Led by the St Martin’s Chapel Consort, Morning Prayer begins on Pg 78 of the Book of Common Prayer or online here. This morning’s hymns are 142 (opening) and 150 (closing). The readings are Ezekiel 37:1-14 & John 11:1-45. The psalm is 130 found and the Psalter section of the BCP. The canticles are 18, The Song of The Lamb, & 17, The Song of Simeon, both on pg 94 of the BCP. The Anthem is The eyes of the all wait upon thee, O Lord, by Berger.

“Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.”

A man falls ill. It begins with a slight cough. A fever that won’t go away. It gets steadily worse. It gets harder for him to breathe. The family is frantic with worry. They know someone who can help; they send word, “Please, our brother is dying—come quickly.” Days pass though, without a response, and the man dies.

“If only you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

If only. If only they used hand sanitizer, or gloves, or soap…If only he hadn’t taken that cab…If only she hadn’t gone to that party…If only he hadn’t sat in his Nana’s lap…

If only. “Our bones are dried up…we are cut off completely.”

Rarely do lectionary passages sync as well as the story of the Raising of Lazarus and Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. And perhaps even more rarely have these two passages more viscerally articulated the moment in which we hear them today.

Our bones are dried up—we can feel the crackling of the skin of our hands from repeated application of soap, sanitizer and vigorous rubbing and drying—trying to protect ourselves from a microscopic enemy. We have been reduced to a skeletal framework of needs and anxieties—groceries, medicine, juggling work and kids in the same space. Many, many of us have been reduced with breathtaking speed to bare subsistence; the next paycheck, the next meal, the next night’s place to sleep. Dry bones.

We are cut off—from one another—working from home, meeting only in cyber space. The simple act of physical human contact is now suspect, and we long for a simple handshake or hug in a way that was inconceivable only a few weeks ago. Isolation—dry bones.

If only. So many if-onlys.

Our most plaintive if-onlys—the ones that we, like Martha and Mary, bring straight to Jesus—these if-onlys come from a place of deep loss and grief, compounding regrets and memories of the past with fear of a future that has a hole in it where something beloved used to be. But where the grief of Mary and Martha was for the loss of their brother, the grief that many of us experience now, at this point, is for something less tangible than the death of a loved one. Less tangible, but no less real. So first of all we need to understand and internalize the fact that the feeling that we have is grief. Then we try to wrap our minds around what– if it’s not an actual physical death—then what is it we are grieving–what it is that we have lost? A job? Autonomy? Health? Peace of mind? A sense of vocation, mission, the future? One of the most heartbreaking pieces I read this week was written by a college junior, entitled, “I Just Don’t Think We Have the Luxury to Have Dreams Anymore.’” To be twenty years old and so lost already. Dry bones.

Grief is a dry time; made all the harder if we feel that we grieve alone. Notice that Martha and Mary were surrounded by their community, as was the custom—all of them in solidarity with the pain and loss of the two sisters. That’s what we do, and why it is so hard now to be in isolation—we usually come together to support each other; to weep and commiserate at first, and then eventually, we hope, to make some kind of meaning out of the loss—to find that the gratitude for what has been loved and lost outweighs the ache. And then we try to find a way forward. In the burial service we say that in death life has been changed but not ended. But turn that around a bit; our life at the far end of the grief process—in spite of what we initially felt—by the grace of God we find that our life, our world, has been changed, but not ended. That’s how, if we will let it, we may discover that grief isn’t just a time of emotional adjustment to loss, it can be a process of transformation. These bones can live again.

How do we transform from the grief of this moment? How do we make meaning from this time without resorting to bromide and platitude?

Gaze upon Jesus. Look upon him in this moment as he stands with his friends and their community outside the tomb, his heart full of love and loss; the resolve in his face crumbling as the tears well up.

“Jesus began to weep.”

His tears have bound him to us. They are a visceral declaration that we are likewise bound to one another. We don’t suffer as individuals. We suffer together. Jesus didn’t—and doesn’t– weep in isolation—he wept in solidarity with the community.

When one is in pain, we all are.

I do not subscribe to the idea that God deliberately tests us by sending trials and tribulations to see how well we measure up. I do believe that the inevitable crises that we face provide opportunities for learning and making meaning. And in this moment, when we are wrapped up by the bindings of anxiety, fear, and isolation we can look upon the weeping face of Jesus and learn anew how deeply we are bound to each other and to realize that nothing, nothing can truly separate us from God or from one another.

