All Saints, Dorval
March 15, 2020
But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him.
Well, here we are. Far fewer of us than usual, and as you’ve already gathered, this will be the last time we meet in person until at least Palm Sunday.
Our situation right now is literally unprecedented, at least within our lifetimes – I suspect the last time this many things were shut down because of a spreading infectious agent was during the Spanish Flu, 102 years ago.
When so many of our usual routines and our daily certainties are disrupted, we feel a lot of things, not all of which make sense. We are frustrated and anxious, sad and confused. (Some of us may also be quietly rejoicing in at least some aspects of the cancellation of plans and the chance to drop some of our responsibilities in favour of naps and reading books!) And we realize how much we depend on those routines and certainties to keep ourselves moored and rooted among what the prayer book calls “the changes and chances of this life”.
As I have struggled this week with the rapidly evolving situation, with the tug-of-war between wanting to care for you all, my people, in person and needing to institute distancing measures to keep us all safe, it has sharply highlighted the whole question of what worship is and what it’s for. There has been a lot of discussion of this in clergy circles, as bishops have issued directives and church leaders have wrestled with whether and when to stop holding public services. And perhaps this is a chance for us all to really think about why we gather to be church together, why we will miss corporate worship when it is suspended, and how to deepen and enrich our experience of both Christian community while we are forced to stay physically apart from each other, and worship when we get the chance to come back together again.
What is worship for? What does it do? There are many answers, all of them true:
- Praising God
- Seeing God at work
- Connecting with each other as the Body of Christ
- Learning
- Receiving inspiration
- Changing as a person
- Following God’s commands
- Anticipating our life in eternity, once we are gathered with the whole communion of saints in the nearer presence of God.
And I’m sure many more that you could possibly think of.
As Christians, we generally rejoice in the incarnational aspects of our faith. We worship a God who came to earth and took on human flesh, in all its messy, intimate reality. We are used to being able to see and touch each other when we worship. We are used to being able to share a common bread and a common cup. And those are irreplaceable elements of the experience of gathering to worship God, and we will miss them desperately when they are no longer possible for a period of time. But I submit that none of the things I’ve just listed absolutely depends on any particular form of worship. We can continue to praise, to connect, to learn, to be inspired, to obey God, to grow in faith, and to see God at work, even when we are required for our own safety to be physically separated. I confess I’m not so sure about that last one – anticipating the life of heaven – because I sincerely hope that heaven is not a video call; but in that case, let us let our fast from the Eucharist, and the foretaste of heaven it gives us, whet our appetites all the more both for it and for the heavenly feast that it prefigures!
When Jesus met the Samaritan woman at the well, he spoke of worshiping “in spirit and in truth”. God’s spirit and God’s truth do not change, whether we are able to meet in person or not. While we deeply cherish the bread and wine of the Eucharist, and gladly obey Jesus’ command to bless and share it in memory of him, God will not deny us God’s presence in our private prayers as we stay home, or in our communal worship through new and different virtual means.
Jesus promised the Samaritan woman a never-ending source of living water: the healing, freeing, life-giving water of God’s presence in her soul. In their conversation by the well, Jesus broke down barriers that told both him and her that they were unclean to each other, that they could share nothing in common. It is bizarre for us now to realize that for a time, we must not share things in common, that we must treat each other as though we were unclean and subject to stringent purity standards – because, for the time being, that is the best way to care for each other and protect each other.
But the living water does not cease from flowing. If you suddenly have a lot more free time than you’re used to, use it to pray, and to call people who might be similarly lonely, and to pay attention to the movement of God’s living water in your soul. If you suddenly have a lot less, because you’re trying to work from home while taking care of small children, or because your work puts you on the front lines of this crisis – even just a single deep breath snatched between moment of frenzy can be a prayer, and can put you in touch with that spring of living water; and please know that all the rest of us are praying for you, as hard as we can.
This is a deeply strange and disconcerting time, but if there is one thing that Christians know, it’s that suffering and death are not the end of the story, and our task is to care for each other and trust in God. The church has closed in such circumstances before; a friend posted this week on Facebook a picture of the parish register of her congregation in the Boston area, which closed for a month in the fall of 1918 to slow the spread of Spanish flu. The church has gone underground, and perpetuated itself via small groups meeting in private houses, before; that is, after all, how we began in the first place. There is nothing – neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, including the novel coronavirus of 2019, that will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.
This crisis may cause us to rethink all kinds of things, as individuals and as a community. It will certainly clarify our minds as to what is most important. Let our time apart focus our hearts on the conscious awareness of God’s presence within and among us, and the things we value most deeply about worshiping together as a congregation.
I will miss you so much, my friends. I already miss those of you who are watching from home. I don’t know what the coming weeks hold, but I can promise that when we get back together, we are really going to live into the “Rejoicing” part of our mission statement. If we are forced to self-isolate through Holy Week and Easter, we will have a huge, festive Easter Sunday service on the first Sunday when we get back, regardless of the liturgical calendar. This may be the weirdest Lent ever, but we are an Easter people, and we have God’s living water, and nothing will stop us from praying, and caring for each other, and worshiping in spirit and in truth, whether we are in the same room or not.
Be strong and courageous, beloveds. God has conquered death, and there is nothing that can separate us from God’s love.
Amen.
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