A Purposefully Small Church: Walking to Church

Americans are a mobile people. We drive, we move, we commute, and now in COVIDtide, we telecommute. A recent article in the New York Times suggested that the societal impacts of coronavirus extend well beyond health implications- going so far as to restructure the way we work, and even the layout of a very cities. It seems that technology has finally made good on its promise to liberate us from the office: we can choose to work wherever we want.

If you listen to our rhetoric, diversity (whether cultural, religious or racial) is a good thing; but when you look at our mobile lives, with more freedom of choice than we have ever had in human history, we see quite a different picture. When people can choose where they work or live, they almost always choose to be around people like themselves. This choice actually has a disastrous effect on our city commons- because we are never around people unlike us, we fear them or misunderstand them much more easily. Freedom, choice and mobility has led to polarity and conflict, not utopia.

In this cultural moment, walking to a small neighborhood church is one of the most rebellious things you can do. It makes our religious liturgies exist in space and time. It forces us to be both visible and incarnational in our neighborhoods. And when they see us from their front porch, it forces our neighbors to ask, “Where are all the people that I like in my neighborhood walking to on Sunday mornings?” By walking weekly, we establish rhythms of visibility and presence in our neighborhood; the same neighborhood that we love and serve throughout the week.

The News Became Flesh

Devotional
Have you been watching the News recently? Not just in the context of the current pandemic, but before that. As the capabilities of information technology increased, from the written word to the telegraph, telephone to the Internet, the News has become a bigger facet of our everyday lives.

I don't mean the News that happens around us every day, in our immediate relationships: weather, sports, local government reporting, etc. A central facet of the News is that it happens far away; its shocking in some way, and it incites in us a feeling of obligation to do something about it, even though, because of the boundaries of space, time, and our own creatureliness, nothing can be done. The News is wars and rumors of wars, as Jesus once said. It calls our imaginations away from the present, away from the places where we CAN have an impact... or could have, if our imaginations, hearts, and muscles had been devoted to loving that place. Which is what makes it so shocking when the News changes your daily life. Is this why we are so resistant to taking action which might spare our neighbors and ourselves? Because we know (or at least we have been trained to believe) that the News is something that happens somewhere else. The coronavirus is as much an outbreak of the News as it is a virus.

COVID-19: and the News became flesh, and dwelt among us.

The Way of Jesus is not the way of the News. Though Jesus transcended all boundaries in his power, sitting enthroned in the heavens, he gave that selfsame power up. "And though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant." Let that sink in: to save the world, Jesus could have snapped his fingers; instead, he poured himself into a particular time, into a particular place, and loved with a life-giving, self-sacrificing love the people who were six inches in front of his face. 

And the Logos became flesh, and dwelt among us.

To be a Christian in the time of coronavirus is to follow the pattern of our savior: to voluntarily limit ourselves for the sake of others. As we have been saved, so now we save. 

A quote:
“But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time...of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is always more than a little strange here...It is in the world, but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.” - Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

For discussion:
1. What are some steps you can take to limit yourself for the sake of the vulnerable among us?
2. Before this epidemic happened, how did your lack of limitation harm others? Can you think of ways in which pouring yourself into the particularities of the present actually served somebody?
3. Think of some ways to pray- not for the epidemic as a whole, but for your immediate neighbors and family in the midst of it. 

A prayer for God's presence, from Psalm 144:
    [1] Blessed be the LORD, my rock,
        who trains my hands for war,
        and my fingers for battle;
    [2] he is my steadfast love and my fortress,
        my stronghold and my deliverer,
    my shield and he in whom I take refuge,
        who subdues peoples under me.
    [3] O LORD, what is man that you regard him,
        or the son of man that you think of him?
    [4] Man is like a breath;
        his days are like a passing shadow.
    [5] Bow your heavens, O LORD, and come down!
        Touch the mountains so that they smoke!
    [6] Flash forth the lightning and scatter them;
        send out your arrows and rout them!
    [7] Stretch out your hand from on high;
        rescue me and deliver me from the many waters.

Farming and Philosophy

In an excellent interview in the New York Times, Wendell Berry poses the question: What if our modern desire to live with total freedom, without limits, is the thing that is destroying our culture economically, agriculturally, and environmentally?

A deeper question: what if that desire isn’t just modern?

What if the incarnation of God (and his body throughout time) into a particular place is the only hope?

“We will have to go back to tradition. I am unsure when we began to think of, for instance, the 15th Psalm and Jesus’s law of neighborly love as optional. They are not optional, as I think the Amish example proves, and as proved by present failure.”

— Wendell Berry

More Spiritual than God

““There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.””

— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

God's Presence in a Fractured World

Marten van Valckenborch, The Tower of Babel, circa 1600

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold..."

A 2016 analysis by Factiva showed that these lines, written by the Irish Poet W. B. Yeats a century ago, were quoted more often in the first seven months of 2016 than in the previous 30 years put together. Our cultural and civic moment is fractured; we feel like we have less in common with our neighbors than ever before. 

We have been here before, humankind. That first moment of fracture at the Tower of Babel (cf. Genesis 11:1-9) pitted neighbor against neighbor in a triumph of misunderstanding and mutual animosity, as each asserted himself as King. And "there was war in the night, and no man knoweth whom he strikes." But into that conflict, God called Abram, not to destroy his enemies, or (more difficult to resist, for anyone who has spent time on Nextdoor or Facebook) his neighbors, but to bless the nations with the same love that God had shown him. God's healing presence with His people would become God's healing love for the world. That healing presence, finding its ultimate fulfillment in Jesus, the King, the Prince of Peace.