Life Upended

One year ago this week… the world as we -or at least, as I- knew it shut down.

I starting hearing inklings of this new or novel coronavirus when I was preparing to fly back to the United States at the end of February. Transiting through Amsterdam, part of the steady stream of people, pulsing through planes and checkpoints, I was struck (as I often am… or was…) by the interconnected beauty of the world in which we live and the systems we’ve built in order to connect with one another. For the first time, however, that beauty was tempered by another awareness… a vague sense of fragility and dis-ease.

On March 3rd my family and I were wrapping up a short vacation to see my brother in California.  Even with a reports of a cruise ship off the coast with infected passengers unable to disembark, we were largely unaware and unconcerned of what was to come.

 
On March 5th I met with my committee chair to do some agenda planning and recall suggesting that we add COVID-19 to it on the off chance it became a problem for travelers. By the time that meeting came around, on March 9th, COVID-19 contingency planning became the primary focus of our discussion.

On March 12 we had a synod council meeting… 24 people sitting shoulder to shoulder in a small, enclosed room with moderate amounts of ventilation. Unfathomable now but completely normal then. A couple of our larger congregations had just announced that they were going to pause in-person activities out of an abundance of caution; for most others it was business as usual.

 
The next day, March 13, 2020 is when everything seemed to close… and the world seemed to flip upside down - as easily a money changer’s table in the temple court…

 
Coins and cattle scatter everywhere. Toilet paper and bleach disappear. Everyday folks like you and me scramble to figure out What. Just. Happened.

And, what do we do now.

It hasn’t been just a pandemic either… Again and again, the world that many of us have comfortably taken for granted has been upended:

+ On May 25th, 2020… Eighteen miles away from here… Over the course of 8 minutes and 46 seconds the world was upended again as George Floyd was killed while in the custody of police.

+ On November 3rd 2020… Americans went to the polls in a hotly debated and hugely divisive election that both sides claimed was for nothing less than the soul of the nation… the results of reverberate to this day.

+ On January 6th, 2021… Supporters of then-President Trump stormed the United States Capitol in an unprecedented assault on our elected leaders doing their duly appointed jobs.

+ And this says nothing of the coups and political turbulence in other countries, the climate crises triggering wild fires out west and a deep freeze in the deep south, or the personal traumas that come with unemployment, unexpected diagnoses, and losses of all stripes.

The point of rehearsing and rehashing these recent histories is not to add to the world’s litany of woes…

Instead, it is to name that as we enter the Lenten Journey this year and encounter the surprising image of Jesus in today’s text, we do so -or, at least, I do so- with a stronger, lived sense of the powerful dynamics at play when systems and ways of being are turned on their head.

These days and these times are marked both by upset and discord as well as the new life and new periods of creativity that come when the status quo is chucked out the door. 

There is Good News here, I promise you that. How it lands, however, depends a lot on where one sits... 

Originally delivered as part of a Message at Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, Saint Paul, MN on 7 March 2021. For a video of the complete message, click here.