We’ve Been at this
Covid-19 thing for over a year and a half. As former pastor and blogger Carey
Nieuwhof put it, the pandemic has shifted from being an acute crisis to being a
chronic condition.
When the pandemic first
raised its ugly head, most organizations, including churches, including our
church, shifted into survival mode. We all did what we had to do to get through
the crisis, and we adapted our operations to accommodate to the world as it
was. That works fine, and is even necessary, in the short term. But now it is
obvious that COVID is not something we’re going to get past in a few months, it
is something that could potentially affect our way of life for years.
So, this raises an
important question. How do we shift our thinking from
surviving-and-hanging-in-there-until-it’s-over, to how do we answer Jesus’ call
to be his body and his hands and feet in this new world we find ourselves?
When God first led the
Children of Israel out of Egypt, they saw themselves as just that, the
descendants of the patriarch Jacob/Israel. But God was molding them into a
nation, so God provided them with the Law, animal sacrifice, other temple
sacraments, and sacred objects like the Ark of the Covenant to set them apart
as God’s chosen people and reinforce their identity as a nation.
Over the course of their
history, Israel had several designated sacred places where they practiced these
sacraments and kept these sacred objects. First there was the Tabernacle Moses
commissioned while they were wandering in the wilderness. After settling in the
promised land, a more permanent location, Shiloh, was chosen. When David became
King and chose Jerusalem as his capital, the Ark was moved to Jerusalem and
eventually Solomon built the temple that became the center of Jewish life and
identity.
Centuries later, the
people of Judah and Israel were taken into exile and the temple was destroyed
and their sacred objects were plundered. Suddenly the centerpiece of their religious
identity was no longer available to them. They had to figure out how to be who
they were without the very thing that gave them that sense of identity.
During that time in
exile, new innovations were introduced into the Jewish faith. Rabbis, local
synagogues and community owned scrolls of the Torah were developed to fill the
void left by the loss of priests, the temple, and the sacred objects. By the
time the exile was over, many of the Jewish people returned home, and Herod
rebuilt the temple, rabbis and synagogues had become a permanent part of the Jewish
religious landscape.
Why did things not return
to “normal.” I think there are a couple of reasons. First, those who did return
to Israel still saw value in having local teachers and local places to worship
and learn—that’s what had kept Judaism alive during the exile. The second
reason is that a large chunk of the Jewish people never came home; they chose
to, or had to, stay where they were.
In some ways we have
been, and still are, experiencing a form of exile. Things in our lives have
radically changed and many of us are looking forward to things getting back to
normal. Things will settle out to some form of normal, but it won’t be the
normal we knew before COVID. Out of necessity people have developed new habits
and have learned to navigate life in new ways. Some of those acquired habits might
be abandoned when we return from exile, but some of those things will become
permanent fixtures in our landscape.
The truth is, many of us
will choose not to return home. Some of the people who have disappeared during
COVID will never come back—at least not in person. Over the past year-and-a-half
we’ve rewired our brains. New ways of doing things have replace many of the old
and we couldn’t replicate the old normal no matter how hard we tried.
Our job now is to figure out some new ways to
practice our faith and new places to house the sacred. Nobody really knows what
the new normal will look like. We can choose to stubbornly hold onto what was,
or we can creatively lean into whatever comes and seize the opportunity of what
could be.
If we choose to wait for
the old normal to return, we’ll be waiting forever. If we choose to lean into
what comes, we can start being what Jesus is calling us to be right now.
We’ll talk about that in
upcoming posts.
