Tag: coronavirus

Rest for the Weary

Heidi Torgerson

a sermon on Matthew 11:16-19; 25-30

(singing)
Rest for the weary…
Rest for the weary…
Welcome everyone…
To the love of God.

I first learned the simple song Come Let Us Worship God, by Ray Makeever, at the opening worship service of a Summer Missionary Conference many years ago now. The particular verse I just sang has been lilting its way through my mind all week. Friends, there’s a lot going on in the gospel text from Matthew that I just read. But truthfully, all I could hear this week were Jesus’ words at the end, which feel like the kind of grace that pours itself out as cool water over our parched souls.

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

+++++

Come to me, all you that are weary and burdened by this pandemic.

If my count is right, it’s been 107 days since Governor Pritzker issued the first stay-at-home order for the state of Illinois. So much of what once grounded our lives and our relationships and our routines became unavailable to us literally overnight. Public health somehow became a partisan political issue and the onslaught of news and information became almost too much to take in. COVID-19 distress became so intense for so many people that the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control issued guidelines for protecting mental health in the midst of the outbreak. The uncertainty about how long this will last and what life will look like on the other side puts us in a constant state of disorienting anxiety. There’s really no way to measure the depth of all that we’ve already lost, nor the complicated feelings of grief that have taken up residency in our spirits as COVID has taken up residency in our world.

Hear the promise of Jesus: Come to me, and I will give you rest.  

+++++

Come to me, all you that are weary and burdened by your responsibilities.

Life asks so much of us, even in normal times. We are trying to work full-time and parent full-time all at once and we’re certain we’re not doing either thing very well. We are caring for aging parents who don’t understand why we can’t visit them, or whose frustration over loss of independence comes out sideways in ways that sting. We are supporting family members or friends who are managing significant health issues, or childcare crises, or job losses. We ourselves got laid off, or our gigs were all canceled, and the hustling required to find a way to pay the bills is almost enough to knock us flat. Our country seems to be crumbling around us and we care deeply about civic and community issues. We want to be involved, but then also we feel guilty, because even though we know it’s critically important we can’t fathom how we could possibly take on even one more thing. We can’t keep up with the housework or the laundry or manage to get the oil changed, and seriously? These people in our house need to eat yet one more meal?! Didn’t they just eat, like, hours ago?!

Hear the promise of Jesus: Come to me, and I will give you rest.

+++++

Come to me, all you that are weary and burdened by loneliness.

I have a friend who lives in another state, far away from her family of origin. She’s a young, single professional with a strong social network, and she happens to live alone. The other day she remarked that it has been 92 days since she has physically touched another human being. Some of us know that same kind of loneliness. And some of us are lonely for other reasons. Our marriages are stressed, so we feel lonely in our own homes despite the fact that they’re filled with people. We’re new to a town or church or job or school community that we can’t really get to know because everything’s shut down. We pretty much always feel like we don’t fit in. We struggle to make friends or have trouble being vulnerable with the ones we do have. Our most beloved person has died, or has moved away, or is living with memory loss. We feel alone, and we ache.

Hear the promise of Jesus: Come to me, and I will give you rest.

+++++

Come to me, all you that are weary and burdened by injustice.

Economists and social scientists have begun to refer to the coronavirus not as the “great equalizer,” but as the “great revealer.” Here in the United States and across the world, the sudden stop to the global economy has put the ever-growing gap between rich and poor into stark relief. The realities of access to food – the most basic of human needs – give us just one glimpse into what life is like for people who have been made poor in our current world order. I’ve been in touch recently with several pastoral colleagues who serve Lutheran congregations in poorer parts of the greater metro Chicago area. The food shelves that their congregations host are often completely empty within just a couple of hours of opening because the need for food is so great. One of these colleagues is in deep grief over the fact that most of their church’s food shelf clients right now are actually members of that very same congregation. That congregation is the spiritual home of many Mexican and Central American immigrants who work in food processing plants and other blue-collar jobs in the far west suburbs – plants whose workers have experienced exceedingly high rates of coronavirus infection because of the close physical proximity the work demands. The plants can’t figure out a way to keep people safe and still make money, and the immigrant community is paying with their lives and their livelihoods. Beyond our borders, chief economists at the United Nations’ World Food Program are looking at the impact of the coronavirus and forecasting a global food emergency on a scale that the world has never seen before, estimating that more than 265 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of the year.  

