hope

Life in Lockdown (COVID19) Mode | an online sermon for a socially distanced people

This week, California followed Italy, Spain, Ireland, and a few other nations, ordering it’s entire population to “shelter in place” for the common good, to practice self-imposed isolation, to “flatten the curve” of COVID19 infections, and ease the coming burden on our global medical facilities and personnel, and minimize illness and death. Economies are crumbling, governments are reeling, and people find themselves in an entirely new situation—life radically disrupted, fear more contagious than the novel corona virus, and this isolation terribly unwelcome. Churches like mine, so familiar with providing communities with the social relationships that can sustain us through life’s challenges, cannot meet for worship, and so, many of us preacher are turning to the digital web to offer solace, perspective, and spiritual grounding when people are grasping for something firm to hold on to.


So we’re home bound for an indefinite period of time (or supposed to be).

What do we do? How do we manage the fear, the disruption to our lives, the challenges we face? What are we going to do with and because of this difficult global experience?

Richard Hendrick, an Irish Roman Catholic friar, shared a poem on Facebook on March 13, as Ireland went into nationwide lockdown.

Yes there is fear, he wrote,

Yes there is isolation.

Yes there is panic buying.

Yes there is sickness.

Yes there is even death.

And then, before continuing, he used the word, “But.” “But” is an important word. It is a conjunction joining two thoughts together but in a contrasting way.

It’s a way of saying, “This is true, but there’s something else going on.” It’s a way of signaling that there is some kind of mischief afoot.

Yes there is fear,

Yes there is isolation.

Yes there is panic buying.

Yes there is sickness.

Yes there is even death.

But something else is happening, something else is at work among us despite the suffering (which I do not want to minimize in any way). All this pain and disruption could be, as Jesus once said to his followers at another difficult time, the beginning of birth pangs. If we are wise, if we find creative ways to constructively engage the calamity, we could help the world enter a new era, an experience we could not create on our own; we in our hubris have thought too long that we are more powerful than we are; we have for too long believed we are above nature and can control it; we have forgotten that we are merely participants in the great Web of Life, part of the Web, called to offer our gifts for the wellbeing of the whole; we are never its masters. Humanity is not the goal of nature; nature is it’s own goal and we are merely part of it.

We are being humbled, humiliated in the true sense of the word: brought back down into the humus from which we came, where the dance of life and death take place continually, and where forces always conspire to restore the balance when it’s lost.

This tumult will pass and then we’ll learn if humanity has learned anything at all—if we will participate constructively in the creation of something new for us and for the planet which is our common home.

So, what do we do?

First, comply with the shut down as much as possible and make it a spiritual practice.

A fallow season is being forced upon each of us, upon the human race—a time to regroup, rethink, and recover values, assumptions, habits, and intentional practices.

Every religious tradition values a period of stillness, respite, and focused spiritual practice that reconnects us to what matters most. In Jewish and Christian traditions this is called the Sabbath. I urge you to stop resisting this quiet period that’s been forced upon us. Jesus once said that if God’s Word was silenced, even the stones would cry out. I wonder if we have become so unbalanced in our relationship with the Earth, with each other, and with ourselves that the Earth has called us back to a moment of reassessment. I’m not saying that this pandemic is sent from God. It is not. It is a consequence of life on this planet. Diseases are part of the cycle of nature, what it means to be part of the humus of the Earth.

So practice Sabbath.

There are a lot of us who just won’t stop unless our bodies force us; this time the whole of our humanity, the Body of Christ, is forcing us.

Stop for Christ’s sake—for your sake, for all of us.

Second, look for the beauty that’s all around you. Wonder is a gift to the soul. We cannot live well without wonder. And beauty is the way we wander into wonder.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of my rabbis (and every Christian minister ought to have a Jewish rabbi) died in 1972. Several years before he died, he suffered a near fatal heart attack. “When I regained consciousness,” he said, “I felt only gratitude for my life, for every moment I had lived. I realized that what I’d prayed so many years earlier had been answered; I had asked God not for success, but for wonder.”

May these days lead you into wonder—maybe only fleeting moments, but fleeting wonder is better than no wonder at all. And beauty is the way in to wonder.

Watch for beauty. Create beauty. Defend beauty. Cherish beauty. Magnify beauty.

Third, memorialize what you learn during this fallow season, especially the lessons learned through hardship and suffering. What I mean is this: we will all change. Some of these changes need to be permanent, indelible, enduring if you, and the rest of us, are to thrive, let alone survive.

If you will commit yourself to make some permanent changes because of all this, if we all do, we all will have a chance to turn these pains into the pangs of birth, something new for our lives, something new for the Earth.

Yes there is fear,

wrote Richard Hendricks a week ago.

Yes there is isolation.

Yes there is panic buying.

Yes there is sickness.