The tears of Jesus break our hearts—open—to generosity, creativity, and yes, perhaps even joy as we see opportunities to reach out—safely—to our siblings in Christ in and around our community, as well as to honor and pray for the health and service workers whose caring reach puts themselves at risk for others’ sake. We now know more than ever that, in the words of poet Lynn Ungar, “our lives are in each other’s hands.” And while the moment is difficult, the lesson of that is a blessing.

“…suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them…” And the Lord said, “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”

Led by the St Martin’s Chapel Consort, Morning Prayer begins on Pg 78 of the Book of Common Prayer or online here. This morning’s hymns are 646 (opening) and 141 (closing). The psalm is 23 found on pg 612 and the canticles are numbers 9, The first Song of Isaiah, and 15 (pg 86), The Song of Mary (pg 91). The Anthem is Ubi Caritas by Ola Gjeilo.

Sung Morning Prayer

The sermon from the Rev. Mark Sutherland

John 9:1-41

Alain de Botton reviewing in the N Y Times Albert Camus’ The Plague published in 1947, writes that Camus believed that all plagues or what today we tend to call pandemics, are merely concentrations of a universal condition – that all human beings are vulnerable to being randomly exterminated at any time, by a virus, an accident, or the actions of our fellow man.

Camus muses on how hard it is for the plague stricken people of Oran to accept this world view. Somehow as modern people with 20th-century amenities, they are not going to die like the wretches of 17th -century London or 18th-century Canton.

In terms of the unpredictable fragility of human life, history marks no progress. We are no better able to escape our fragile state than our forebears were. De Botton notes : Being alive always was and will always remain an emergency; it is truly an inescapable “underlying condition“.

In The Plague, Camus speaks into our own times because he understood the changelessness of the human predicament. Because, no amount of technological progress, of sustained economic growth can ultimately conceal that which we spend all our time hiding from – that is, everyone has the plague within them: because no one in the world, no one is immune.

It seems that Jesus also understood the truth Camus grasped. In John’s story of the man born blind – one of John’s sign stories, Jesus challenges us to open our eyes to a new world view – to turn away from judgement and embrace our common solidarity.

We are currently living through a period of huge anxiety. The speed with which the Coronavirus has catapulted us into this global crisis leaves us all bewildered and fearful. Despite the growing evidence, no one it seems saw a world pandemic coming. Certainly no government, perhaps apart from Singapore was prepared. To quote President Trump – who knew?

The Coronavirus pandemic and its global collateral economic damage poses a serious and urgent challenge to our world view. As 21st-century people, Western people, Americans no less – we harbor the illusion that the precariousness of our frailty is an artifact of former more brutish times. We find ourselves reeling – yearning for some solid ground on which to stand as the world shapes and then reshapes around us like the patterns of rapidly shifting sand dunes.

We are those incredulous disciples of Jesus who comfort themselves with false distinctions as they ask: Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents; that he was born blind. 

They want to locate the man’s blindness in his history -so as to protect the themselves from contemplating the reality of their own fragile vulnerability to misfortune. The truth is that no one is any more or less protected against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune – the callous unpredictability of affliction and adversity.

In this story from John, Jesus challenges our tendency to scapegoat others whose experience threatens our security or complacency. As President Trump likes to say – it’s a foreign – a Chinese virus. How exactly is this a comfort?

This is just another example of attempts to distance ourselves through scapegoating others. Throughout his ministry Jesus’ most serious conflicts always center on his confrontation with the way religion draws these kinds of distinctions as a mask for the hardness of the human heart.

At the end of the day we cannot distance ourselves from our common and shared vulnerability to chance. We need to open our blind eyes and begin to see that all we succeed in doing is to distance ourselves from our fear. We then will discover the insight Jesus invites us to take to heart.

The man born blind receives more than his sight. In his dawning realization that the man who cured him is none other than the messiah he moves from sight to insight. Having recovered our sight can we risk the similar journey from sight to insight?

If we can what will we discover?

In his contrast between the responses of Oran’s doctor and the parish priest Camus echoes John’s portrayal of the tension between Jesus and the Pharisees. The priest condemns the suffering he sees explaining it away as God’s punishment for sin. Who has sinned – Jesus disciples ask him? This man has sinned by healing on the sabbath – the Pharisees complain both seek to harden their hearts against God.

Camus’ doctor knows that suffering is a comic tragedy -and if accepted as such leads to a softening of the heart. Camus’ doctor says that the only way to fight the plague is with decency. When asked what decency means, the doctor responds that decency: is doing my job.