The promise of Jesus belongs first to such as these: Come to me, and I will give you rest.

+++++

Come to me, all you that are weary and burdened by divisiveness.

Black lives matter vs. blue lives matter vs. all lives matter. Protestors vs. police. Republicans vs. Democrats vs. the Completely Disenfranchised. Teachers vs. parents. Science vs. individual choice. Rich vs. poor. Mask-wearers vs. those who loudly refuse to use them. Open our State proponents vs. those who advocate caution. We receive a constant bombardment of messages fueling the lie that our identities are primarily about belonging to one supposed side of an issue or another, rather than the truth that we first belong to God, and then to each other.

Hear the promise of Jesus: Come to me, and I will give you rest.

+++++

Come to me, all you that are weary and burdened by grief. By shame. By our inability to gather as a full community of faith. By the feeling that you aren’t measuring up. By your sense of powerlessness in the face of so many challenges. By depression. By anxiety. By fear. By hopelessness.

The promise of Jesus is for you, too: Come to me, and I will give you rest.

Bring your weary and burdened souls to Jesus. Lay at his feet the crushing weight of all that you carry, remembering that he knows exactly what it feels like to walk in human skin. And as you lay down your own burdens, don’t forget to look on either side of you. Because when you do, you will see other people just like you – and still others who are not at all like you – who have also come to the feet of Jesus looking for rest and renewal. Notice as they, too, lay down the weight of all they carry. And then watch what happens when all of us, together, suddenly find our arms freed from burden and renewed in strength to be Christ to one another, and to the whole of this weary world. Feel yourself breathing a bit easier as you lean into the strong arms of the communion of saints, and let that breath support songs of life.

I’m going to ask my daughter Kate to join me to close this sermon, because the verse I sang to open this sermon is actually written as a call and response. We invite you to join us in singing.

(singing)
Rest for the weary…
Rest for the weary…
Welcome everyone…
To the love of God.

Amen.

Yours Are the Hands

Heidi Torgerson

on being Christ’s body & on the rebirth of the church – a sermon for ascension sunday

This might be, like, the nerdiest church-person thing that could possibly come out of my mouth, but I actually stopped being cool somewhere around the year 2000 so I’m just going to say it anyway:

I have never been more thankful for the liturgical calendar.

If that phrase is new to you, now you know…the church keeps a calendar. But instead of moving us from May 24 to 25 to 26 and so on, the liturgical calendar moves us through the seasons and stories of our faith. The liturgical calendar takes its name from the word “liturgy,” which means “the work of the people,” and our work as God’s people begins in worship. Different colors, themes, and scriptures accompany each season of the liturgical calendar, which begins not in January but in late November or early December. Advent is the first season. The color blue comes out to accompany these 4 Sundays of waiting and anticipation which lead us into the next season – Christmas. White is the color of Christmas, signifying the purity and light of Christ. Then there are some lower-key “Time After Epiphany” Sundays, all dressed up in green, before we move into Lent, which are the 40 days the church spends in solemn preparation for the death and resurrection of Jesus, which we remember with great reverence during Holy Week. Purple is the color of Lent.

And then, come Easter Sunday, we are back to white as we celebrate life. The resurrection of Jesus is such a spectacularly powerful, hope-filled event for our lives and for the world that the church sets aside a full 50 days to celebrate it in our liturgical calendar. And toward the end of Easter, we find Ascension Day. The ascension falls exactly 40 days after Easter in our liturgical calendar. That was last Thursday, but the ascension of Jesus is such a significant event that we often observe it on the Sunday immediately following. So, we call today – the last Sunday of Easter – Ascension Sunday – the day when we hear the writer of Luke and Acts tell of Jesus’ last appearance to the disciples before returning to the heavenly parent.

