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A New Story

8 Apr 2020

Easter Sunday

It would be a vast understatement to say that the moment we’re currently living through has a certain strangeness to it. At least once a day, I am struck by the thought that I’ve never experienced anything quite like this, and I suspect I’m not alone. In a matter of weeks, we’ve been collectively immersed into a new vocabulary, a new set of practices, and maybe more than anything, a tsunami of information that threatens to overwhelm us. Individuals in power, journalists pursuing an angle, researchers armed with data, and conspiracy theorists with an agenda—everyone has a chart to display, a forecast to project, a meme to share, a cure to hawk, and an axe to grind.

Across a vast array of platforms, a dizzying collection of narrators are telling us their disparate versions of a common story, and it’s not an easy story to digest. When we cut through all the details and all the data and all the differences, it’s ultimately a story of sickness and grief and loss that spans from China to Italy to points closer to home. It’s a story about our limitations, a story about mortality, a story—as much as we hate to say it—about death. And in this respect at least, despite the profound strangeness of the moment, we can find some common cause with generations of people who have lived before us. Because from the beginning, in one form or another, we have been telling and living stories about death. READ MORE

[ Posted in Lectionary Reflections | Tags: easter ]

2020 Gathering – an update

A Letter from the EP Board to the EP Community,

After considering the ongoing reality of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have decided to cancel this summer’s Gathering. The scheduled theme “Discipleship in a Technological Age” and its programming (including location, enlisted plenaries, preachers, worship services, forums, etc.) will be moved back one year to Summer 2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought havoc across the world, and certainly in the United States, where the death toll has reached well over 10,000, with estimates surpassing 80,000 by summer’s end. For the foreseeable future, most of the country will remain under shelter-in-place directives aimed at flattening the curve of the disease’s spread and buying time for overwhelmed medical services. Much of America’s infrastructure has shut down, with untold consequences for the global economy and the world’s most vulnerable. As you well know, churches can no longer meet in person, a devastating reality in any context, but especially so during the church’s highest holy season. Resurrection tells us that dividing walls have been brought down and the world now reconciled in Christ can come together. The church must now wrestle with what Resurrection means as we cannot physically be together.

In this context it simply did not make sense to continue with the Gathering as planned, much less begin the process of conference registration as we normally would at this time of year. Even if conditions were to dramatically improve by July, the sheer number of contingencies facing registrants makes it unwise to move ahead. We considered rearranging this summer’s Gathering to COVID-19 conditions (such as hosting a virtual meeting), but decided that the integrity of the planned program and the Gathering’s particular ways of being together were too important to seriously alter.

We do not make this decision lightly. For 20 consecutive years, the EP has gathered to be together, worship and learn together, be challenged and grow together, lament and celebrate together, where simply being together embodied for us the goodness of God’s deep love. COVID-19 has certainly revealed the fragility of the world’s many institutions and systems, including the great inequalities of the pandemic’s effects. But the plague has also illuminated the loveliness of God’s world, a loveliness that for us sinners often only becomes apparent when threatened. In those moments one is forced to decide what is important, and learn better how to hold it. Through this process, the Board has come to even greater appreciation for the Gathering, all that it means and does, and so deeply lament not being together this summer.

In the coming weeks, we will announce a number of EP-sponsored events for churches as they address the pandemic. While no substitute for the Gathering, these events, we hope, will foster some semblance of togetherness as churches wrestle with how to be church in this season. We believe EP’s storied church communities offer much needed resources that can inspire and equip churches during this time. You can expect a variety of on-line offerings, from the contemplative and worshipful to the practical and useful. We will soon be in touch about these offerings.

In all things, we find encouragement from you and all that we have heard and imagine your communities are doing to serve your neighbors. Holy Week tells us that God remains with us even in the deepest darkness, and that we can take heart knowing that Resurrection will in time lift the darkness, this current darkness and many others beside.

A Holy Week Like No Other

Palm/Passion Sunday

Matthew 27:11-54

Palm Sunday breaks the monotony of the season of Lent. And what a Lenten season it has been. One for the books, with social distancing, enforced quarantine, empty churches, no, I mean EMPTY churches, toilet paper fasts, all underlaid with a gnawing sense of unease, and in many parts of our neighborhood and world, fear of disease and death. The title of a recent blog post echoed my sentiments exactly: “This is the Lentiest Lent I Ever Lented!”

And now we prepare for Palm Sunday and Holy Week, knowing that this year there will be no gatherings at the church door, no procession of palm-wavers singing their way down the center aisle, no “Hosanna in the highest!” will be heard on the streets of Jerusalem or any other city street, no sudden hinge that leads the church into Holy Week.

The skeleton crew that gathered last Sunday in our church to livestream the service talked over plan for Palm Sunday. “Maybe four of us waving palm branches could circle the camera twelve times and no one would notice all the people were missing.” What will Palm Sunday be like without our annual dramatic reading of the Passion of Christ? What will Holy Week be like without our gatherings with other churches, without foot washing, bathrobe dramas, shadows and candles, stations of the cross, without real flesh and blood people? Sometimes it seems like we’re living in an Avengers movie and a quarter of the world’s population has just disappeared.

In another sense aren’t we living what we always wished for? We have definitely experienced a break from the busyness of life, from the diversions that pulled us in a hundred directions. Things have simplified; our needs have been clarified; even as our fears have been amplified. I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but this Palm Sunday doesn’t feel like any other. It feels like we’re perched on the edge of a precipice. It feels like those few seconds when the roller coaster comes to the highest point of its ride and stops, just before it plunges over the crest of the hill.

In a way, the strange silence on our streets today reminds me of the silence of Jesus on that last day of his life. Jesus had a lot to say in a three year ministry. We read his words and teachings each week. We have pieces of his sermons, transcripts of his public protests, remembrances of the fights in which he participated. He spun stories for huge crowds; he whispered the secrets of the kingdom to his disciples. He talked to people he wasn’t supposed to talk to—untouchables, women, foreigners, sick people, sinners.

Jesus was still talking when he came to Jerusalem, even though his mouth had placed a target on his back. He taught large crowds in the Temple by day, and spoke privately with his disciples at night. Time was running out, and he wasn’t quite finished. “I have much to say to you, but you cannot bear it now,” Jesus told them. He spoke with urgency through that last supper and we even have a record of the last prayer he prayed for the disciples and the private words of agony he poured out to God on his own behalf in the garden of Gethsemane. But when the hour of darkness finally caught up with him… when he was handed over to those who sought his life, Jesus quit talking. He went utterly silent, letting his actions speak rather than his words.

This Holy Week will be like no other. For one thing, it’s going to be a lot quieter. But the story is still there. Jesus’ actions still speak as loudly as they ever have. And, who knows, maybe with the enforced separation and the buzz dialed back…with the shadow of danger and even death lurking over the whole scene, maybe we are ready to hear the story of Jesus’ last days in a way that we haven’t heard it in a long time. This year, as the days lengthen, as the drama heightens, as the crisis grows, as our anxiety squeezes us, the Son of God makes his way to the Mount of Olives, riding on the back of a donkey. The drama begins. With words. With silence. With heart-wrenching passion and action. With acts of betrayal and acts of mercy. This year, may Holy Week be a week like no other.