church

On the screen, a dozen boxes, a dozen tiny windows into lives and homes, begin to stack like bricks placed by an invisible hand. You can see me, with my bad posture and my tired eyes, a blinking stone already added to a living, breathing, growing thing. Zooming (Have we already verbed that word?) feels like looking in a mirror while wanting a conversation with all of you; I have to learn to stop noticing myself, the way I prop up my own head with my hands. Regardless of environs, I guess self-centeredness always competes with loving others. Maybe now I just see it more clearly because it happens in front of my eyes instead of behind them.

I want to listen better, have asked God to make it so, and now we sit in an online space where I can see just how often the noises I make distract from what you mean to say. We aren’t just learning new routines, new protocols, new jargon; we’re learning to mute ourselves so that others can have full attention. We’re learning not to interject, not to finish one another’s sentences, not to miss the quavering change in each other’s voices. We’re learning to take turns, to seek equity, to touch one another without using our bodies. Even here, God changes us.

It’s not a substitute, this digital place, but in the Name of Love it will have to do. As I look at all the boxes on the screen, all of us open windows, God’s own joists of tissue and bone, I remember that the Spirit builds people into temples. Going to church, it was always the wrong phrase. We are the safe space, and God, whom we could never contain in any of the buildings of our making, explodes all boundaries, even time. Nothing ever limits God, certainly nothing that seems limiting to us.

My worship spills, your worship spills, and the River widens until Living Water pours right here, right now, water erupting from our Rock. We slow, sharing the quenching that cannot be taken away, and my heart swells. God’s people no longer know any deserts.

I think of a favorite passage, unroll it like a scroll: “All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God. Therefore we do not lose heart (2 Corinthians 4:15-16).” All this living that makes us the church–all this sharing Christ as Lord; all this treasure-carrying in bodies of earth that shows the power is God’s; all this living again and again the death and resurrection story; all this hard-pressed, never-crushed life–all this is so that. Just Sunday, we streamed worship, and by way of another flesh and bone brother the Spirit encouraged us to add a so that to our prayers: take this virus away so that; keep our family safe so that. So that what? All this, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God. So that we pass on grace to every life we touch and thanksgiving spreads and people live and God’s glory grows far, far more than counts of infection and devastation. Right now, in some space that isn’t a space at all, grace floods, and our thanksgiving overflows.

Before we sign off, we pray.

We open our hands and close our eyes and talk to God together, children crowding on His lap, remembering a promise: If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land (2 Chronicles 7:14).

Praying always forces me to recognize that silencing my lips comes more easily than silencing my thoughts. I listen to you and you and you murmuring to God and my heart nods, whispering assent to your heartfelt words, and I feel wonder, understanding suddenly that it’s only as we begin to speak to God that we finally, mercifully, forget ourselves. While glory grows; we all become a cloud of witnesses: Would you heal? Would you save?

Amen, let it be so. Let it be, so that.

We open our eyes; we lift our heads; we take a new collective breath, and gratitude spills, again.