I have close family members who are refusing to be vaccinated. I have weathered lots of disagreements before and still find a way to stay connected, but for whatever reason, this vaccination thing is a biggie for me. I went the direct approach and talked about it with them and it created a huge rift between us and they asked me to stop bringing it up. So now I sit with this rift and have a really hard time ignoring it, which is my preferred method of moving on. I am angry. I feel trapped in anger. I am captive to anger.
But here’s my modern advanced human being mistake: We think unity means ideological agreement. We think being united, connected, belonging to each other, means thinking, or knowing, or believing the same things. Especially when our beliefs have real consequences in action – and we’re literally pulling in opposite directions.
We also think unity is up to us. It’s our job to get each other to agree with us, then we will have unity. Then we will be connected. And these days the way we build union is through anger or through fear. Anger feels stronger than fear. So we let that fear turn into anger, anger that galvanizes union through violence. “Those people are doing this to us” we say, and we build whole communities around anger and fear, bonds that define ourselves over and against others, “We are not like them.”
But at the core of it all, the unity we yearn for and are angry that we can’t have is to protect us from our fears. Fear of loss, fear of perceived danger, fear of what will be taken away from us or done to us.
But in our scripture today Paul is talking about a different kind of unity. Paul’s message is that we don’t have to be afraid. We were dead and made alive in Christ. Like the mantra that guarded my children from nightmares and reminded them of their baptism when they were little, we can remind ourselves, “Death can’t get me because Jesus has got me.” We can give ourselves over to a union of life and for life without fear.
The way of fear objectifies others and takes away personhood, both theirs and our own. But in the way of God, unity, belonging and connection is as persons with and for each other. God came as a person, for persons, to be a person with us and uphold our personhood.
I can’t just snap the fingers of my heart and quit being angry, or fix my feelings by deciding to suddenly be ok with choices I see having damaging consequences in the world. And all my strategies for this are failing me. I am imprisoned by anger. I need to be freed by someone else. Paul says Jesus made captivity itself a captive. “He who ascended, also descended” - God came into our death alongside, with and for us, so that by going toward the death we find life, and we find the one who sets us free from fear, and free from anger. Not by fighting them but by feeling them and opening them to God. Christ makes a space for us to go toward our fear and anger, confessing them, again and again, and find in our places of death a God with us who give us life we cannot give ourselves.
Fear and anger killed Jesus, and yet that fear, anger and death itself could not break the cosmic union that now holds us our deepest belonging to God and each other. Our union is so secure in the love of God that nothing can separate us from that.
What gives us unity is not ideological agreement but the very cross of Christ.
This is Christ’s Body, not ours. We are set free to be with and for each other in love, to speak truth without fear, to call out lies that damage and divide, and in grace and gentleness, to grow up together into Christ, to more and more live as the one body we already are.
Yes, the pandemic could get worse. Yes school could be affected. Church could be affected. Vaccinated people can spread this. “The war has changed,” the headlines read this week about the delta variant. And, friends, I am not down for more change or more war. I am not on board for this. I was looking forward to things getting better and better with no more surprises. I looking forward to mostly vaccinated, completely unmasked, shoulder-to-shoulder, boisterously singing, indoor worship on Labor Day weekend. I was counting on it. I was telling myself we were on our way out of this thing. I was feeling like I had about hit my limit of adjusting and surely we were finished with all that. As Andy just said to me on a walk Friday night, “For people who watch the news, yesterday was a hard day.”
But hearing that the war has changed and we are still deep in it doesn’t have to stoke me toward anger, or push me toward fear again, and we don’t have to let any of it drive a wedge deeper between us all.
Up against our impossibility and loss, we can confess our anger and fear and our exhaustion with it all, and let Christ meet us there, in and through one another.
And we can “bear with one another,” as Paul says, we can “build up the body in love” and remind each other of what is true. So here are some things that are true that I want to remind us of:
This, all of this, is part of the story. This is not the whole story. The world belongs to God. Church is who we are, not where we go. Worship looks all different ways. So does gathering. We are good at adapting – even when we don’t like it. We’re scrappy and creative. We’re also tired and probably sad. And it’s ok to grieve. Again. It’s ok to grieve again. Grieving is a need we can meet.
Also: Worry is practicing fear. Rest is practicing trust. We can choose what we want to practice.
At last weekend’s Women’s Retreat we talked about different types of rest. (Sacred Rest by Sandra Dalton-Smith goes into detail about this, summarized in this article). Physical rest, like sleep, or stretching sore muscles, or walking circulation back into jarred nerves. But the rest many of us need right now might not be physical; it might be emotional rest, or social rest, spiritual rest or sensory rest (or all the rest!). We may need to take an extended break from the constant barrage of intensity in the news and social media. We may want to set a regular coffee date, or morning walk, or evening phone call with a friend. Maybe we need to commit to reading a really good novel every week of August. We might want a visit to a body of water, or the Landscape Arboretum, or to pull out a lawn chair each night and not miss a single sunset for a week.
This month we will continue to meet over zoom for worship – Pastor Lisa will lead services that focus on awe, beauty and wonder in God’s creation. And we are still planning to be together in-person (and via zoom, both) beginning September 5. Because all we can do is just keep moving forward, knowing that things might - and likely will - keep changing, and as they do, we will keep adapting. We don’t yet know what worship will look like on September 5. Will we be indoors or out? Will we all be masked? How will singing and music work? When it’s time to have those answers, we will have those answers. God always shows us the next step in front of us, and sometimes not very much further than that. But we don’t actually know anything very far ahead of time these days. And that’s ok. We are going to practice trusting. We are going to rest.
Starting on Monday, I will be away for three weeks. For the past year and a half, it has been hard for me to step away – even when I was away. I have carried worry with me, practicing fear. I have not completely rested. But I am going to be very intentional seeing about this time as sabbath time, to let this time reorient me back to God, back to trust. This is God’s world. We are held in God’s love, no matter what and always.
Yesterday, while I was both breathing in the smoky Canadian Wildfire air into my aching, scratchy throat, and also watching an extended family pile out of cars with coolers and picnic blankets and set up next to a basketball court with tiny and big people getting ready to play together, I found myself praying the Serenity Prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. So, I can’t make the air better, or make people get vaccinated – not even people I love. I can’t make covid not be so relentless and contagious. And I can’t even make myself not feel angry or sad or worried or scared.
But I can remember that I belong to God and everyone else. And I can take in the moments of joy and connection. And I can practice noticing and being present. And I can grieve. And I can confess my fear and anger instead of letting them consume and trap me. And I can rest. I can be deliberate about practicing trust. So I pray for the courage to rest. And I invite you to rest this month too.
Just before Paul says to live in unity, belonging and trust, he says why and how we can.
I invite you to receive these words as a benediction:
I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.
