The space between - quarantine

Jeremiah 29:1,4-7

Jeremiah’s Letter to the Exiles in Babylon
These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 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. 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. 

The prophet Jeremiah is given a message to take to the exiles in Babylon - Gods people - driven from their own land, taken into captivity and forced to live in a foreign culture. These were people wondering how to be the people of God in a foreign land, wondering how long they will remain in captivity and how they can ever maintain some sort of identity as the people of God when removed from all that is familiar to them. The message Jeremiah proclaims is one of encouragement to put down some roots where they find themselves:
Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile.
The message to these people is that their business is not to mark time. It's not about holing up and waiting for release, waiting for things to get better. Their business is to LIVE where they are - in the midst of death and destruction.
Although they find themselves in a border land not of their choosing, their task is to discover God in that place with them.
And - To affect the culture in which they find themselves, to make a difference right where they are.
Is it too incredible to imagine that a message written some 2,500 years ago to Gods people in exile has any relevance for the people of God today?
Scattered as we are, locked out of our normal meeting places, devoid of many of the tools with which we normally practice faith, our task, no matter how irrelevant or how marginalised we perceive ourselves to be is to find new ways to positively affect the culture around us.
And to remember and discover anew that it is often in the margins, under stress, that creativity comes to the fore.
I’m not sure that that’s all about taking what we do on a Sunday morning behind sometimes locked doors online. Or about planning how we get everyone safely back into our buildings and what we’ll do there when we emerge. Of course that may be part of it but not at the expense of actually connecting with and impacting the community and the culture around us in the midst of lockdown.

A word I loved to use when I worked in Hospital Chaplaincy is liminal.
For me, that word described perfectly the interface in which I often found myself working - encompassing faith and ritual and tradition and superstition - straddling the chasm that folk often felt when their experience of life and faith to date no longer accommodated the place they found themselves in the landscape of illness - their own or that of a loved one.
That place where there were no easy answers - or any answers at all.
Liminal - a place of transition, a border land.
According to the fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia: “During liminal periods of all kinds, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt.“

In the liminal space in which we find ourselves, locally and globally today, how and where are we finding and signposting God in the midst?
And how is the God we glimpse sitting beside us calling us to be authentic people of faith, a people continually on the move - not simply waiting until we can safely get everyone back in the building and continue where we left off, but a people called to practice faith where we are - listening to the voices of those around - those who are thriving through pandemic restrictions and those whose worst nightmares are coming to fruition? Listening so that we can straddle the gaps with all those in very different places.


The natural human response is to resist liminality and to strive backward to the old familiar identity, or forward to the unknown identity. The ambiguity and disorientation are at times so heightened that the very work required to move forward becomes impossible to engage.
Susan Beaumont: How to lead when you don’t know where you are going







That sounds just about right for the church right now.
There are, inevitably, those who are simply waiting, however long it takes, for things to “get back to normal”. And others, who see possibilities to change everything. And still others who are experiencing such disillusionment with the institutional church, along with systems of justice and government that any way beyond the mess we’re in seems impossible.

Perhaps our task is not so much to learn how to be in a new normal or to plan for a changed future but to listen and listen well - to God and to our community - so that we might discern how to engage with those we are called to be alongside now, seeking prosperity in this land in which we are all exiles.
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. 

Reading the signs

Matthew 16:1-3 
Some Pharisees and Sadducees were on him again, pressing him to prove himself to them. He told them, “You have a saying that goes, ‘Red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning.’ You find it easy enough to forecast the weather—why can’t you read the signs of the times?

