From the Study...

Dear Friends,

            We could use some Easter right about now. It has been a long two years since that Easter of 2020 when things over the world were freshly closed after COVID-19 came to town. We had just celebrated Ash Wednesday a few weeks before and were about a third of the way through the 40 days of Lent when the word came out on Sunday, March 15, that everything except what was ‘essential’ had to come to a stop, including schools. Churches were not required to close, but almost all did. That first pandemic Easter was an exercise in creative improvising. By then I think we had graduated from a cell phone on a tri-pod, through a laptop computer on a music stand, to an actual video camera, all sending live stream images through a YouTube channel. The congregation was the camera and whatever unseen faces there were watching from the other side of the lens. They didn’t teach any of this in seminary, but, thanks to some make-do ingenuity and the talent of some tech-savvy members of the church, we made it work.

            When it was again allowed, the people gradually began coming back to church. It has been a long and slow process, and it needed to be. The church we are coming back to isn’t the same one we were kept from attending two years ago. Having time away from something gives you time to think about why you were there to begin with. You think about which parts of it were meaningful and which were there only because they always have been. You think about what needs to change as the world has changed, and what connects you with the deepest parts of the faith and must never be changed because it ties you to the spiritual roots that give you life and define you as a child of God and sister or brother of Christ. We’re taking stock of where God seems to be leading us as we walk together into His future. Even though COVID lingers and threatens while there is the ongoing background noise of nations and people in conflict, we are taking those first steps of this path that God has set before us.

Fortunately, Easter is on the way … and will be here very soon. The palms of Palm Sunday will begin the gatherings of Holy Week. They will lead us to the glory of the rising sun and the risen Son of God on Easter Day. This is affirmation that God is putting new life back in the Church of Jesus Christ … and that each of us is a part of that life.

Grace and peace,

Mike