Thursday, September 30, 2021

How do We Shift Our Focus Away From Mere Survival?

 

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment