Recently, I saw a picture of a church with a big outdoor
signboard on the front lawn. The message
on the signboard read, “The church has left the building.”
“The church has left the building.”
This is a powerful message about life under quarantine, expressing
both the anxiety and the tremendous opportunity created by the disruption of
our normal routines and relationships.
We like being church in our building, even though we know intellectually
that the church is not a physical structure.
Our building is beautiful, safe, comforting. It is familiar. We know how to operate within its walls. It is no accident that I’ve chosen to be in
the chapel for our virtual worship gatherings.
But the church is not a building. It is a community of people, a network of
relationships, collectively embodying the presence of Christ in the world. “Let the same mind be in you that was in
Christ Jesus,”[1]
Paul writes to his beloved friends in Philippi.
The church is not just supposed to worship Christ, but to be
Christ. Christ cannot be contained
within the walls of a building. The
church has left the building because that is the only way we can be the church,
the body of Christ, in the world.
Being the church in this way makes us vulnerable to the
suffering and joy of life. In this time
of quarantine, in which we are all affected by the global coronavirus pandemic,
we are compelled to acknowledge our vulnerability. We are “out there,” with everybody else in
this crisis. We don’t have the luxury of
retreating behind the safety of these walls.
Still, it is tempting to try to do so. Last week, St. Aidan’s Church was zoom-bombed
during their virtual worship service.
Someone joined their meeting for the sole purpose of disrupting it. It was a very disturbing experience, leaving
folks feeling exposed and traumatized.
Fr. Cameron, in sharing about this incident, talked about how tempting
it is to create stronger virtual walls to keep people out. It isn’t easy being the church when you’ve
left the building.
Being the church outside the walls can make us anxious. It also can be the occasion of rediscovering
our identity and our purpose as the body of Christ. It can even be an invitation to joy.
In the earliest Christian communities, there were no
buildings for public gatherings. The
church met in people’s homes. For the
first three hundred years of its existence, Christianity was considered to be a
subversive, minority sect and was periodically persecuted under the Roman
Empire. It was suspect, in part, because it aspired to
transcend the usual divisions between rich and poor, slave and free, male and
female, Jew and Gentile. It was admired,
even if misunderstood and rejected, for its service to the hungry, the sick and
those in prison. The church was the body
of Christ in public. It shared the life
and suffering of the world. But it also
was marked by intense solidarity and joy.
Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi is a good
example. Paul is writing from prison,
probably in Rome but maybe Caesarea or Ephesus.
Prisons in the ancient world were squalid, cold, and dangerous. There were no kitchens or hospital
wings. If you wanted to eat, somebody
had to bring you food. If you were sick,
they had to bring you medicine. You were
socially isolated and completely dependent upon the generosity of others. There was some risk involved in visiting a
prisoner, as you might be guilty by association; or, at the very least, exposed
to the unhealthy conditions in the prison.
So, imagine Paul’s joy when Epaphroditus shows up at the
prison bearing gifts from their sisters and brothers in Philippi; probably,
food and blankets, a change of clothes.
He writes to the Philippians primarily to thank them for their generous
support, and to reassure them that Epaphroditus, who became so ill while
visiting Paul that he nearly died, was on his way back home; perhaps carrying
Paul’s letter! Paul tells the
Philippians, “Welcome him then in the Lord with all joy, and honor such people,
because he came close to death for the work of Christ, risking his life to make
up for those services you could not give me.”[2]
Rereading Paul’s letter this week, I could not but help
think of the many people isolated at home or make-shift housing, completely
dependent on the generosity of others to bring them food and medicine. I couldn’t help but think of those in
detention or prison, with no one to visit them.
How much does getting an email or a letter mean to you under quarantine,
which even three weeks ago you would have taken for granted?
How many today are risking their lives to make up for the
services that we can not give to those who are sick and dying? How many of them are suffering moral injury,
having to make traumatic decisions about life and death, who to ventilate and
who to let die, who to bring to the hospital and who to leave at home, because
of the services that our government – we, collectively - failed to
provide? They are doing the work of
Christ at great cost, and they should be honored.
Paul risked much for the people he loved, and they risked
much for him. Yet, it was precisely in
acknowledging and sharing their vulnerability, that they discovered a sense of
meaning and joy that changed their lives.
They lived with open awareness, even when reality was hard to bear. They became Christ, transparent to the
presence and power of divine love, responding to reality with compassion. The church left the building and the world
has never been the same.
In her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit
writes about the joy that people often experience in the midst of natural
disasters and similarly disruptive events, through the renewed discovery of the
bonds of solidarity, community, and service.
What is truly important becomes magnified, the inessential falls away;
our capacity for intuitive and compassionate responses to suffering is
enhanced; we are energized by a sense of collective identity and purpose. In an essay reflecting on this book she
notes,
The positive
emotions that arises in those unpromising circumstances, demonstrate that
social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and
intensely rewarding. What prevents these things from arising most of the time
is the very structure of our economy and society. It’s also ideological . . .
The facets of that ideology have been called individualism, capitalism, social
darwinism, have appeared in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and Thomas Malthus,
but also in the work of most conventional economists, who presume we seek
personal gain for rational reasons and refrain from looking at the ways a
system skewed to that end damages much else we need for our survival and
well-being.
Disaster
demonstrates this, since among the factors determining whether you will live or
die are the health of your immediate community and the justness of your
society. We need ties to survive, but they along with purposefulness,
immediacy, and agency also give us joy—the startling, sharp joy I found over
and over again in accounts of disaster. These accounts of disaster demonstrate
that the citizens any paradise requires—the people who are brave enough,
resourceful enough, and generous enough—already exist. The possibility of
paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes
powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If Paradise nowadays most often
arises in hell, that’s because the chaos of that hell suspends the ordinary
rules and routines; it is not its hellishness but its disruptiveness that
cracks open possibility.
The church has left
the building, forced out by a global pandemic we could not have imagined, only
to discover that Christ has gone ahead of us, manifesting all around us, in
courageous acts of sacrificial love and solidarity. Can we see Christ? Will we be Christ? And when this crisis is over, will we simply
slip back into the building, as if nothing had happened? Or will we cease the opportunity to become
more fully the body of Christ in the world?
Rebecca Solnit asks, “Who are you? Who are we? In times of crisis,
these are life and death questions . . . What you believe shapes how you act.
How you act results in life or death, for yourself or others, like everyday
life, only more so.”[3]
Who are you? Who are we?
We are Christ. “Let the same mind
be in you that was in Christ Jesus”. Manifest
divinity by following the way of Jesus, the way of self-giving love. Jesus willingly engaged the promise and risk
of love in vulnerable solidarity with others.
In his self-emptying he revealed God’s glory. This is the Paschal mystery that we celebrate
as we move into Holy Week. The mystery
of how vulnerability, willingly accepted, releases the power of love into the
world. We become fully human as we give
ourselves away in love, and thereby manifest divinity.
From loss and
death, new life can be born. Suffering
can be redemptive, if it breaks our hearts open to a greater capacity for love
and solidarity. Paradise can be built in
hell. We can choose resurrection, but
only if we are willing to never be the same. Amen.
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