So, I’ve always appreciated the way that the liturgical calendar marks the rhythms of our life together as God’s people. But I find myself even more grateful for it in the middle of this coronavirus crisis because time is doing weird things lately. I know you can relate! I often wake up in the morning not having any idea what day it is. I’m pretty sure last Friday was actually 62 hours long, and that the month of April alone included approximately 472,000 days. I don’t think I’m even fully, consciously aware of how my brain has already kind of divided the whole of life into two pieces along a coronavirus-shaped hinge. There’s life pre-COVID-19, and there’s now. The chronological time that our regular calendars mark feels all out of whack, and so I find some sense of grounding in our liturgical calendar, knowing that God’s time is somehow revealed there.

The disciples, in our reading from Acts today, were having a different kind of struggle dealing with chronological time and God’s time. Jesus had been crucified only about six weeks before the ascension in Acts. With his death came the death of the people’s hope that Jesus would be the one to overthrow Roman rule, ushering in a new reign of freedom for those who had been suffering. But then Jesus was raised, and he’d been appearing to the disciples for forty days, talking about the kingdom of God. Their chronological clocks were still ticking, and so they ask Jesus as they had many times before, “Is THIS the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Jesus tells them that their time is not God’s time, and then he blesses them. He assures them that they will receive God’s power when the Holy Spirit comes upon them. He tells them that they will be witnesses to his radical love not just in Jerusalem, but to all the ends of the earth.

And then he is lifted up on a cloud, carried away out of their sight and into heaven.

Yep. You heard me right. The person who wrote Luke and Acts tells us that Jesus was lifted up on a cloud and carried away into heaven. We’ll talk on some other day about how differently our first-century ancestors viewed the heavens and the earth, about how science isn’t actually the enemy of the Bible, and about how you don’t have to throw away your intellect in order to be a Christian. But for now, here’s the question I want us to sit with together:

What does this story mean for us? The earliest followers of the Jesus movement believed it was important for people to know that Jesus had not only been raised, but that God carried Jesus away into the heavens as he was blessing the disciples below.

Church, what does this mean for us?

St. Teresa of Avila was a 16th century Spanish nun who had an especially powerful connection to the mysteries of God. There’s a poem attributed to her that gets to the heart of the matter more beautifully than I could. She writes:

Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which he looks with
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

Beloved of God, when the writer of Luke and Acts tells us that Jesus ascended into the heavens, he is telling us that the power of Jesus’ love was carried not just into one specific place somewhere far away. The power of Jesus’ love was carried into the whole of the cosmos, touching everything that is with the grace of God. The power of Jesus’ love ascended not just into the heavens. It ascended into you. It ascended into me. It ascended into God’s people so that we might embody the grace, mercy, compassion, justice, gentleness, and love of God that Jesus embodied so fully while he walked this earth.

Christ has no body on earth now but ours, Church.  

The liturgical calendar is going to move us into Pentecost next week. Rushing winds and tongues of fire carry the Holy Spirit to God’s people on Pentecost, and the church is born. And it’s perfect timing. This coronavirus pandemic has changed everything we thought we knew about what it meant to be Christ’s body on earth. It’s unsettling, to say the least. My internal chronological clock is not just ticking; it’s screaming! It’s screaming to get back to the way things were. So thank God that the liturgical calendar is throwing us a bone here, giving us an opportunity to reflect not only on the birth of Christ’s church at Pentecost, but on the re-birth of Christ’s church today.

It was only 10 weeks ago that congregations like Grace were still gathering together in the same buildings. That simultaneously feels like a lifetime ago, and like it was just yesterday. Life in the church is changing almost as quickly as the news updates we hear about the virus itself. We’re tired. We’re stressed. We miss our people. Time feels out of whack and we’re confused and crabby about it…or at least, I am. So what do we do?

I think we do what God’s people have learned how to do over literally thousands of years of practice. We hold close together. Though we remain physically apart, we allow ourselves to be re-membered into the one body that we have always been, people of Grace – people of God. We allow ourselves to be re-membered into Christ’s body here on earth as we become something new for the sake of the world.

As we experience this time of rebirth:
Let us keep our eyes – which are Christ’s eyes – open for every opportunity to look with compassion on those in need.

Let us reach out our hands – which are Christ’s hands – to bless this aching world in deep and meaningful ways.

Let us root our feet – which are Christ’s feet – in needs of this present moment, trusting that the power of Jesus will guide us into our continued becoming.

