15 March 20 Homily
March 15, 2020
11:00 a.m.
Third Sunday of Lent
Worship by Zoom
One week ago today, many of you were with our friend Sr. Alison McCrary at the Solomon Center for the annual Women’s Retreat. Welton Gaddy was preparing to lead worship at St. Charles with the remnant of those remaining in town. We were all bemoaning the time change as the greatest inconvenience we’d recently known. What could be worse than losing an hour on a Sunday morning!!!
I was with my family in Birmingham. By now, I had already preached at Baptist Church of the Covenant (who worships at 9 a.m.—8 a.m. with time change) and stood in line shaking hands and hugging and loving on people for over half an hour. Even a week ago I was feeling very nervous about that level of physical contact and immediately slathered my hands with hand sanitizer after the greeting line was over. A COVID outbreak in New Orleans still seemed like a mild-but-certain possibility, and I was still hopeful that limiting things like our coffee and refreshment time would be enough.
You’ve lived the past week with me, so you know how rapidly developing every day has been. Sometimes everything has changed within an hour. Or even within 15 minutes. On Sunday, I mentally debated whether or not it would be safe to all touch the same coffee carafe. By Friday, my children are out of school well into May, and we are learning to worship and gather virtually.
This is where we are. This is the place where we find ourselves today, and I’m so grateful to see your faces and hear your voices as we hold space together to remember we may be in our homes, but we are not alone.
I turned to two favorite passages of scripture today. Psalm 46 calls us to be still and know what is truer than true even when what we are facing is terrifying.
I was in Rouse’s on Friday morning, anticipating that school would be canceled for two…maybe three weeks. I wanted to stock up on more food than I’d already purchased at Costco that same week, and clearly everyone in that store knew that our lives would be changing tremendously by the end of that day. I kept circling past one woman, the way you do at the grocery store, who was likely in her 80s. She wore surgical gloves and looked so afraid with every item she placed in her cart. Something about that moment made me realize we weren’t just talking about an abundance of caution. We were talking about our neighbors who are scared and fragile. We were leaning into radical acts of love that some would perceive to be histrionic and over-reaction but would be because we understand the call to love our neighbors just as we love ourselves.
I always think part of the challenge in those words of Jesus is the call to love myself. I struggle there and know I have work to do in valuing my own worthiness. But in our response to Coronavirus, I really do believe if we value our love of self over our love of neighbor. Does it reframe this time at home to think of it as a radical act of love? If staying home right now is a radical act of love, then what are we to do with this time?
The passage from Jeremiah 29 is a special one to me because this is the text I used 7 years ago this September to preach in view of a call at St. Charles. The people of Israel are lost to exile—far from home, far from temple, far from what is familiar. And the prophet calls to them where they are and tells them to be there fully.
Let’s listen again:
Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 6 Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. 7 But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.
Right now we have planned to suspend our church activities for 3 Sundays. And schools are closed through Easter. But if you’ve seen the numbers out of Italy and South Korea that Brod Baggert from Together Louisiana has been sharing (or many other news sources available everywhere), you know we’re on the climbing side of the curve and not the down side. This may take awhile. It’s scary not just to think about getting sick or our loved ones getting sick, but it’s scary not to know how long this will last or what the consequences will be on the other side of such an unprecedented hiatus from life as usual.
But God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear.
The only thing to do right now is be here in this place. Live in it. Dig in the soil and feel the way it slows you and centers you. Reach out to people in the ways you can and seek their welfare. Even in exile, the Lord hears you and is with you and is participating in the flourishing of all things and all people.
Just two and a half weeks ago, we gathered for Ash Wednesday. I said that I was entering the season of Lent thinking about how we as a people are called to reflect on our presence and voice in this world. Not just as individuals, but as a collective. How are we as a people called to release old ways that distance us from who we’re called to be? How are we as a people called to take on ways of being that make us spark like light in darkness?
I challenged you that night to consider what it means for us simultaneously to come from the earth and to be called to care for everything and everyone it holds. Throughout the season of Lent we were to ask: What old ways are too small for you and prevent you from living into the fullness of who God created you to be? What practices will sustain and restore you, making you come alive for good? How is God calling us as a people, a collective, to consider our calling and our mortality in the season of contemplation stretching out before us?
God knows, I wasn’t thinking that we’d be here fewer than three weeks later. But here we sit. And the same questions are before us. How, in this unexpected wilderness season, are we called as a people to take on ways of being that make us spark like light in darkness? In this exile, what practices will sustain and restore you, making you come alive for good? In an uncertain time with an uncertain ending, how will we live? How will we love? How will be be moved and changed by the presence of God right exactly where we are?
That is our work right now. To be here. A radical act of love. Listening to the ways Spirit is moving even now. And when it feels like to much, return to these words: God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear.
Amen.
CALL TO PRAYER
Just as we do when we are together in person, even from our separate homes we hold silence together as we pray for our city, our nation, and our world.
Let us pray.
SILENCE
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE
O God,
On this Lenten journey, we expected wilderness to be a metaphor but not a reality. We who take for granted the tremendous freedom we have to come and go as we please, gathering for worship, lingering over coffee, adding in a long lunch together. Now here we are.
It is frightening to recognize we have so little control over what is happening around us. The uncertainty of the days ahead still feels surreal. Remind us that slowing our pace is an act of love and distancing ourselves from face-to-face community is our participation in and for the common good. These steps are prayers.
For those who are terrified, we pray your Spirit’s presence. For those who are deeply impact by COVID-19, we pray for their physical care and their emotional calm. For friends in our community who are vulnerable and feeling isolated, we pray your deep peace be with them.
In these days when there is little else to do but wait, call us to be the fullness of who you have created us to be. May our doing be entirely wrapped up in our being. Kindness to neighbors and strangers. Moments of simple beauty. Slow walks through the neighborhood. Full afternoons of gardening and noticing. Reaching out by phone, email, written note, FaceTime, and every other way to friends and loved ones who are feeling very alone and a little afraid.
May this unexpected time turn into a resting season when we return to ourselves and to you in unexpected ways. It is with the steps of Christ before us, the Spirit’s breath within us, and the Love of God around us, that we are bold to live just as we are bold to pray, saying:
Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth, As it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, Forever. Amen.