Remembering
Given the choice, we probably wouldn’t want to go back there, but in order to release, we do have to remember. It’s been over five years since our world changed dramatically. It was late 2019 that word started spreading of a new virus, but it wasn’t here. By late January 2020, our federal government declared Covid a public health emergency. Soon thereafter, we began hearing reports about cruise ships and nursing homes filled with people suffering from Covid. By mid-March 2020, life as we knew it stopped.
Schools closed. Our worship services went fully online. All public space was closed. Restaurants couldn’t open. We learned the term “essential workers,” and then watched videos from around the world, where folks stuck at home would cheer on these essential workers.
Zoom went from an option to a necessity. The church session met online to make all its decisions. I remember thinking the session looked like the Brady Bunch title sequence with two dozens heads on a screen trying to figure out how to relate online. The church staff worked from home, spending their days online and on the phone trying to find a way forward.
For a time, it felt novel. My family must have taken an average of five walks a day. Of course, we also struggled mightily to get our kids to engage in online learning. Initially, we kept to a schedule — everyone up by 7:00; family yoga at 7:30; do your school work; take a walk — but that fell apart pretty fast. We kept a counter on a whiteboard. Covid Day 1. 2. 3. and when it finally got over 100 days at home, we gave up. Man, it was hard as it dragged on.
I still have a file that has loads of documents that cover the decisions we made to keep ministry going. We’d worship online. Let’s do some music to stream online to give people some beauty in their day. We’ll still deliver Hand2Hand because people needed food, but it’s all done alone and outside. We called through the entire church directory. Then we did it again, taking notes about needs.
A couple of months into things, I got a call from one of the pastors at Westminster in Grand Rapids. “Troy, how is your church handling funerals?” (I have a document for that in the file.) We were doing funerals for family limited to 10 people. Westminster wasn’t doing them at all, deferring them for a time when folks could gather.
Life had not prepared us for what we faced. Seminary certainly had no classes on managing public health and its relationship to Christian worship.
There are words and phrases that still give me pause. Social distancing. Masks. New normal. Contact tracing. Change is the only constant. There’s no toilet paper at the store.
In my file there’s a document about a phased return to worship that outlines five phases towards a return to normal. It’s several pages long. Many here probably remember what it was like. Online only. Then we had folks sign-up and assigned your pews. We wore masks. Only the leaders sang, so we sang on behalf of the whole church. We stopped shaking hands. We took communion remotely. There was no nursery. I believe there were three separate times that we went online only, which cost us both Easter and Christmas in 2020. The next year we held four Easter services because we were still limiting attendance.
To be honest with you, I still am struggling with what it means to touch after those awkward months. I’m not nervous about it, but I don’t know who wants what — a fist bump, a wave, a handshake, or a hug. We stopped holding hands at the end of services, although there is a rebel faction in the back of the Traditional Service that still does. (I see you.)
And that’s only worship. PW Circles stopped. We didn’t have youth group and midweek studies, although we tried all of these things online.
This pandemic was costly on so many levels. No decision was the right decision. Families fractured over vaccines and politics. Although I have to say our church did a pretty good job of trusting its leadership, we still lost many people to other churches or to no church at all. Other churches had far bigger rifts than us over Covid. Businesses closed. Children and youth lost important developmental time, and so schools have really been challenged by social-emotional health and behavior.
Over seven million people died worldwide due to Covid. Some of those are people we know from our church, the community, or our families. The grief over those deaths and the countless other losses is huge. So, today, we start worship with remembering because I believe that somewhere deep inside of each of us there is lingering hurt, pain, grief, and sorrow over something. To learn how to release at least some of it, we have to be honest with ourselves about what we’re carrying.
Releasing
So, as part of our worship — in place of our usual time of a prayer of confession — we’re inviting you to think about one sorrow or bitterness you’ve been dragging around over the past five years. It’s time to start the work of releasing that into God’s hands. It’s time for us to remember and release — to let it go — so that we can move towards wholeness individually and as a community.
Renewing
I’ve chosen the 23rd Psalm today because it is familiar and beloved. Despite being a picture of rural life 3000 years ago and a land that is entirely different than ours, the message of the psalm still resonates deeply within us. It reminds us that God’s care for us is careful and personal. It is loving and constant. It gives us two images of God — shepherd and host. It also is intensely personal. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. It’s not a general truth. It is true for me personally. And for you personally.
As a shepherd, God leads us to green pastures and quiet waters. He restores us. He directs our steps to life. As host, God prepares a feast for us. God soothes our dry skin with oil.
But this psalm also makes it clear that God is with us in the hard parts of life too. Even when we walk through the darkest valley — that place where death is lurking in the shadows, that place where the Covid-19 pandemic revealed a lot of the ugliness of humanity — even there, God is with us. Even in the presence of enemies, God is hosting us at the table, calling us to find a path forward that turns enemies into friends.
The literal heart of the psalm — I kid you not, it’s 26 words in with 26 words to follow — is this line, “For you are with me.” All of this centers on the presence of God with us. God is always with us, even in the hardest of times. God was with us in the pandemic. God is with us now. It really is up to us to believe that is true and live with that kind of hope and confidence.
