Several times in the last several weeks I’ve heard and read of people looking forward to “getting back to normal.” That desire is particularly strong among congregations, for we have weathered the loss of an Easter season, Pentecost, graduation and confirmation festivities, gathering, and specifically, singing – that most dangerous of occupations during a viral pandemic. And, for Lutherans, nicknamed long ago the Ecclesia cantans [the singing church], this has been a wearisome sacrifice. A well-meaning but woefully uninformed candidate for office in a Lutheran music organization declared, “I believe things will return to a facsimile of “normal” for the most part.” At best his nostalgia-laced hope suggests only a facsimile of what once was. Nevertheless, the 1918 Spanish Flu provided sufficient medical data regarding on-going challenges in the aftermath of a pandemic.
The candidate [for whom I did not vote] also missed the mark biblically, which the post-Pentecost season already has set before us to consider. This coming Sunday explores the difficult challenges facing the church and people of faith individually. Jeremiah 29 reminds us that the prophet has some hard words for us which no sugar-coated nostalgic hope can soften. Author Thomas Wolfe’s posthumous novel, You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), explored communal anxieties arising from the global upheavals of post-WWI. The pandemic caused a profound and lasting impact on people. The protagonist concludes,
“You can’t go back home … back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”
Nostalgia, the sometimes desperate but always futile attempt to stop time and life’s unfolding, is dangerous for the Church to embrace. However, St. Paul [Romans 6:1b-11] and Matthew [10:24-39] offer us the Good News delivered in a quite sobering tone which hopefully will steer us away from ineffectual decision making. Paul informs his readers that through their baptism they have died to the old and have been raised to new life. Now dead to sin, they are alive to God – that is, they are living in a new reality, and certainly not a facsimile of the old. Although it remains a mystery, the baptized have been joined and share in Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection to eternal life. Matthew takes a different tack but arrives at a similar conclusion. The Evangelist expands upon what it means to “die to the old.” Having been joined to Christ’s sin-purging death is to be joined to the wondrous work of the cross of Christ. Each of us “takes up” that cross in our baptism in order to enter into Christ’s resurrected life. Just as there is no Easter without Good Friday, there is no eternal life without dying to all that is killing us and others. By the cross we lose our old life of sin, fear, and death.
A synonym for “normal” is “ordinary.” The Church in its wisdom also calls this time after Pentecost Ordinary Time. What is “ordinary” is not simply doing “what we’ve always done.” Rather, it means the sometimes gritty, challenging, and hair-raising day-to-day work for the sake of embodying and proclaiming God’s in-breaking kingdom to a world hungry and broken. Matthew’s Gospel makes no bones about the ravages of sin, hatred, and betrayal we all experience and sometimes perpetrate on enemies and loved ones alike. This present liturgical season gives us time to practice doing God’s ordinary way of working so that through our words and actions others might see the presence of God come to them. The Psalmist concludes:
Let the oppressed see it and be glad; you who seek God, let your hearts revive.
For the Lord hears the needy, and does not despise his own that are in bonds.
Psalm 69:32-33