As we begin to ponder what emerging from lockdown might mean for gathering as the body of Christ it strikes me that, in this season of Pentecost with the resurrection stories still ringing in our ears, we are once again invited to identify with the disciples as they worked out how to be community together.
Many of us have been discovering or re-discovering the things that matter about being church. We’ve been relearning and reconnecting with the stories of the people of God in every time and place.
We’ve been identifying with the pilgrims on the Emmaus Road, confused and dejected, trying, and failing, to make sense of the events that have overtaken them.
As Jesus walks alongside them, somehow he stabilises the disciples. How? By rooting them again in the ancient stories of faith which which they have grown up. By tracing for them the presence of God with people all through the ages. Jesus grounds them again in their faith - but he also helps them to begin to write the next chapter, the story that continues beyond the empty tomb. “Their eyes were opened and they recognised him in the breaking of bread.” It was in that ritual, a ritual they had shared with Christ just before he died that they were able to make the connection and recognise Jesus sitting at table with them. It was in that ritual that they were given confidence and energy to race back, in the fading light, to Jerusalem to share the news: Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia!
We don’t know when we will be able to gather again to share that meal but we have even more stories to tell than those two disciples on the road to Emmaus. In the midst of pandemic, we can recognise the risen, now ascended Christ, along with the gift of the Spirit walking alongside, helping us to reconnect our stories of faith. And, though we are in uncharted territory, isn’t that always the way of the people of God - learning how to make sense of a changed landscape in the knowledge of the living God by our side?
In confusion, grief, hurt, loss and yearning, we are grafted all the more to Christ the vine who enables and empowers us to keep on walking into the unknown. 
NO GOING BACK  
What Jesus did make clear is that everything was changed. There was no going back to “business as usual”. Living with pandemic takes us there too. Some of us may welcome that more than others. For those of us who long simply to go back to what we know, I wonder how much our perception of what we thought we had is real and not tainted by comfort and cosiness? And how much did what we were doing in our sanctuaries impact our communities?
As we emerge from the Easter season and welcome the Holy Spirit, how willing are we to co-write, with God, the next chapter of the story of God’s people? How prepared are we to walk the road in the darkness and uncertainty even knowing that the risen Christ walks beside us and the Spirit leads us? How will we make room for grief and lament and for fear and uncertainty. And, from our own bewilderment, how bold will we be to risk failure so that we can learn the new road that we are invited to walk as people of faith today?
And how patient will we be in sitting in that place of not knowing, that place of dependence  on God, that place to which we come with empty hands and full hearts and bruised and fragile spirits longing for healing and recommissioning as servants of God for this time? How will we read the signs?

Look to the healers

These are incredible days filled with darkness and with light, with hope and despair, with predictability and surprise. They are days in which we can, in one moment, take hold of our professional competence and, in the next, realise that nothing could have prepared us for ministry in such times and that there is nothing in our metaphorical toolkit that will see us through. And, in this season after Easter, it’s possible that we can identify with the roller coaster on which the disciples seem to ride - those heady days of occasionally glimpsing hope and joy and those plummeting days of recognising that still they could not comprehend. Those restorative moments when it seemed they had a place in the mission of God and the arresting times when they went into processing overload and had no idea which piece of string to attempt to unravel first.
We see it in all the different ways our colleagues react - from those who gleefully put into practice their technology expertise or who enable the folk who can, to those who are paralysed by observing the Herculean efforts of others. We witness those who are nimble and adaptive alongside those who are more sluggish and reactive. We are in awe of those with energy to implement a dozen new ideas before breakfast and empathise with those who simply don’t know where to start or what to tackle first, whose elephant simply won’t be decent enough to divide into bite sized pieces that they might tackle. And, of course, some of us are even managing to be all of these caricatures in any given moment or day.
When all our normal defences, the apparatus of our work, is taken from us, as it has been, to what do we resort?
Richard Holloway very helpfully describes something of the confusion that was embraced 40 years ago when AIDS was emerging as a global challenge, describing how it brought out the best and the worst in folks and exhorts us, in the words of Camus to “strive to be healers”.
It may not be within our gift is to determine, how our communities of faith and the communities we serve will emerge from this pandemic. We are, however, in a position to model love and vulnerability, exploration and commitment. We can share our wondering and our uncertainties as well as our faith in a God who majors in resurrection.
None of us would have chosen this way of cultural renewal and it is not simply opportunistic to recognise that, in time, we might emerge with wisdom and strength, with greater faith and hope. However, that is not, for now, our focus. Our task is not yet to attempt to make sense, to establish a new normal or to attempt to tidy things up. Rather, in the midst of trauma, while clinging precariously to the roller coaster ride of these days we could do much worse than “strive our utmost to be healers”.

Glimpsing resurrection

Matthew 27:61
Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the tomb.

