provincial regulations were really saying “don’t do in-person worship” so we decided we would go with when the province loosened restrictions again. This week the day came. Instead of 15 bodies in the church for worship we are now allowed 15% of our fire capacity, with the possibility that in a couple of weeks we can have 1/3 of capacity. Our Sanctuary has a fire capacity of 388 so 15% is 58 and 1/3 would be 129.

Which is a really long way of getting to the point of saying that as of June 6^th St. Paul’s will once again be having worship both in-person and online. We will be using the same protocols we used in September-November. As the provincial mask mandate is still in force masks are required. We still will not have congregational singing but will have our 3 person choirs each week to share music with us. Humming along with the singers is appropriate. We will have folk greeting and ushering at the door. We will keep a record of who is there each week in case contact tracing is required later. We will still be spacing ourselves around the sanctuary. We still can’t have post-church coffee (in person at least, coffee time on ZOOM will continue). But at least some of us will be together in person. It has been a long winter where we have not been able to say that. Believe me when I say that it feels really odd (or even terrible) to lead worship to an empty sanctuary and a camera. I look forward to having real live bodies looking back at me.

Like many of you, I am living with the hope that the end of COVID-tide is drawing near. It has been a long 15 or 16 months thus far. I miss getting together in person. I tire of connecting only over a computer screen. I feel disconnected. There is still a ways to go, we are not past the finish line yet. Some of us will still take time before we really feel comfortable getting back to “normal”. But we are getting closer. As I went to name this file I noted it was the 9^th letter of COVID-tide. I sincerely hope it is the last pastoral letter I write with COVID in the file name

As we start to see the end of COVID-tide on the horizon I have a request. I think that if we try to go back to doing things exactly the way we were doing them before we will have missed a chance to learn new possibilities from the past few months. So I have a question for you. What have we learned about being the church in this time? What do we want to do differently than we did before? What might we need to let go of so we can take on something new? What is really important to keep? We are still called to be the church. What does that mean in this new era?

June 6^th marks a new stage in our journey. We will be worshipping in person and online. Conveniently it is the first Sunday of the month so we will mark the new stage with the celebration of communion and a reflection on the 96^th anniversary of the United Church of Canada. And whether we are present together in person or present through cameras and screens we are present together as a community of faith. God is there in the sanctuary and God is there in the cables and the bits and bytes. We are not alone. Thanks be to God.

Have a Blessed Summer, May God be with you till we meet again,

Gord

What Next God? ( A Newspaper Submission)

There is a joke I have seen on Facebook a few times recently: God is asking the angels in charge of scheduling if they have put all the stuff for the 2020s in place. The angels sheepishly ask “the 2020s? You mean plural?”. God realizes they heard a request to put 2020’s stuff in place. “You mean you put 10 years of history into one year?” “Oh well....” Sometimes apostrophes make all the difference.

Many of us are almost constantly worrying about the future. What will it bring? Will it be positive? Will everything fall apart? And really we never truly know what the future will bring. Perhaps this year that uncertainty is even more deep-seated. “What next?” seems to be the question of the year thus far. What could go wrong NOW? Will we be able to sing Christmas Carols? Will the economy regain lost ground? When the next shoe falls (we must be up to about 8 shoes by now) what will it shake loose?

This past month my sermons have had me wandering around in the desert with Moses and the people of Israel. There is a lot of “What next” in that story. First they get trapped at the Red Sea and ask Moses why he led them there to get slaughtered. Then they get hungry and tell Moses they were better off in Egypt – at least they had food. Then they get thirsty and once again grumble against Moses. And right after that Moses goes up the mountain and comes down with a set of rules to govern how they will live together.

I think that living through 2020 is a lot like wandering in the wilderness. We have been cut off from the life we knew. Sometimes it seems like the rules are changing weekly, if not daily. Between the pandemic, an economic crisis, racial unrest on both sides of the 49^th, and an increasingly uncertain Presidential election season, who really knows what new crisis will hit us? Out here in the wilderness called 2020 we start to wonder where 2021 will find us.

I don’t know. I am not in the business of trying to tell the future. Like anyone else I have guesses and hopes and fear what that future will bring but none of us really know. All we can do is guess with varying degrees of certainty.

I return to the people wandering through the desert. They were usually not happy about what was going on in life. They complained a LOT. But that time in the desert was shaping them, preparing them for who they would be in the future. So how is our time in the wilderness shaping us?

