(18) What Is Essential

 

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for What Is Essential?, originally shared on May 28, 2020. It was the eighteenth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   We are now attempting to reopen our national economy. It’s happening unevenly across the country, but it’s happening. Retail stores are opening, but not barber shops. I’m getting to the point where, when I wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, I look like Tom Hanks in Cast Away.

   Churches have been given the go-ahead for public worship services with restrictions for three weeks, then we’ll see if the numbers have gone down or gone up. That’s the plan.

   I’ve seen an email, widely shared by a colleague, Pastor Mark Price, in which he describes the specific requirements, guidelines, and extrapolations from general requirements not specific to churches, in order for churches to reopen.

   Those restrictions include seating limited to 25% capacity with social distancing, reservations needed, worshipers to be ushered out to ensure social distancing, no singing or communal praying or creeds, no communion, no passing of the peace, no offering plates, no bathrooms, entry doors to be propped open, masks required, no childcare or Sunday School, no coffee hour or potlucks, vestments and worship space to be cleaned after every use, and temperatures will need to be taken at the door. Churches are also encouraged to continue digital services and the elderly and members with underlying health conditions are encouraged to stay home.

   Even if only some of these are true, Mark rightly concludes by asking, “What’s the point”?

   Here’s another question: More than 100,000 people have died in the US alone this year. If the risks of contamination are so great that such restrictions are necessary, why are we physically gathering together at all? 

   I don’t think I would be OK with people dying because we gathered for worship. Sure, people die every year because they catch the flu or something else at church. But, we’re dealing with way more than the flu. 100,000 people have died in, what, four months? Between 8,200 and 20,000 people die in an average flu season which generally goes from late fall to the end of May in the United States.  

   The church is the body of Christ, however, and has survived through way worse restrictions. And, though not ideal and is manageable if temporary, digital worship can be done fully and faithfully.

   When I led the pre-school and day care Chapel service at the congregation I served in San Dimas before retiring, we would regularly sing a song with the words: “The church is not a building, the church is not a steeple, the church is not a resting place, the church is a people!”

   Here’s a third question: What is essential, in worship and in life?

   Because, I believe worship is life.

   Here’s how Jesus answers at least part of that question:

*Luke 10:38-42

   We need to make a living, food, clothing and shelter, but a living is not a life. All living things want to live, but what is essential to living a truly human life?

   We need the to live the one thing for which we were created, a living relationship with the living God that defines everything about us.

   City Slickers movie with Billy Crystal. In the movie, a group of urban men go on a cattle drive to escape or to gain insight into their various crises.

   In one scene Curly, the trail boss, played by Jack Palance, advises the Billy Crystal character to find that one thing, that one thing that he most values and to focus on that so that he can move forward.

   Our relationship with God is different.

   God is not a spiritual component necessary for a well-rounded life. God is all in all.

   God is not my counselor, God is my Creator.

   God is not my co-pilot. God is not even my pilot. God is everything.

   There is no family first. There is not even God first. There is no order of importance, God defines everything and is everything in our lives.

   It is our relationship with God, our living relationship with the living God that, as a result, produces the actions that the world sees. What we do is a natural outcome of that relationship, as natural as it is for a healthy fig tree to bear figs.

   Our life-giving relationship with God is what is essential.

*1 John 4:17-21

   I saw a woman on the news the other day. She was in an outdoor public area in a crowd of people, and she said, “Look around you. Nobody is wearing a mask. I’m not wearing a mask. Because, I’m not afraid.” 

   This “fearlessness” is not a virtue. It’s callousness. It’s hardness of heart. We don’t wear masks because we are afraid. We wear masks to protect others.

   Caring for others is a natural outcome of a living relationship with the living God. We love because God first loved us.

   A living relationship with the living God takes us out of ourselves, saves us from our sin, and changes us from being self-righteous, self-centered, and self-absorbed into people who are a new Creation, born again, made new in order to love others in word and deed. It is essential to living the life we were created to live as human beings.

   When I was just starting in my first parish, Christ Lutheran Church in Compton, I was feeling overwhelmed. One day, during that time, I read an article in the Christian Century Magazine, that changed how I approached ministry.

   It wasn’t written by a pastor or a theologian. It was written by a pediatrician…

   He wrote about how his first job out of medical school was opening a new free clinic on the South Side of Chicago. His supervisor, another Dr., came by with a file folder under his arm and a book. He laid the file folder on the new Dr’s desk, opened it, and said, “These are the people I want you to hire for the clinic. The new Dr. looked through the papers and said, These people aren’t qualified and I know we can do better. Maybe, said the supervising Dr., but I owe these people favors, and you will hire them. That’s how it works in this neighborhood. The new Dr. countered that he would not be hiring them, that he would be interviewing and selecting his own staff, and he knew he could do that because he knew the law. The supervising Dr. took the book he brought with him, laid it on the new Dr.’s desk, and opened it. Inside, the book had been hollowed out and a .45 automatic pistol was nested inside. He said, Dr. in this neighborhood, this is the law. Now hire these people.

   The new Dr. wrote that he became discouraged in his work, believing that the good he was doing was being overcome by the evil in the system itself.

   One day, someone gave him a book on the monastic hours of prayer. He read it and began to observe the hours, stopping to pray five times a day.

   He wrote that it didn’t happen right away, but that he began to feel that he was connected to something larger than himself. That he was like a thread in a tapestry, the individual meaning of which would not be apparent, but that some day it would be woven with lots of other threads into a beautiful tapestry, whose meaning would be clear for all to see.

   We need to continually open our hearts to receive the relationship that is God’s gift, to speak with and listen to God, to be fed and watered by the living God.

   How do we receive this essential life?

   The primary way God speaks to us is in reading or hearing the Word of God, the Bible. The primary way we speak to God, and sometime how God speaks to us, is in prayer.

   Sitting at Jesus feet, being shaped by him, acting in response. Exercising the relationship with God that we call faith, not just blindly believing things. It is what is essential.

   This is the time to receive and/or to cultivate that relationship. Open your eyes, read your Bible, open your heart and pray. Receive that gift of Faith today. Open yourself to the embrace of the living God. Worship fully and faithfully, in ways that respect the God-given value of all life, and the human life that is created for a living relationship with the living God.

   We belong to God, and no one can take us out of God’s hand.

   Open your heart and receive the gift that is living waters, the presence in the person of the Holy Spirit, nourishing and reshaping us from within.

   That is essential.