Resurrection, Not Resuscitation
Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
April 22, 2021
One of the things we often hear this time of year is that Jesus’ coming forth from the tomb alive was resurrection, not resuscitation, i.e., he came forth more alive than before, newly recreated even as his body bore the scars and evidences of his sufferings. He was not like Lazarus, raised from the dead only to die again years later. As St. Paul says, “Death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives he lives to God.” Resurrection is creation anew, preserving and deepening what was once our lives, even as we pass into immortality, not just of the spirit, but of the body as well.
As we start discussions in the Parish about how best and most safely to renew our common life, our face-to-face shared life as we reach better control of the Covid-19 contagion, I think it is important that we consider this a moment for the Church’s resurrection, not its resuscitation. We do not want to throw away all we have learned and experienced in quarantine lockdowns and return to “normal,” the way we think things once were. As we renter common life, we want it better than the old normal. We want it more pastorally caring, not how it was when we stopped face-to-face visits. We want our worship more reverent—that is, more relaxed even as it is more attentive, more spiritually engaging even as it is more accessible. We want worship that remains accessible online to the homebound and those far afield even as we resume tried and true in person worship practices.
We have hear a lot in the recent year about risk/benefit analysis, about the absolute need to avoid making church into a super-spreading event. And this is right. It has allowed us to start limited and masked services with Eucharist yet do so safely without great risk. It has allowed us to have some music in our worship even as we have been unable to participate in choral or congregational singing.
But we do need to remember the key bit about the importance of face-to-face gathering in church: we need to gather together to share and feel together, to mutually teach and be taught, in order to power our personal faith journeys.
When I was attending a house church in Beijing in the late 1980s, I had a glimpse into the importance of regular face-to face gathering for worship. During the somewhat liberal period of religious openness in China prior to the June 4, 1989 massacre, local Chinese had begun attending our services together with the expatriates who were the core of the congregation. After the crackdown, the Chinese security and political control apparatus was brought to bear on Beijing’s Chinese Christians as well as any other group seen to be too closely identified with foreigners. Old Communist Party rules that had remained on the books forbidding Chinese nationals from attending “foreign” worship services started to be enforced with a vengeance, including lengthy interrogation and physical abuse. The pressure brought to bear on our Chinese congregants became almost unbearable.
Finally our congregation decided that the local people and the expatriates in our little congregation would have to go their own ways and worship separately. It was very hard on all of us, because we had become close friends. One of the Chinese members of our congregation spoke at the last service we held together. He started his sermon, in Chinese, by noting that separate worship would be hard, since “gathering together each week is like drawing individual pieces of firewood together, to make a blaze that can warm us through the week.” Pulling apart the critical mass of fuel for the fire, taking away the air infusions by bellows or blowing, posed the risk of extinguishing the flame, especially if the individual pieces of fuel were isolated, put aside, and kept alone in the cold, where their flame would die for want of heat. But we had no real choice in the matter, given the pressures, and ultimately went our separate ways.
What have you learned about yourself and others this last year? What have you most loved and enjoyed in “doing church” covid-style? What was hardest? What energized you and helped build your inner fire? What helped kill it? These questions will have different answers for different people, but I hope we can use them in personal reflection, in our upcoming Parish Mutual Ministry Review, and in small group discussions to help bring focus.
As we move forward into this uncharted territory, I pray that we can use the answers to these questions as a compass to give us direction. I pray that we can re-engage on a face-to-face basis, and open Trinity Church healthier, happier, more loving, deeper spiritually, and more joyful than we ever were before.
Grace and Peace, and Happy Earth Day,
Fr. Tony+
No comments:
Post a Comment