One of my hopes as we move forward out of our wilderness is that we will have learned something from the experience. What a waste of a year it would have been otherwise!! I hope that what we have learned will shape our priorities, both as individuals and as communities, going forward.

What are some of the priorities I see coming out of our wilderness experience? One is that we, as a culture, need to be ready to find ways to ensure that everybody has support so that a crisis does not leave them destitute. Some of us see this happening through a Guaranteed Annual or Universal Basic Income, some see other mechanisms. But we have learned (again) that our safety net needs strengthening. We need to fix that.

Another priority I would live to see coming our of our wandering is a renewed commitment to real action on issues of inequality. The protests this year have shown that more and more of us are less and less willing to accept structural inequality (racial, economic, gender-based). I am reminded of the late John Lewis and his admonition to “make good trouble”. I hope one of our priorities is to be troublemakers in search of a better way of living together.

When the people of Israel wandered around in the desert they kept wishing they could go back to Egypt. They may have been slaves but at least there they had food and water. At least there they knew who they were. Living into a new vision of who you are is hard work. But they could not go back. God was moving them forward into a new identity, a new vision, a promised land beyond the wilderness.

Time and again this year I have heard people yearning to go back to “normal”. I hope we don’t do that. I hope our time in the wilderness leads us into a new place. I think God is leading us to a new place. I just hope we don’t have to spend forty years wandering to get there.

Looking Ahead to September 20, 2020 -- Proper 20A, 16th After Pentecost

 The Scripture Readings this week are:

• Exodus 16:2-15
• Psalm 78 (VU p.792)
  

The Sermon title is Can We Go Back?

Early Thoughts: MAGA. Take Canada Back. When I was your age... All three have something in common. They evoke a time when things were better, or at least a feeling that things were better then. They express a desire to go back to what once was, because then life would be better or easier, or more straight forward again. Nostalgia has a powerful presence in the world.

Normally when I prepare to preach on this passage it is to preach against the desire to go back.  Because it is often unhelpful.  Nostalgia is a tool we use to  avoid changing our sense of who we are, or a tool to fight back against changes that scare us, or a tool to maintain our preferred status in our communities. Moving into a new sense of identity, moving into a new world can feel like moving into a place of barren-ness. We can easily make ourselves think that we would be better off it the place we used to be, even if that place was often painful. So often nostalgia is a force we need to push back against, because there are always folk who want us to go back to Egypt, even though hope and life lead out into the new place.

This year I am noticing a more nuanced approach is needed.  And in that nuance lies a side to nostalgia that we often overlook.  We talk a lot about the fear and resistance to change. We don't talk a lot about the grief that might underlie that fear and resistance. Even for the Israelites, recently freed from slavery, I think there was grief. They had to let go of their whole sense of identity as an oppressed, enslaved people. Who were they now. Grief, especially unnamed or unacknowledged grief is a potent force.

Thus is a year of grief for many people. So many people have lost so many different things over the last 6 months. And there is a real desire for us to get back to "normal". To get rid of social distancing, to sing hymns on church, to gather friends around a table for a meal, and so many other things. 

It ain't happening nearly as fast as folk want it to.

So what do we do with that? Can we name the things for which we are grieving? Can we mourn what is lost? Then can we ask what we really want back and what we don't? Because it is plausible that we really should not go all the way back to "normal". It is plausible that when we come out of this pandemic we will never do things the same way. I think that has real positive possibility, because "normal" was not always healthy as it was.  But I think we only get there by naming our grief and doing the work of grief so that we can honestly evaluate where we want to go next.

Otherwise we fall prey to nostalgia, and pledges to take us back to the Golden Age, to make us great again. How will we choose to move forward?
--Gord

Looking Ahead to September 6, 2020

 This week we are officially resuming in-person worship.  In part to mark that event, and because it is the first Sunday of the month, we will be celebrating Communion during worship.

The Scripture Reading this week is 2 Samuel 6

The Sermon title is Dance! Celebrate! Wait?

Early Thoughts: Where are we in the story? Are we at the end when the Ark of the Covenant has finally been brought into David's capital city? Are we at the beginning when the Ark is still hidden away? Are we in the middle, where the Ark is coming "home" but has to take a break part way, so the celebration is not yet complete? [Or maybe we are years later after it has been lost and we are traveling with Indiana Jones to save it from the Nazi's??? 😎]

The Ark of the Covenant has a storied history in Scripture and in myth/legend.  Here is the Wikipedia entry on it. Suffice to say that during the wars with the Philistines the Ark had been captured and then got moved around to a few different dwelling places. Now that David has captured Jerusalem/Zion and is making it into his capital city he decides it is time that the Ark be brought into the city. It would be a sign that God was with David, and by extension the nation of Israel.