For Jesus as well as for Camus’ doctor, decency means to commit to living lives of courage, trust, fueled by hope, not the fairytale hope in faith as some magical protection, some divine insurance policy, a denial of fear, but the hope rooted in a refusal to be defeated by fear of the random unpredictability of suffering.

The movement from denial to sight to insight – leads us to a surprising rediscovery. In the face of fear we just need to be decent enough to do the job God called us here for. We are all in this together, all equally vulnerable facing the reality of the world together.

Because of our liturgical tradition it is always a difficult decision to cancel Sunday services. Gathering together in the assembly of the baptised on the day of resurrection (Sunday) is the first duty of a Christian. Why? Because it is as a community that God addresses us regardless of the state of our own individual relationship with the divine. It is as a community we hear ourselves being invited by God through the lectionary readings to the conversation God is seeking to have with us -freeing us from the same self-serving conversation we would prefer to have with ourselves. In the Eucharist we come to be fed with real sustenance for our journey together as God’s agents in the world.

Therefore, as Rector, I have not taken the decision to cancel services for the next two weeks, lightly. I thank everyone for their support for this decision.I have become convinced of the wider social need to flatten the curve of the rate of infection by limiting the occasions for larger public gathering. The consequences of the CoronaVirus Pandemic are now very serious not only for human health, but for social cohesion and the economic prosperity upon which all rely.

There is no such thing as a foreign virus. The cumulative consequences of the pandemic are very serious for global cohesion and our ability to collaborate across borders in pursuit of the common goal.

In this posting you will find the service of sung Morning Prayer led by the St Martin’s Chapel Consort, together with Linda’s+ sermon for this week.

You may simply listen to the service or participate from home by following the order in the Book of Common Prayer beginning on page 78. If you don’t have a BCP you can download the service here. I have made other suggestions for how to approach worshiping virtually in Friday’s E-Blast.

Our religious faith forms in us an attitude for the daily practice of hopeful resilience. Hope is our compass setting to use an analogy. Times of crisis, understood from our Christian perspective of hopeful resilience, are times in which we recall our true purpose and reorient ourselves to matters of ultimate significance, i.e.those things which really matter in our lives.

Stay safe, get outside and enjoy spring’s budding, and do not fail to keep an awareness for the needs of others around you. Be ready to lend assistance when and where the need arises.

Mark+

Follow here the podcast for Sung Morning Prayer.

Listen here or read below Linda’s+ sermon

A Love Story

Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.”

Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, Moses and Zipporah.

Each of these couples–foundational figures of the faith and our identity as people of God—each of them has something in common with the others, besides the fact that they are related, if only (as in the case of Moses) very distantly. Each of their relationships began—at a well.

In some ways, it’s not surprising. The communal well was where people gathered as part of their working day, so it would be natural for a stranger to the area to come to the well for refreshment, gossip, information or, evidently, a spouse. In the lore of the Ancient Near East the well just seems like a natural place to begin a love story.

Does that make today’s Gospel passage a love story? Interesting question.

Jesus and his disciples were on their way from Judea to Galilee, but they had to go through Samaria—not a route that most self-respecting Jews would look forward to traveling. The split between Jews and Samaritans extended back centuries, and centered on a dispute over the proper place of worship—either at the Temple at Jerusalem or at a shrine on Mount Gerazim. The conflict had come to a head about 150 years before when Jewish troops destroyed the shrine. Since that point the hatred between the two parties had been at a slow burn, and they couldn’t bear to be in each other’s company. Sad to say we don’t find it difficult to imagine such a situation today.

So Jesus was effectively in enemy territory. He was tired. He was hot. He was thirsty. And he was at a well. Only unlike his patriarch forbears, he was alone. There was no one else there, because no one would be at a well at noon, in the heat of the day. Unless it suited her to be alone at a well in the heat of the day. With no one to talk to. No one to answer to. No one to pry, or to speculate, or to pity, or to judge.

Tradition has it that the woman who approached the well that day was a particular kind of sinner—a loose woman who married and then cast off husbands as though they were old shoes. But this is simply not backed up in the words of John. All he says is that she had had five husbands, and the man she was with was not her husband. In a patriarchal society she didn’t have the power to pick and choose, to take on and cast off, remarrying at will. It was more likely that she had been married young and then widowed and passed on to her deceased husband’s brothers according to custom because without a husband or children she had no other means of support. Or her husbands had cast her away because of infertility. And the man she was with, for whatever reason, refused to marry her.  Regardless of the reason, and whether the sin was hers or whether she was a victim of a misogynist culture, she was shamed; humiliated. And the last thing she would have wanted would be to be confronted with that pain in the cool of the morning or evening when everyone else was there to poke and prod her wound.

