Your love, O Lord, forever will I sing; from age to age my mouth will proclaim your faithfulness. For I am persuaded that your love is established for ever; you have set your faithfulness firmly in the heavens.
- Psalm 89:1,2
I am writing this meditation after spending a glorious morning at Trinity playing Paul Weber’s Coronamesse (Corona Mass) for the first time in worship. A world premiere! Risky business. Gary Taylor preached about risking our talents for the sake of Christ. Risky again. A congregation coming to church in masks, signing in for contact tracing, sanitizing for communion. Risk. An attempt at streaming our services out for those who cannot attend. (didn’t work) Once again - RISK! An invitation to spend time this month thinking about Justice! Wow! What does God want from us anyway?
Each Sunday that we attempt to worship together in one way or another during this pandemic, and then to go out an act like the Christians we want to be, I think of this quote from Annie Dillard:
“Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”
I suspect we have reached the place of no return at this point. As the numbers rise in the pandemic, even these masked moments of worship together might become too dicey to be sustainable through the winter. Our children, like many of yours, will not come home for the holidays. More of us will have to quarantine at some point. And yet….
The God we worship is faithful to us offering Love that is established forever! And that will sustain us. With each sacrifice, with every uncertainty, as we reach out to one another to connect our mutual humanity and our frail attempt to wake up and follow Jesus again today! A miracle! The steadfast love of our creator will sustain us.
Musical Reflection Moonlight Sonata - Beethoven performed by Marcin
