That's what it feels like in church thus far into 2021. For our first Sunday, the winter weather did its last second dive into the End Zone to win over having church. The winds of Christmas dropped a big old Christmas tree across the front of the church on the day of our Savior's birth. The heat in Westminster is down, although the furnace is working like a fiend. Pastor has fallen so low as to use football metaphors in his blog post...could we descend any lower?
There is a certain cultural expectation for this. COVID rendered 2020 into a year like no other in our living experience. That led to very high expectations for midnight on December 31 to cause a radical shift back to what we remember as normalcy. Yet things have not changed. The pandemic is still here. The 'rollout' of vaccines has been reported as 'slower' than expected. Things in Washington D.C. ... oi, not going there.
There is one constant in all of this however. It is the reason we have church in the first place. That one constant is our God.
Who's going 'ewwwww', pastor going religious on us? It is well known that the religious is my vocation, but God, why do we always have to hear about God? I hate to say it, but this is a common reaction, in and out of church circles. And I can understand why. It runs parallel to discussions about politics. These are two topics where people, generally, fall into two categories:
1. They have highly developed, polarized points of view of what is right and what is wrong and there is no middle ground for discussion or
2. They are so burned by the highly polarized points of view with no middle ground for discussion that they have tuned out.
They are...we are...some say potato, others say potato...and that cliché loses so much when typed...
But there is one constant, and that is our God.
So whether it be COVID or the burnt over nature of the present political and religious landscape or winter weather or Westminster unheated or...fill in the blank...big or small, tragic or just annoying, one thing is constant and that is our God.
If you look through the Bible...and this is the next spot where I lose people. To be condescending, I might say this is a bored reaction. But as I consider, I do not think it is. I think it is a lack of common experience. What does that mean? It means that as one who is steeped in the wonders of Scripture, it is SO easy for me to presume other people are as into this book as I am. But as I have discovered about my interest in 'science fiction', that presumption that people are as into it as I am just isn't so.
What we know about God, we know from the Bible. What we know is that our God is not a distant, uncaring toymaker who wound up the world and let it go. God is in relationship with us. What we know about that relationship is that God is not some tyrant of whimsy, making impossible and contradictory demands depending on God's mood. Our God is a God of love, which is the foundation of that relationship with us.
And the proof is in God's staying power. No matter what happens, God is with us. And from what we know from the Bible, God does this deliberately. And in a formal manner. In human terms, consider the covenant of marriage. It is something of a cultural joke to talk about 'till death do us part', but that is not the important part of the covenant. To 'love, honor, and cherish', that's the important bit. A license does not define the relationship of marriage, the attitude of the partners does.
For me, an underlying principle to figure out what the Bible is saying is the principle of the covenant. God made us and made our relationship. God's capacity for love, honor, and cherishment is unlimited. Ours, not so much. We are 'only' human. Thank God that God is not.
So through a pandemic, a tree blowing down, a lack of heat, a winter freeze, whatever, God is always with us. And God loves us. And God is there for us. And there is that line in the marriage covenant, 'til death do us part'. Well, God, through Jesus, rewrote that line so that death cannot part us from the love of God. Such is God's covenant with us who know Jesus as Lord and Savior.
So I wonder what is going to happen to us today...whatever it is, God is with me and God is stronger and more loving than whatever might happen.
Peace,
Pastor Peter
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