I’ve always been intrigued by the tenacity of the two Marys who sat by the tomb. Why didn’t they simply leave when it seemed clear they could do no more? They had endured a long night and day, accompanying Jesus through all the horrific events that led to his death - the trials, the procession, the crucifixion, the final cry. They witnessed his body being removed and laid in a tomb. And still they waited and returned early after Sabbath. And their reward? Was to witness resurrection firsthand.
On so many levels it makes sense that to witness resurrection we have to stay close to the tomb. Yet often we are busy looking for the next new thing, rushing on from the place of death to work out what we should do next. Indeed we are encouraged not to allow our thoughts to linger on what has been lost but on what has been found. It is counterintuitive to sit with death. Especially in a church anxious for survival, eager to move on to restoration.
Perhaps faith and praxis has to be much more counterintuitive. Perhaps when every other area of our lives is crying out for life to return to whatever a new normal might look like, after this pandemic, even though we know we will be irrevocably changed, perhaps there is a call for people of faith to be slower. Partly because we are often the ones called to minister and accompany people through death and mourning. But also because we want to wait on God to show us the way of resurrection today. We’ve always claimed that we are about discerning the mission of God, about letting God direct our paths. That discernment is going to be critical as we emerge from this time of global trauma and crisis. A quick fix is neither desirable nor sustainable. Rather, attuning our hearts to the “slow work of God” as Teilhard de Chardin puts it will be vital for finding a way through. Yes the rate of change, the rate at which we we’ve had to respond to adaptive challenge has accelerated but we are still called to accompany folk through transition, to care for hearts and minds and to nurture souls. To do that, we must attend to our own souls. That’s why we must be prepared to linger by the tomb - so that we might see for ourselves those discarded grave clothes that symbolise those things by which we no longer need to be held and point to the new beginnings that are possible. Only once we have watched and waited and glimpsed resurrection will we be commissioned as the women were on Easter morning : “Go Quickly and tell the good news.”

Weeping or singing a new song - or both?

Psalms 137:1-4
Lament over the Destruction of Jerusalem
By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How could we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?

In these strange days of Covid-19, with worship gatherings cancelled and all the things we’d normally do to show our care for one another now considered too risky, it’s so easy to feel dejected, perhaps even useless. (Ask me how I know that?) Isn’t it for such a time as this that we responded to God’s call to become ministers of the gospel? What is our purpose if not to reach out physically, spiritually and emotionally to those we are called to serve?
How can we sing the Lord’s Song in this new and strangest of lands?
What did God’s people do in exile? They sat down and wept. They cried out to the God of their ancestors to show them how to be God’s people in a foreign land.
As we find ourselves feeling exiled in these days, as we discover that the familiar songs and the familiar patterns are of no use in this foreign territory, may we take time to feel the loss. And then, from the midst of that loss, may we know God’s purpose for us as we embrace a new reality that we might never have imagined. God’s call has not diminished. The gospel imperative  to love one another is not diminished. Who knows what we might trip over in the darkness, who knows what discoveries we might make that will enable us now - and in the future - to BE church rather than simply do church?
Instead of rushing around trying to find ‘virtual’ ways of doing all the things we’d normally do, how about taking the time to sit down and weep? And then, follow God’s lead as we find new songs and new patterns and new vocations revealed by God who is in every age the ground of our being.
Stay safe, stay well, stay connected - for the love of God.

Intentional and Provisional

Ephesians 3:16-17

I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. 

The Choluteca Bridge in Honduras was built to withstand hurricanes - and it did. It withstood Hurricane Mitch in 1998. However, the resultant flooding caused the river it spanned to chart a different course - and so the bridge became redundant.

As the third tranche of ministers and congregations embark on Path of Renewal, I’ve been struck again by the intentionality and the provisionality of what we are about together with God.

We are intentional about seeking God’s direction and about incorporating into our daily lives practices that will help us in being more aware of God at work all around us and the invitation God extends to us to become involved in that work.  Sometimes that involves rediscovering ancient paths and learning from old monastic disciplines. At other times, it involves finding some new digital practices (and digital sabbath) that allow us to deepen our connection with God and the world in this age. And so we find ourselves being taken in directions we might never have envisaged. 

Perhaps less dramatically but no less significantly, there is an awakening to the subtle changes that are happening as those we engage with and mentor notice too the pervasiveness of God and seek to pay attention to the numinous in our everyday. 

As the awareness of God’s presence grows, what we are noticing is an openness to experiment, to embark on new terrain rather than traversing well known routes, learning to navigate as opposed to simply reading the map.

Even as we chart a new course, however, we are conscious of the provisional nature of any structures we put in place or of any ventures on which we embark. God is always doing a new thing and calls us to be responsive rather than reactive, light of foot yet rooted in love.