As part of this service of remembering, releasing, and renewing, I wanted to highlight some of the ways we as a church have changed because we lived through this pandemic. I invite us to lament our losses. I also invite us to live deeply into how God is calling us to be in this new reality.
First, the pandemic changed how we viewed time and schedules — at least for a time. One day seemed to bleed into the other because most of us weren’t going to work or to church or to school. Our days were wide open. Even the roads were largely empty. As we started back into school and work, many of us vowed that we were going to slow our lives down a bit because we so appreciated not having to rush from one thing to the next. That didn’t last long.
Once life got back to some semblance of normal, we filled our schedules out again. In fact, I feel like many of us are far busier now than we were before the pandemic. Work expects more; after all, we know how to work from home too. Youth sports are nonstop, and our expectations for our kids in those activities keep going up. And somewhere in the middle of it all, church has faded a bit more into the background of our lives. We still love it, but we realized after being away for months that life kept going on, that God didn’t rain lightning down on us in judgment when we missed church. So, while our busyness outside of work has increased, our connections to church have loosened. Regular attendance in worship used to be 3-4 Sundays a month. For many getting here once a month is now regular.
That brings me to my second point — the importance of community. The pandemic shone a glaring light on how important it is to have person-to-person connection. We took it for granted that we could show up here on Sunday and connect with others we love. When we reopened the sanctuary, I can still remember the joy in your eyes (I couldn’t see your smiles because of masks!) as you assembled for worship.
Yet, thankfully, we already had an online worship ministry, so that pivot was not a huge one for us. When we were online only, I remember being floored watching the number worshipping with us. I remember taking online prayer requests. I remember preaching to an empty sanctuary, with Eric Snyder in the back pointing to the camera so I could preach directly to you. (Seminary did not train us to be TV stars.) I also remember my first few empty-sanctuary sermons talking about how we’ll all be back together in another week or two. Boy, was I wrong.
Still today we average 50-60 worshipping with us live online, which is amazing that we can reach people in a new way. We have folks that worship from other states. We have a way to connect to our snowbirds when they’re out of town. We have folks online who never will set foot in this place and whom I may never meet. It’s a wonderful and weird ministry opportunity.
But I’m also saddened by the loss of community that happens when we choose online worship but could actually be here together. The sanctuary is slowly repopulating, but when I think about the fifty folks who could be with us instead of online, I miss the energy they bring when we sing together and smile at each other. We will not stop having online worship, but in my heart of hearts, I truly miss the many whom I used to see in this place. Community matters, and the gathering of God’s people is essential.
Third, our ability to be online has reshaped our ministry outside of worship. Many of us use Zoom. You can be on a committee meeting from across the country, thanks to hybrid meetings. That’s a real gift to ministry when folks travel as much as they do. I also see studies that carry on with folks who live elsewhere for part of the year, not letting the distance be a barrier to discipleship. That’s really great. So, when the Nominations Committee calls this year asking you to serve on session, you don’t get the excuse that you’re in Florida for the winter. You can still serve!
Fourth, our church like most churches is smaller than we were before the pandemic. Thankfully, we weren’t decimated the way many other churches were, but we’re definitely not the same. Because we’re smaller, busier, and even older, we have to make adjustments to the ministry that match the needs and vision of the church. We’ve started making some of those, but there will surely be more to come. The pandemic changed the playing field, and we’ll have to adjust our game plan to live faithfully into God’s mission for us.
Fifth, and this is one we know to be so true, the pandemic exasperated the problem of partisanship we have in this country. It exists even in this church in a lesser form. Masks or no masks. Vaccinate or not. All of these decisions got politicized and had folks lining up with those who agreed with their views. The partisanship continues and hangs over so much of our lives and even the ministry of the church. Decisions and even language that I would have thought were simply neutral have become loaded. That kind of partisanship has actually been driving people from both sides of aisle away from churches, including this one.
My final thought has to do with our youth and young adults. These are the folks who were too young to make choices about their lives in the pandemic. They lost interpersonal social opportunities at a crucial developmental stage. They watched their parents lose friends over whatever choices they were making. They watched complete breakdowns of family relationships. Youth and young adults already are growing up with less trust in institutions, but the pandemic intensified that for them. They are far less trusting and hopeful than previous generations. They have been the hardest group to keep interested in the church because the hard questions about where God was in this pandemic were not undergirded by a deep faith or life experience. Churches — ours included — have a lot of work to do to connect with our youth and young adults as they seek to navigate a world that really got flipped on its head for them. And we have to be there for parents trying to figure out how to care best for their kids.
I say all of these things because they are real. But I also hold onto the truth that God is with us in the valley of the shadow of death. God is with us in the presence of our enemies. God is with us in the low times, just as much as God is with us in the best of times.
So, here we are five years later. Our DNA is still the same, but we are different. The church is different. Each individual here is different. We all have our scars from this time. We all have carried burdens — some of which I hope you’ve let go of today. I think it’s worthwhile to be honest about how we’ve changed as a church and a society. It’s also a practice in hope to seek who God is calling us to be as a church for this time and place. It’s an act of improvisation to learn new patterns of being a faith community. Friends, God is with us. Come what may. God is still there, leading us to green pastures and still waters. So, let us dive deeper into trusting that is true and in being the kind of church God needs us to be in this season.