Yes there is even death.

But,

They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise

You can hear the birds again.

They say that after just a few weeks of quiet

The sky is no longer thick with fumes

But blue and grey and clear.

They say that in the streets of Assisi

People are singing to each other

Across the empty squares,

Keeping their windows open

So that those who are alone

May hear the sounds of family around them.

They say that a hotel in the West of Ireland

Is offering free meals and delivery to the housebound.

Today a young woman I know is busy spreading fliers

With her number through the neighbourhood

So that the elders may have someone to call on.

Today Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and Temples

Are preparing to welcome

And shelter the homeless, the sick, the weary

All over the world people are slowing down and reflecting

All over the world people are looking at their neighbours in a new way

All over the world people are waking up to a new reality

To how big we really are.

To how little control we really have.

To what really matters.

To Love.

So we pray and we remember that

Yes there is fear.

But there does not have to be hate.

Yes there is isolation.

But there does not have to be loneliness.

Yes there is panic buying.

But there does not have to be meanness.

Yes there is sickness.

But there does not have to be disease of the soul

Yes there is even death.

But there can always be a rebirth of love.

Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.

Today, breathe.

Listen, behind the factory noises of your panic

The birds are singing again

The sky is clearing,

Spring is coming,

And we are always encompassed by Love.

Open the windows of your soul

And though you may not be able to touch across the empty square,

Sing.

Easter: Awakening to the Power of Human Resilience

A brief Easter meditation drawn from 1 Corinthians 15.50-58, John 20.1, and An Easter Acclamation: Cosmic and Evolutionary. My sermon on Sunday, April 21, 2019, preached at Davis Community Church. Find the audio of the sermon here.

Last summer, my wife, Patty, and walked past the Notre-Dame Cathedral. The line looked excruciatingly long. And so, we passed by and crossed the Pont des Coeurs bridge and explored the Left Bank and the Latin Quarter instead.

This last Monday, I watched, along with hundreds of thousands of Parisians and millions around the world, as Notre Dame, astonishingly, collapsed in flames. Though I’d never been inside it, the grand cathedral was nevertheless inside of me. Notre Dame is the spiritual heart not only of Paris, but in many ways, the consciousness of the Western world—religious and non-religious.

Since the fourth century, a place of worship has occupied the site—the current structure, since the mid-twelfth century. Notre-Dame is an architectural masterpiece, a symbol of artistic genius and ardent spiritual devotion. It’s stood as the cultural and spiritual center of Western life for 850 years—withstanding plague, war, environmental disaster, revolutionary iconoclasm, and even Hitler’s destructive hatred for any glory that wasn’t German.

One journalist wrote as she watched Notre Dame burn: “To those of us who live in Paris, Notre-Dame is a familiar landscape, as solid as a mountain. Durable as time. How could it burn so fast?

Ann Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, watched the flames from her office window, and confessed to what so many felt: “absolutely powerless”.

The historian, Jean-Francois Colosimo said the scene evoked images of the end of the world. The fire, he said, seemed to communicate “the extreme fragility of our situation.”

To feel horror at Notre-Dame’s collapse is human, and yet it’s also an experience of privilege. Today, over two hundred people were killed in terrorist attacks on churches Sri Lanka and high-end hotels catering to Westerners. I do feel myself chastened that I’m more affected by the collapse of a building than by the deaths of hundreds. I’m not proud of that. Such attacks are too commonplace today. I for one am almost numb to them. The collapse of Notre-Dame, caused likely by a technological malfunction or oversight rather than by act of human hatred and violence, strikes deeply, I think, because it is a sign of the times.

There are things, dear to us all, once as solid as a mountain, that are collapsing.

There are experiences coming at us that make us feel powerless.

There are images swirling in our heads that make us feel terribly vulnerable.

Alongside the story of our times, comes another story of collapse, powerlessness, and vulnerability—

—the story of Jesus, the strong and courageous healer of the sick and dying, who in the end becomes so terribly fragile and vulnerable…

—Jesus, revolutionary and reformer in whom the ordinary people placed their hope for a better world, who in the end becomes apparently powerless against the Empire…

—Jesus, God’s advocate of the poor, excluded, and forgotten, who in the end is crucified, dead, and buried…

It feels as if Saint Paul in today’s reading was either wrong or terribly naive—“Death does have the victory; death does sting.”

It must have felt that way to the followers of Jesus on that first Easter long ago.

Mary Magdalene went to the tomb that first Easter morning feeling like it was the end of the world—that her dreams for a better life were always just that, dreams; that shame would tell her always that she was a fool for having dared to believe she was more than what others made her out to be; that people she loved would only die, or leave, or betray her in the end; that she was powerless and vulnerable against the forces of the tyranny, greed, and violence of a male-dominated, power-hungry world.