Disappearing Spaces

Heidi Torgerson

a sermon on john 14:1-14

Texts like this one from the gospel of John can be a bit tricky for a preacher, mostly because this one is so familiar. Church people have heard it a thousand times, and a whole lot of people who aren’t so familiar with church have also heard it a bunch. For example, regular church attender or not, I’d guess that most of us have heard this text read at at least one funeral. Traditional funeral sermons on this text encourage us to imagine Jesus putting his carpentry skills to good use for us in heaven, making up a bright and shiny room for us and our loved ones to call home when our time on Earth is done. Others of us have heard this text used to influence interfaith conversations, usually by suggesting that people of other religious traditions have no place in God’s reign and most certainly will NOT be our neighbors in any of those aforementioned bright and shiny heavenly rooms. The common theme here is that most us have learned to hear these words from John and cast our thoughts away from the complexity of this earthly life and instead to look heavenward toward the glories awaiting us in our Father’s house after we die.

I gotta say, I understand the tendency. Jesus’ words are reassuring. “Do not let your hearts be troubled! In my Father’s house there are many rooms, and I’m going to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and bring you with me so that where I am, you will be also.” Part of my own weary soul breathes a tiny sigh of relief when I hear these words, because Lord knows – literally – that words of assurance are hard to come by in these days. Lord knows – literally – that its exhausting to battle our ways through the miniscule and massive challenges surrounding us every day right now. If you saw my weekly video message on Wednesday you heard me and my husband Jason talking about what a rough week it’s been around our house. Patience has been in shorter supply. Sadness and maybe even some atypical low-grade depression are more at the surface. We’ve been feeling frustrated about pretty much All The Things and also a little afraid of the long-haul nature of this COVID crisis, and of the reality that life isn’t ever going to be quite the same anymore.

I know because you’ve told me that things are feeling heavy for you, too. Loneliness is taking a new kind of toll for many of us, even for the proudest self-proclaimed introverts among us. Some of us are regular visitors to hospitals and clinics for health concerns that have nothing to do with COVID, except that they suddenly have everything to do with COVID because showing up to a hospital feels risky right now, even when it’s necessary. Some of us are separated from loved ones who are ill, or who are nearing the end of life, or who have died very recently, and the grief of all of that is just too much to bear. Some of us have lost jobs or have taken significant pay cuts or have been furloughed, and the financial stress on top of everything else is enough to almost topple us. Some of us live with depression or anxiety that might be relatively well-managed in normal times, but these aren’t normal times and our emotional health is suffering. Some of us are feeling bewildering signs that our overall wellness is just out of whack in ways that we haven’t really experienced before. And these are only the COVID-related parts of our life together. We don’t even have space to think about the climate crisis or the immigration & refugee crisis or the food insecurity crisis or, or, or…

It’s no wonder we long for words of assurance. It’s no wonder that we’d rather look toward that golden heavenly home than face the brokenness that’s both within and all around us. Like Philip in this gospel reading we, too, are apt to ask Jesus, “Alright, where is God? Show us the Mother – the Father – the Heavenly Parent – and we will be satisfied.”

Where is God? 

A close friend of mine named Jen kept a blog through a particular phase of her life. She began one memorable blog post in this way: “I have spent the last week seeing God everywhere, but principally in the disappearing spaces between people.” As I was praying over this text in preparation for this sermon, the memory of this friend’s words became gospel for me. It maybe sounds almost cruel to talk about the disappearing spaces between people as gospel when we’re in the middle of this extreme kind of physical distancing, but just stick with me here.

I have spent the last week seeing God everywhere, but principally in the disappearing spaces between people.

Church, I do think the scriptures promise us an ultimate future dwelling at the God’s side. And I confess my hope that God’s dwelling will be filled to overflowing with all kinds of surprising people – including ones of different faiths. But the promise of an other-worldly, heavenly home isn’t what stands out to me as I read John today. Instead, I hear a recounting of the disappearing spaces between people. I hear a story of relationship…a deep and intimate relationship between Jesus and his friends that is lived out not in the sweet by-and-by but in the grit and pain of an earthly existence which just hard as often as it is not.

