After the Blip
March 21, 2021
John 15:1-8

I’m skipping ahead in John by 7 full weeks because the imagery is just too good and too perfect to wait. I want to leap into John 15 today while we’re still all at home. Still all on our screens. Still in the pandemic bubbles where we have sheltered for over 12 months.

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. 2 He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes[a] so that it will be even more fruitful. 3 You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. 4 Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.

5 “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. 6 If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. 7 If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

I have loved it here in this bubble. Nathan and I will mark 20 years of marriage in just 2.5 weeks. We haven’t spent this kind of time together ever. Our son turned 15 this past week, and we celebrated in the park with friends yesterday. Our daughter turned 12 in January, and we marked her birthday the same way. It’s a new normal, but it’s not altogether the worst normal for my little family. (I recognize not everyone has had the experience we’ve had, so I’m fully aware of the privilege in every word I’m saying.)

One of the things we did during the year at home was watch all of the Marvel movies from Captain America to Spiderman: Far From Home to WandaVision to this weekend’s premier of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Mostly, I want you to know how thorough our deep dive into the Marvel Comic Universe has been. Without nerding out and going into great detail, I’ll just say there was a moment in one scene where the antagonist makes 50% of the universe disappear with a single snap. He has these stones and a special glove…it’s complicated…but he snaps and 50% of Earth and everywhere else just crumbles into dust and vanishes.

Good guys rally, they come up with a plan, it involves some kind of quantum wormhole transport thing…and they are able to snap again and bring everyone back. But this second snap happens five years later. And even though they can somehow time travel, they can’t un-do the passage of those 5 years. So everyone returns to a world that has been changed. A world that has grieved. They refer to this time as The Blip. 

I feel like we’re emerging from a Blip here. Everyone’s experience has been different. And some day we’ll look back on this time and refer to it succinctly as The Pandemic Year. Those words won’t at all capture what was lost and who was lost and what changed forever and the beautiful parts that were actually really good. *Blip* Now half of us are planning to show up in the Fellowship Hall next week while half of us remain on this zoom channel. Things are changing again.

I’ve been teasing out this transition over the past two weeks. There are parts of the old life I don’t miss and parts I likely will not welcome back. Working from home has been really good for me. I’m often far more productive—in writing and even in meetings—at home than I am in other places. We’ve all figured out that cutting out the transit time of meetings has also left more time for going on a walk, making another pot of coffee, or tending the garden. That flexibility and freedom sustains me. Sitting in the sun to write is better for me than sitting in an office. And so I plan to continue as much of that as I possibly can.

But here’s the real thing that I haven’t missed in our Pandemic Blip. The real thing that we have all known for a decade that has been a drain on our budget and an albatross on our community’s proverbial neck. I haven’t missed the building.

Sure, I’ve missed watching the crepe myrtles and azaleas bloom in the courtyard. I’ve missed tracking the progression of Carnival by witnessing the Japanese magnolia’s unfurling. I’ve missed the light streaming in through our second floor sanctuary and the sound of the streetcar rumbling by in the middle of a prayer. I’ve missed meals around tables with you.

But I haven’t missed peeling plaster. And leaks. And Carolyn’s daily reports of how yet another line has shown up in the floor because a Community Partner doesn’t value our building the way she does.

I gave myself months and months of permission to avoid the historic preservation work we had begun with the National Fund for Sacred Places because honestly—I was completely and totally overwhelmed after attending that training in Chicago in November 2019. It’s daunting. Architects and mold and water and old buildings and fundraising and asking people about what’s in the checking accounts rather than what’s in their hearts—it’s just not me. It’s not who I am. It’s not what makes me come alive. I know we’re facing decades of deferred maintenance, and the time has come that we must just face the conversation about the building but DO SOMETHING about the building.

So the respite I have found in this pandemic year has both nourished my spirit and allowed me to see the way we do church with new eyes.

In Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, Barbara Brown Taylor writes, ”All these years later, the way many of us are doing church is broken and we know it, even if we do not know what to do about it. We proclaim the priesthood of all believers while we continue with hierarchical clergy, liturgy, and architecture. We follow a Lord who challenged the religious and political institutions of his time while we fund and defend our own. We speak and sing of divine transformation while we do everything in our power to maintain our equilibrium. If redeeming things continue to happen to us in spite of these deep contradictions in our life together, then I think that is because God is faithful even when we are not.” 

As we begin to emerge from our Pandemic bubbles and re-engage life as a congregation, I want to hold to the best of who we have been as a people in the past year. We have met every single week for worship—to pray and share and study and learn and center ourselves. We have laughed and played and delighted together in Happy Hour—no agenda. No requirements. No preparation. Just being together. I have watched friendships grow and witness guards dropping as we could relax at home and just be ourselves in these little zoom boxes.

More of that, please! All of it!

I have also spent hours every week (at least since mid-summer 2020) working on the St. Charles Center for Faith + Action. Not just working *for* The Center, but working on it. Alongside Becky Meriwether and Tina Clark and Ryan Harvey and a fantastic Board of Directors, I have been helping to build this Center that came out of planning and discerning that our congregation did in early 2019.

Kevin Hagan, Tucker Wannamaker, and Brendan Bailes came down from D.C. and spent a couple of very long weekends with us. They taught us zoom. They gave us homework. They listened to our passions and interests. They heard us saying we are a congregation of progressive faith and purposeful action. They hard us speak freely and easily about our knack for convening—bringing all kinds of people together for meaningful gatherings and vital conversations. They also heard us saying that it wasn’t just enough to bring people together to talk about things that matter, we also want to participate in doing good in and for our world. We want impact.

But the first weekend with Thrive Impact wasn’t where this conversation started. When I first came to St. Charles for my very, very, entirely—too-long interview with the Pastor Search Committee in June 2013, there was already conversation about what to do with the building. Rumors had spread that the Trustees were talking with realtors and not being transparent about those conversations with the congregation. Some wanted to sell. Others wanted to stay. And I know from talking with Steven Meriwether that this conversation stretches back at least as long as his tenure.

We know who we are as a people.

We know what we value and love.

We know what makes us come alive.

We know what inspires us to beauty and grace and equity and justice. 

And dealing with our enormous, old building and it’s myriad problems just ain’t one of our priorities. Period.

Stay with me here as I work to pull these three pieces together—lessons from the Pandemic, our work with Thrive Impact, and the National Fund for Sacred Places grant.

A team emerged from our work with Thrive that created the framework for the St. Charles Center for Faith + Action. It would be our missional legacy, we said. In the same way that St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church once contributed to the life of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and the vibrancy of Baptist Hospital, we would infuse our intellect, our curiosity, our love for our neighbors into the Center. 

We established a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and legally named the Church as the sole member of the Center. That means the Church and Center are legally tethered together, though still separate and independent.  But the work of the Center matters to the life of the Church, and we will see that relationship grow even more this year with the hiring of the Center’s first Executive Director who will also work with the Church on Community Engagement. 

Here’s the phrase I want to parse just a bit: our missional legacy.

What do we mean when we say the St. Charles Center for Faith + Action will be the missional legacy of the St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church?

I can’t speak for you, so I’ll tell you what I mean.

Remember a few years back how I constantly asked us to imagine ourselves 5 and 10 and 15 even 20 years into the future as we dreamed about our church? And I reminded us that it wasn’t enough think about our church, we had to age ourselves into that visioning—when I am 50, what does our church look like? When I am 50 and you are…76, 97, 83. 

When I say the St. Charles Center for Faith + Action will be the missional legacy of the St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church, I mean that I believe the Center is likely to outlive our congregation. 

I don’t think I’ve ever put it that succinctly before, so sit with that for a moment and any possible objections you may have to what I’m implying.

In 20 years, when I am 63…and you are 110 and 95 and 89…

The St. Charles Center is a seed we have planted. And the Capital Campaign and addressing the needs of our physical campus is part of tending the soil around the Center. 

If we are talking about replacing HVAC and mending walls and upgrading the innards of this old but beautiful sacred place JUST FOR OURSELVES, then I can’t do it. We’ve had amazing worship and gathered as true community for 12 months without entering that space a single time. We don’t need it, and I can’t get excited about the yeoman's work ahead of me if ALL OF THAT effort is just for the 50 of us.

