A time to embrace...a time to refrain from embracing

Good afternoon sisters, brothers, and friends,

“This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it…” 

Rejoice and be glad? Yes - in good times and in bad. No doubt about it, we have been warned -
bad days lie ahead. How do you plan to live through them?

​The strong words of trust in Psalm 42 were composed when times were bad. We don’t know what trial confronted the people - an enemy army, an a deeply divided community, a disease, a plague, a pandemic? We do not know who or what the enemy was, what we do know is that out of the dark pain, the psalmist sings:
​
As a deer longs for flowing streams,
    so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
    for the living God.
When shall I come and behold
    the face of God?
My tears have been my food
    day and night,
while people say to me continually,
    “Where is your God?”…
Why are you cast down, O my soul,
    and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
    my help and my God.

The past two mornings, I have laid in bed half in fear and half in prayer…”How bad is it going to be?”
The answer is obvious say the medical and CDC communities. It is going to be bad. For hundreds of thousands it is bad already. Watch the news, watch the scenes inside the emergency rooms in New York city, look at the makeshift morgues, listen to the doctors and nurses talk about the death and disease they see every day. They are overwhelmed. Listen to their anguish. Look at their tears. Listen to their pain. Is that our future?

So far, our communities have been spared the abject terror of this virus. Yet it is at times like this we remember the answer Jesus gave to the lawyer who asked the haunting question, “Who is my neighbor?” People who are not from around here; people who look, talk, and live differently from us; the people who are suffering and dying – they are our neighbors.  If one member suffers, all suffer together…

What is God saying to us during these dark days? What are we being called to do? I hear the call to meet them, be with them, in their suffering. We are called to show our com-passion to them. (The word compassion literally means ‘to suffer with’.) Compassion is what the good Samaritan showed to the stranger lying on the side of the road. Compassion is what Jesus showed when he suffered for you, for me and for the world on the week we call holy.

Why are you cast down, O my soul,
    and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
    my help and my God.
 
Pastor Michael