These were the stories that stalked her soul—and for good reason. Collapse, powerlessness, and vulnerability—loss, death, betrayal, and abuse—these were things she knew all too well.

But there was another story rising around her in the darkness of that first Easter morning—one she could not yet see or trust. It was a new story rising out of of the darkness, out of the collapse, powerlessness, and vulnerability—rising up against her doubts and fears, shame and despair.

What was rising around and within her—though she could not yet see or trust it—was the counter-narrative, the alternative story around which the entire cosmos turns—the truth that it is out of collapse, out of powerlessness, out of vulnerability that new life comes. Always. This fact is as true for human life as it is for the giant sequoia that rises from the tiny seed propagated only by fire. It’s as true for your life and mine as it is for a planet born from a dying star.

This is the story of Easter—

—that life comes from death; that the future rises from our failures; that wholeness comes from our brokenness; that vulnerability and fear, shame and doubt are not weakness. No, this is the strong stuff, the humus, from which new life always comes…

—Jesus rises in the dark of night. A planet is born from a dying star. A sequoia rises from the scorched forest floor where a single cone, broken open by extreme heat, drops a seed into the humus of the earth, and there countless dead things conspire to give birth to life…

—Out of vulnerability. Out of powerlessness. Out of collapse—life rises always. Inevitably. Irrepressibly. Irresistibly. Life always rises…

On a recent trip to the border—there, to practice solidarity with those fleeing violence, poverty, and despair in the hope of a new and better life—a Central American spoke the best and simplest definition of Easter I think I’ve ever heard. It’s a common saying south of the border. And for good reason. It’s spoken against cartels, gangs, the environmental disaster of climate change on poor farmers, and against repressive governments on both sides of the border. And we in the north would do well to learn it—if we wish not merely to survive the age, but to thrive.

She spoke of the key to human resilience, the ground from which unstoppable courage, even revolution can rise.

With the quiet determination of a soul that knows what Easter knows, this young woman of irrepressible courage said: “They tried to bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds.”

We are all seeds and in us is a force of life that cannot, indeed, will not be conquered—ever.

So, don’t run from the struggle of life.

When you fall—and you will—get back up.

When you’re afraid and falter, keep going.

You are seeds, all of you.

We are seeds, all of us—together. You notice that she didn’t say, “They tried to bury me.” She said, “They tried to bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds.” We rise together, in relationship, in community…never alone…but together—filled with the irrepressible power of love that alway seeks life, each of us an audacious seed that can’t help but press up from the earth—buried, yes, but in Christ, indomitable, revolutionary, and free!n

"There is a crack in everything": Hope for activists entering a new political era

Despair is an energy, a negative energy that is born of the stuff that can rattle around in our heads, unchecked.  Despair’s the sour fruit of the cranky stories we often tell ourselves, the bad-tempered tales we can inflict on others.

We live and die by the stories we tell—inside our heads and outside our bodies.

“The destiny of the world,” Shakespeare scholar, Harold Goddard tells us, “is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories [we] love and believe in.”

Today, we’ve gathered in this circles, not to wring our hands or shake our heads or pound our fists and inflict our despair on others.

No, we’ve gathered together to stir ourselves, to wake up, to find some traction.  Whether we realize it or not, we’ve gathered together to tell ourselves stories, ordinary stories that come from ordinary people—stories that can become the source of our hope . . . our creative, courageous action on behalf of the wellbeing of our world.

“Hope,” says Rebecca Solnit (who is for me a contemporary writer and dissident whose voice is on par with the voice of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, that feisty Russian dissent who challenged the Soviet behemoth in the second half of the last century)—

Whenever difficulty gnaws at your heart

 

Blaise Pascal said, "In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart."

I like that.  

It's so easy to find ourselves overwhelmed by what's broken--by darkness, fear, and trouble.  And there's plenty of all that around us.  

Instead, carry something beautiful in your heart.  It'll hold it all that at bay; it'll push back against the darkness that sometimes feels so suffocatingly powerful--both the forces outside us and inside us.

Beauty is bigger, more powerful.  It has a force of light and the eternal about it.  It is a source of hope.  

So to any of you who find the shadows drawing near you.  If winter's lingering long in your soul, the earthen clay of your heart hardened by whatever it is that creeps around inside you, making you feel dull, bleak, cold and hard . . . then here's a little beauty that can--if you hold it to your heart, feeling its warmth--bring a little of the greening power of spring to the winter of your life.

I suggest you find a way to just sit with this after the eight minute visual poem is finished.  Don't hurry or let another task pull you too quickly from the beauty that wants to carry you through whatever difficulty gnaws at your heart.  

And take care that you don't do too much theology or philosophy or science.  It's a poem.  If you try to explain it or debate it, you'll have missed it.  

Peace.