Listen to this quote again from Barbara Brown Taylor: ”All these years later, the way many of us are doing church is broken and we know it, even if we do not know what to do about it. We proclaim the priesthood of all believers while we continue with hierarchical clergy, liturgy, and architecture. We follow a Lord who challenged the religious and political institutions of his time while we fund and defend our own. We speak and sing of divine transformation while we do everything in our power to maintain our equilibrium. If redeeming things continue to happen to us in spite of these deep contradictions in our life together, then I think that is because God is faithful even when we are not.”

How is the work before us about divine transformation, the redeeming of things, challenging the religious and political institutions of our time?

What if we look at this capital campaign as preparing our house and getting it in good order before we pass it along to our children?

What if the St. Charles Center for Faith + Action continues to grow financially and in the breadth and scope of both support and impact, and takes on all of the Community Partnerships we have in the building in addition to the relationships the Center is cultivating in this city and across the region and nation?

What if the physical campus itself becomes a true Center for Faith + Action with retreats, conferences, arts events, speaker series, cohorts of discernment and shared justice work?

What if, in 5 years or in 10 years, the St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church can continue to worship in that same space with the light streaming in through the windows and the streetcars rumbling by in the middle of a prayer, but the Church is one of the Community Partners and the Center is taking care of the HVAC and the sound equipment?

What are we coming back to? I don’t want to go back into the church building after this Pandemic Blip and pretend that nothing happened. I don’t want to move through a Capital Campaign and all of the work that it entails and pretend that the future of our church is numeric growth with dozens of families joining and eventually needing to reclaim all of our Sunday school space. I certainly welcome being wrong about that. I welcome experience that challenges the data on Gen X and Millennials and Gen Z increasingly naming themselves as “done” with religious life or identifying with no religious tradition. 

But I really do think we can choose between working against the trends and shifts in our larger culture or embracing where those trends and shifts seem to be taking us and riding them like surfers ride a wave. 

I want to rethink how we do church not just so we are about divine transformation and the redeeming of things, but so we are really telling the truth. So we are walking with our eyes open. So we are clear about what matters most and what does not.

That’s why I skipped ahead to John 15 today. You’ve likely forgotten it by now, so here’s a refresher: 

I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.

John is playing in all of these gardening metaphors again, and I love it. Seeds and soil, vines and branches, pruning and tending, all the way to the garden of the resurrection where the Risen Lord is assumed to be a gardener. 

I’ll spend my afternoon weeding and making space for the zinnias and rudbeckia and cosmos that Nathan has been growing in seed trays. We’re waiting for the liastra to arrive before we determine where everything will go. 

The seeds were planted weeks ago and have altogether disappeared. They were submerged in soil, never to be seen again. Some of them just stayed right there. Others split open in the warmth and moisture of that dark place, and by allowing themselves to be completely split open, new life has found its way up into the sunshine.

That’s the point of all that weeding and tending and pruning—to make space for life to reach out into the light and flourish.

I can do the work of the Capital Campaign. I can do the work of needed restoration of our building. I can meet with funders to build out the Center and donors to make possible the historic preservation work. I can do all of those things WITH YOUR PARTNERSHIP, if we have an honest, passionate vision about where all of of this work is taking us in the next 5 and 10 years. 

We are not creating a museum to 20th century protestant Christianity. That’s not why we are willing to give of ourselves and do this kind of work. We believe that the efforts of the next year or two are efforts of planting seeds that will one day grow. We believe that the investment we are making in the St. Charles Center is tending a new vine that has emerged from our own. We understand that we are participating in something that will outlive most of us and will hold a different kind of space for our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to ask questions, seek justice, love neighbors, and welcome all for decades to come. 

Think on these things with me, my friends. Let’s talk and process in the days and weeks to come. And let’s slowly return to a community life in person that is thoughtful, purposeful, about divine transformation and the redeeming of things, and rooted in the love of Jesus the Christ. Amen.