Download sheet with Psalm 22 and the Passion Gospel according to St. John. If you read the Passion Gospel in parts with your family, you can pick up again at the sermon at 22:42 (that’s a time indicator on the audio file).
During the shutdowns and lockdowns and social distancing that we are all experiencing right now because of the coronavirus, one of the ways that people have stayed in touch has been through social media. Humorous and inspirational and just plain silly messages and videos have been hitting the airwaves. They help to keep us connected, they keep up our sense of humour, and sometimes they remind us of what is important.
A message that one person sent me several weeks ago via WhatsApp has stuck with me. It was a poster, and I know some of you received it also. It said this:
“Your grandparents were called to war.
“You are being called to sit on a couch. You can do this!”
Yes, we can, I thought. The vast majority of us, who are not health care workers or delivery drivers, can sit on the couch. We can relax, we can learn new ways of being, we can reflect on what this virus is teaching us.
Or can we? How hard is it for us in our current day to sit on the couch, so to speak?
This virus that has afflicted the world is teaching us a massive series of lessons. And they are lessons that show how the world in which we have all been living, prior to Covid-19, was completely out of balance. Allow me to demonstrate:
The virus outbreak started in China. To contain the outbreak, factories were shut. But China is the country to which much of the world has sent so much of their manufacturing, for cheap labor. As factories shut down, those companies suffered, and their stock plummeted, as did then the rest of the markets.
Climate change and the state of the environment has been a huge concern for years. We have received one dire warning after another. We know that planes and cars are among the largest sources of pollution, yet we continue to fly and to drive freely. Now, we cannot go anywhere. Already there has been a drop in air pollution in major cities.
Speaking of cities, in so many countries, including this one, young people fled towns and villages and flocked to cities. Jobs were in cities. Now cities are horrible places to be. Imagine being locked down in a flat in a high-rise building. How often in the past few weeks have I heard people around here say how grateful they are to be in the country.
Before Covid-19, we were constantly busy, between flying and driving and working. Time with family suffered. Now we must sit at home. We must spend time with one another. We must relearn how to spend our time and how to be together.
Before Covid-19, children’s sports were organized. I often wondered if children ever did something that was not organized and structured. In other words, did children still know how to play, how to use their imaginations, how to create games? Club sports are valuable, but right now they cannot function, and children must learn new ways of being, to keep from being “bored.”
The modern world has not known where their food comes from. Farm and farmers were not respected. Now when buying food is about the only thing we are allowed to do outside of our homes, we are being shown the importance of farms and farmers. With restaurants closed, people have to prepare their meals.
And one last thing: Before Covid-19, human beings thought we were in charge. At least we expected to be in charge. We thought it was our right, our expectation. When something we cannot even see — a virus — can bring the entire world and our whole way of operating to a halt in three months, then that shows us all too clearly that we are not in charge.
Today is Good Friday. Good Friday is the day in the church year when everything is stripped down to the bare essentials. Our churches are bare, our worship is simple, the focus is simply on Jesus on the cross. In no year is this more true, that on Good Friday everything is stripped down to the bare essentials.
And the essentials are these:
Jesus on the cross, taking all of our sins and all the world’s ills onto himself. Jesus on the cross showing God’s utter and complete forgiveness, as we turn ourselves, our hearts and minds and souls, to God, because, after all, we are not in charge. As the prophet Isaiah says,
“All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have all turned to our own way,
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.”
Another essential is summed up in an old phrase that says where most of us are being asked to place our focus now: hearth and home. We are being called to make our meals, spend time with our families, relax and sit on the couch.
And there’s another essential, something else that we are being called to do, the thing we so often forget: Pray. Pray for one another. Pray for the health care workers and the delivery drivers and those who continue to work. Pray for the unemployed. Pray for our neighbours, our families and friends, those we see and those we cannot now see. Pray that we learn from this pandemic the lessons that we need to learn, so that we might come to a new way of being.
Do we know what that will be? No. But Good Friday also teaches us to wait, because on Good Friday our worship service does not end. It just stops, and we wait through the rest of this day and through Holy Saturday until Easter Sunday.
Let us watch and wait and listen to the Lord.