So she practiced radical social distancing to protect herself. She was safe, perhaps, but also lonely and isolated, with only shame to keep her company. As she approached the well she was probably dismayed to see a stranger there, in the heat of the day, with no bucket. A Jewish stranger.

“Give me a drink.”

With those four words the stranger violated three boundaries. One: He was a Jew speaking to a Samaritan, asking for a drink from a Samaritan well, from a Samaritan jar. Two: He was a Jewish man speaking to a Samaritan woman. And three: He was a Jewish man speaking to a Samaritan woman with a humiliating marital history. What was he thinking?

“Give me a drink.”

Here’s the thing about water. It is profoundly obedient to gravity. It seeps and drips and flows and burbles and eddies and gushes and tumbles downward, ever downward toward its lowest point. The spring that quenched the thirst of the community at Sychar was far underground, and the time it took for the woman to let her jar down, and to bring it back up again, heavy and full, was time for a long conversation; the longest conversation between Jesus and anyone in the Gospels.

There was plenty of time for talk, for healing, and for transformation.

This is that kind of a love story.

Jesus talked of living water, and the woman was intrigued. Was he really greater than the Patriarch Jacob, the father of the Twelve Tribes of Israel? Was it even possible to drink and never thirst again? As they talked, the truth of his identity began to seep, drip, flow and burble in her heart.

“Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

Please, make it so I don’t have to keep going through this humiliation anymore.

And how does Jesus respond? He changes the subject. Or does he?

“Go, call your husband, and come back.”

Lutheran pastor and writer Nadia Bolz-Weber puts it bluntly (she puts everything bluntly) observing,

“…when [Jesus] says to her that he offers her living water that gushes up to eternal life and when she says Give me this water so that I may not thirst he then goes straight for her wound. She says give me this living water and he asks about her husband.

He wasn’t avoiding the subject – he was avoiding the BS.

You want to stop trying to quench your thirst with things that will never satisfy? You want this eternal life then it starts with being seen. It starts with the truth – the naked truth of your original wound and your original beauty and every good and bad thing about you. You have heard it said that water finds it’s [sic] lowest point – well, living water finds your lowest point.”

Pastor Nadia, at her best.

Living Water seeps and drips to our lowest point, our deepest shame, our darkest anxiety. Living water flows and burbles to our lowest point, soothing, healing, and offering peace that passes all understanding in a time when panic and isolation have left high and dry. Living Water gushes and quenches the soul’s thirst, transforming the wounded and rejected and lonely into something new. Something beloved.

This is that kind of a love story.

Jesus revealed that he was the Messiah, and she ran back to the city, overflowing with new courage; her jar no longer needed, proclaiming the Good News to the people. Because that’s what apostles do. They meet Jesus, they are transformed by him, and then bring others to come and see.

“Come and see, a man who told me everything I have ever done!” And you can almost hear her add, “And he loves me anyway!”

Later, in Eastern tradition, this woman would at last be given a name: Photini, “Luminous One.” Her heart lit from within by encounter with the One for whom, she’d waited all her life without realizing it.

That kind of love story.

Isn’t that what any of us want? That kind of love? That kind of healing? That kind of courage to face the days ahead? Especially now?

Jesus, please, give us this Living Water. Amen.

The greatest tragedy for any of us is to fail to live the life we came here for. The greatest sadness is to behold in someone an unlived life. The unlived life is a cramped and circumscribed life – a life of painting by numbers. A life in which there abound opportunities not taken; doors that opened but that were not walked through; invitations declined; chances and risks avoided.

In such a life we become obsessed with second guessing ourselves. We become bogged down with circular questions designed to distract us from our central aim of procrastinating. We assiduously avoid decisions. Show us the blueprint first, we demand, then we’ll know what to do.

Looking back on my life I can see long plateaux – level sailing often propelled by a sense of due caution and risk aversion. Then it’s as if the screen on the oscilloscope measuring the energy of my life lurches into a jagged vertical pattern as the pieces of my life – like a shaken-up snow globe – are thrown up into the air before landing – reconfigured into new patterns of living.

In his poem Morning Offering John O’ Donohue writes:

May my mind come alive today to the invisible geography that invites me to new frontiers, to break the dead shell of yesterdays, to risk being disturbed and changed.