This is a cause for celebration. God has granted David and Israel victory over the Philistines. In the future Jerusalem/Zion would be known as they place where God dwelt because the Ark was there.  David's son, Solomon, would build a grand temple and the Ark would have a place of honour at the core of the Temple.

But things don't quite go to plan. The Ark is about to fall so one of the attendants touches it to steady it and is struck dead. David is afraid and cancels the parade for three months. Then the journey is concluded with much dancing and sacrifice and celebration. David himself, it is said, dances so enthusiastically (and so scantily clad) that he exposes himself to the crowd.

This week marks a time of return for us. Back in March we had our regular church service on March 15th and then everything changed. Our chances to gather together have been limited for almost 6 months now. But now we are resuming in-person worship. A time to celebrate! A time to dance!

And yet it is still not the same. There will still be some people who will not feel comfortable/safe in group gatherings and so will continue to join us virtually. Our worship will look and feel different with distancing measures and masks in place. It is still a time of waiting and adapting.

I think the closest approximation is that we are in the middle of the story.  Celebrating and returning but not quite all the way home.  But still it is a time for celebrating.  Maybe even dancing a little  -- although that ma happen more in our hearts and souls than actually moving our feet. I guess you could dance your way up to receive communion?

--Gord

Looking Ahead to August 16, 2020

 This week's Scripture Readings are (it is worth noting that all of 1 Corinthians 8:1-11:1 is seen as a unit on this topic, you might want to read more than the portions for this Sunday):

• 1 Corinthians 8
• 1 Corinthians 10:23-31

 The Sermon title is What About Masks?

Early Thoughts: Last week I read this blog post and realized that this was a sermon that needed to be preached.  I think Paul lays out an ethical principle here that extends far beyond the issue he is dealing with in Corinth, one that has application in a wide range of human interactions.

The 2 letters we have to the Corinthians in Scripture are part (it appears) of a larger body of correspondence between Paul and the church he founded in the city. Certainly there were letters from members of the community to Paul and possibly as many as four letters from Paul to the Corinthians. Reading the letters, particularly First Corinthians, reveals that the community in Corinth is not a unified  group. In fact they seem to be split and fighting on a number of issues, some of which are theological, some of which appear to be class-based. Among the issues of dispute is a question about meat.

For much of human history, meat was a luxury item. Hunting always had a hit or miss aspect to it so meat could be rare. And even once we humans started raising animals for slaughter meat was still a luxury item because of the cost involved. Adding to the controversy is the fact that much of the meat in Corinth (a very cosmopolitan seaport in the Roman Empire) may have been from animals that had been offered as a sacrifice in one of the many temples in town. Can a Christian eat meat (or any other food) that had been part of a sacrifice? That is the question.

Some in Corinth say that it is not an issue because they know full well that those bits of stone and metal that the animal was sacrificed to are not gods, or idols -- they are just bits of stone or metal. Others are less sure. Are they participating in idol worship by eating the meat? Are they risking their salvation? It appears that the Christian community in Corinth has asked Paul for guidance.

To be honest, I have long avoided this passage. I have avoided it because I find Paul's answer lacking in clarity. He seems to say that there is no reason not to eat the meat, and then in the next breath say there is a big reason not to eat the meat. He seems to have missed the "just say yes or no" aspect to giving advice.

But reading it now I realize what I missed in the past. I missed the ethical principle that Paul lays out.

Paul is telling the Corinthians (and, through them over the years, us) about one way we make love real and actual in our lives. It is a clear way to live out the commandment of Jesus "love one another". When it comes to the question of meat the question is not actually (or not only) the meat itself. It is "how does my behaviour impact my neighbour?". If my choices might negatively impact my neighbour (in the case of meat and idols by leading them astray) then I have the duty to make a different choice.

As people of faith we are both free and not free. Our freedom is bounded by the commandment to live love for our neighbour.

So this 2000 year old question about meat does in fact touch on our current debate about wearing masks. And on older debates about restricting smoking. And on a host of other questions about how we live together in community. How do we live out love for our neighbour? How does our commitment and responsibility to the collective interact with the North American idol of individual freedom and "rights"?

To be part of the Christian family means we have different priorities.  Paul challenges us to think of our neighbours. So did Jesus. So did the prophets of ancient Israel. So, in the end, does God.

--Gord