Devotional for the Rio Texas General/Jurisdictional Conference Delegation - March 26, 2020

So, fellow delegates, if we thought things were weird before, we just didn’t quite have all the information. From the denominational perspective, the amount of flux we’re having to get our heads around during this pandemic is tremendous. General Conference, postponed to more than a year out. Jurisdictional Conference, a date to be set by the Council of Bishops, who represent many places and positions. Annual Conference, scheduled for Corpus in June, which could easily have to be canceled but hasn’t been yet. So we wait in the unknowing.

Of course, the unknowing extends way beyond dates of when things will and won’t happen. How will we United Methodists, who only barely made it out of St. Louis still standing, and who were driven to the mediating table by our utter failure, continue to live in the same house for another year and a half? What will happen to complaints and abeyance and churches and people who are all ready to start a new thing? This Book of Discipline, which has been a good guide to us but which also burdens and constrains nearly everyone, no matter what side you’re on—how do we keep living under these rules?

As surely you’re all accustomed to answering your children, your parishioners, your friends—I don’t know. But when I don’t know, I always try to look again for what I do know.

I am intrigued by this week’s intersection between the lectionary gospel text and the moment our country and our world are experiencing. I know a bunch of you don’t follow the lectionary, but the Lenten cycle in Year A is one of the most meaningful series of scriptures there is for me. This week’s story is John’s account of the raising of Lazarus. Jesus, who seemingly waits to go to Bethany until Lazarus is good and dead; his visceral anger at the grief he finds there among his friends; the physicality of this dead body, which has begun to stink and decompose, already making its way back to the earth from which it came. Jesus stands there, at the gate between life and death, right at the spot where the hinge opens and closes for us, the place of our ultimate powerlessness. There stands Jesus.

As we stand in that sort of doorway, we’ve all heard tales recalled of the influenza epidemic of 1918. The stunning graph that speaks to us from over a century ago, proving the value of putting physical distance between us to slow the spike of contagion and giving us the term, “flattening the curve.” Accounts of the impact of sunshine and fresh air on recovery rates. Trying to imagine what it would have felt like as a nation to be at war, already sending our young into harm’s way, and watching soldiers, whole swaths of them, struck down by the virus before they even reached the battlefield, before they even crossed the ocean.

I recall the stories from my own family—how my grandfather, then a seven year-old, watched his mother die in November 1918 and then spent the next 93 years, until his own death at the age of 100, never having gotten over the death of his mother. My grandmother’s cousin, a five year-old that same year, who at her mother’s funeral kept trying to climb into the casket with her mother’s body.

I recount these memories, not to be morose. I tell them in part because I wonder what the mark of that time felt like to the society as a whole. We have largely forgotten now, and hopefully our historians can go back and help us remember. But that sort of collective trauma or grief must have left its mark on those people, as I believe we will happen to us in this current crisis. It definitely marked the individuals who lived through it. A very unscientific study of my own family shows that these who suffered so as little ones yet somehow lived long, full lives that overflowed with service and blessing for others. That wasn’t the whole story, but alongside the grief they carried, it was part of their legacy for the world, by God’s grace.

What will be the story for us? Will the time of economic breakdown, distancing, illness and even death that lies before us make us different? Will it impact the polarization in our society and the fight over irreconcilable differences in our church? We know of so many times in recent memory when we’ve been willing to suspend our fighting, our judgments, in order to respond in compassion to our neighbors. 9-11. Hurricanes, from Katrina to Harvey. Even in our churches, when the tragic death occurs, the casseroles and memorial checks come from all sides. Social psychologists help us understand why that is, but we also know that the duration of the golden moment is limited. We always seem to snap back to our old patterns of seeing and relating to one another. In this case, my morose wondering is, especially if we start putting bodies in the ground, bodies of people we know and love, what will the impact be on us and on our journey as a church?

I’m sorry this is all so dark. But we are in darkness, in this moment of unknowing, wandering in the depths of our hearts as we try to examine them during this most extraordinary Lent—and in this moment, Jesus stands in the doorway and proclaims, “I am the resurrection and the life.” When we weep, he weeps with us. When we die, he even dies with us. And yet. He stands in that doorway with us as the one who holds the key. He speaks and invites us, at the grave itself, into life that is incorruptible, that shines brilliant, giving off light and heat, burning off the death that clings so closely.

I learned from sermons I heard long ago that only the dead are available for resurrection. Pretending this is not happening to us and that it will not change us, that we will not in some ways die—as families, as a society, as a church—is both futile and an ignorance of the gift our Lord seeks to give us.  Because the flip side of saying that only the truly dead can be resurrected is that there is no grave that can keep hold of a body called out by Jesus. There is no doorway closed to him. And we don’t have to wait for the trumpet to sound on the last day to find that out. This victorious life in Christ is his gift to us right now. He speaks life into our death, right now.

A friend noted the ways our fragile earth is already responding to the coronavirus crisis. The cloudy waters in Venetian canals have settled. The smog-laden air over places in China is measurably clearer. We are for now taking to the streets, meeting our neighbors (from a safe distance), leaving gifts of art and humor for each other along the way. These are not full or permanent shifts, to be sure, but they are signs to us, signs like one Jesus showed his people in the gospel of John. What we see is not all there is. It’s not all that can be.

So we are entering both a time that is unimaginable for us and one when we will most need our imagination. What might lie on the other side of this crisis? What redemption might come of our suffering? As a church, what fight or structure might die that needed to go, and what life-filled body might take its place? How will Jesus use us during this time to call out life to the world, especially to those whose suffering started way before COVID-19?

As Jesus tells us over and over, do not fear. Not because the moment is not fearsome, for it is. We fear not, because the Lord of life stands with us, calling your name and mine, and he has conquered even the grave itself.