And boy, were Jesus and his disciples in the thick of that grit and pain. This particular piece of John’s gospel unfolds on Thursday evening, the night before Jesus’ crucifixion. Jesus knows that he will soon leave this world and is trying to prepare his disciples for all that is about to take place. Just a few verses before the reading we heard today, Jesus told the disciples that one of them would soon betray him, and then he tells Peter that he will deny Jesus three times. It’s in this context that Jesus says, as we just heard, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” Seriously, Jesus?! How could one’s heart be anything but troubled by all of this? Philip and Thomas and the others are afraid and, frankly, Jesus’ words about going to prepare a place for them, and coming back to take them with him, and reassuring them that they already know the way to the place he’s going, sound, like, actually a little bit crazy. So Thomas says it: “Jesus, we have no idea what you’re talking about. We don’t know where you’re going. We have no idea how to get there.” Jesus says, “Of course you know the way because I am the way, and the truth, and the life. If you have seen the Father, you have seen me. You HAVE seen him, and you know him.” Phillip enters the conversation with his own doubts. “Alright, Lord. SHOW us the Father and we’ll be satisfied.”

The disciples tend to get a bad rap in the gospels. They’re slow to understand and often slow to believe. But I read Thomas and Phillip’s questions and doubts not so much through a lens of thickheadedness. Instead, I see them as an illustration of the disappearing spaces between people…the disappearing spaces between them and Jesus. These disciples have walked a long road with Jesus, and Jesus is telling them that there is still a long and difficult road ahead. Their questions, to me, are an indication of the trust they have in their relationship with Jesus. That trust might not seem evident on the surface of their doubts, but somehow, their relationship with Jesus has deepened to the point where they are unafraid to be vulnerable with him, even in the midst of their fear and anxiety. A pastoral colleague of mine suggested last week that fear and anxiety, in tension with trust, is where we find the beginnings of hope. I think that’s right on.

“I’ve spent the week seeing God everywhere, but principally in the disappearing spaces between people.” This is a story about relationship. It’s about the relationship between Jesus and his friends. It’s also about the relationship between Jesus and the Father – the Mother – the Heavenly Parent. Phillip asks Jesus to show them the Father, and Jesus says, “Friends, you already know the Father because you know me. We dwell together, one within the other. There is no space at all between us. Believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. But if you can’t, believe because of the works themselves.” And oh, what works they have been!! The Way of Jesus, which these disciples have walked along with him, has been marked by acts of love that reveal the very face of God. Healing the sick. Raising the dead. Turning water into wine at a big ol’ party. Shedding holy tears along with his friends who were nearly destroyed with grief. Creating huge feasts for thousands of people out of simple fish and bread. Earthy, tangible works that change lives here and now, in this present moment, in this very time.

Beloved of God, these are anxious times. Here’s what I wonder. Dare we put that anxiety in tension with trust in the same Jesus who calls us just like he called those first disciples…who calls us again and again to allow the spaces between us and him to disappear…who calls us over and over into a deep and intimate relationship with himself? Dare we find hope in the midst of this anxiety? We HAVE seen God because we know Jesus. And we know Jesus through the radical ways in which he lived and loved and healed and served. We know Jesus for the ways he still shows up in the grit and pain of this earthly existence. Through his life, death, and resurrection he dissolved the spaces between us and him so that we might be freed to show a dead and dying world what resurrection looks like, feels like, smells like, and tastes like right here, right now. Yes, even in the midst of a pandemic.

You know the way to the place Jesus is going because you have already seen it. So as we gather again today around the abundant feast of bread and wine, rooted in relationship with the one who raises us from the graves of our own fears and anxieties, may we dare to live out the hope we find there. You know the way to the place Jesus is going because you have already seen it. So go! In whatever ways are safe and appropriate right now, Church, bring the hope you have come to know in Christ to the places he has first gone. Send notes of support to the sick and the suffering and to those who care for them, right down to the hospital custodians. Join the BEDS Plus meal train and provide for the hungry and the poor. Learn about Ahmaud Abery’s story and advocate on behalf of those who are victims of race-based violence in this country. Drop a care package on the porch of the neighbors you barely know, or make a gift to ELCA World Hunger in support of our neighbors across the oceans. And then notice as the spaces between God’s people begin to disappear, in spite of our physical distance.  Amen.