In all of us, there lies at the heart a longing that is so deep yet also so unsettling. If we are not careful, we can spend the whole of our lives denying it.

Nicodemus had such a longing. He spies Jesus from a distance and is drawn to him because Jesus has awoken in him a deep longing. But he is afraid of his longing being discovered. So, he comes to Jesus by night – concealed by the darkness. Nicodemus’ fear is a fear of being discovered to be a follower of this compelling and disturbing young Rabbi in whom he discerns the presence of God.

Coming to Jesus under the cover of darkness is also a metaphor for concealed longing. As a respectable Pharisee, Nicodemus’ anxiety runs deeper than his surface concerns about being outed as a Jesus follower. At a deeper level he is compelled by an internal longing.

Operating as metaphor, the covering of darkness represents Nicodemus’ desire to conceal the true nature of his longing from himself. He knows intuitively, that to consciously face his unconscious desires will result in his life being vigorously shaken up with unpredictable consequences. He longs to break free of the dead shell of yesterdays (O’Donohue), yet he is afraid to risk being disturbed and changed.

Isn’t this the truth for many of us – griped with a longing for something more to life we simultaneously fear and resist with every fiber of our being taking the risks that will lead to our being disturbed and changed.

We move with tentative caution into the season of Lent. Lent brings us face to face with our unacknowledged longing to be more than we are, to experience relationship with God more intensely -with a greater satisfaction than we have experienced to date. Lent confronts us with our largely unacknowledged longings. We barely have the words – the language – to breathe our longing into a second birth.

Our past experience is littered with the disappointments and failures of past Lents. We’ve set out before with great hope and resolve only to fall at the first hurdle. Or we may have with gritted teeth tenaciously slogged through our Lenten discipline only to find the shear effort has robbed us of joy and fulfillment other than being able to tick the box of supposed success in achieving what we set out to do. Those of us who have been around the Lent track many times will approach Lent these days with strictly controlled expectations designed to mitigate disappointment by not setting the bar too high.

Nicodemus is the figure for us all. We long to live with a greater sense of being alive and yet are afraid to take the risks required. We fear risks to our reputation; being associated too intensely with Jesus is the kiss of death in our polite society. We avoid consciously registering our unconscious longing to be set free from the ghosts of our past. And yet, do we not long to process the energy of our unconscious longings into Bread for the hunger no one sees.

Jesus asks Nicodemus to be born again, i.e. to submit to being remade in the form of his original creation – the ‘wind-hovering-over-the-water’ creation, the invisible moving the visible, a baptism into the new life of God’s kingdom here and now.

Nicodemus, despite his longing resists – compelling Jesus to forcefully exclaim,

“You’re not listening. Let me say it again. When you look at a baby, it’s just that: a body you can look at and touch. But the person who takes shape within is formed by something you can’t see and touch—the divine breath—filling them with a living spirit.

From the Message translation

May we have the courage this Lent:

to live the life that we would love, and to postpone our dream no longer, but do at last what we came here for and waste our hearts on fear no more.

John O’Donohue

Led by the St Martin’s Chapel Consort, Morning Prayer begins on Pg 78 of the Book of Common Prayer or online here. This morning’s hymns are 142 (opening) and 150 (closing). The psalm is 130 found on pg 784 and the canticles are numbers 18, Song of the Lamb, and 17, The Song of Simeon. (pg 93). The Anthem is The Eyes of All Wait Upon Thee, by Berger.

Here’s the text of Linda’s+ Sermon for Lent V

Bound

“Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.”

A man falls ill. It begins with a slight cough. A fever that won’t go away. It gets steadily worse. It gets harder for him to breathe. The family is frantic with worry. They know someone who can help; they send word, “Please, our brother is dying—come quickly.” Days pass though, without a response, and the man dies.

“If only you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

If only. If only they used hand sanitizer, or gloves, or soap…If only he hadn’t taken that cab…If only she hadn’t gone to that party…If only he hadn’t sat in his Nana’s lap…

If only: “Our bones are dried up…we are cut off completely.”

Rarely do lectionary passages sync as well as the story of the Raising of Lazarus and Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. And perhaps even more rarely have these two passages more viscerally articulated the moment in which we hear them today.

Our bones are dried up—we can feel the crackling of the skin of our hands from repeated application of soap, sanitizer and vigorous rubbing and drying—trying to protect ourselves from a microscopic enemy. We have been reduced to a skeletal framework of needs and anxieties—groceries, medicine, juggling work and kids in the same space. Many, many of us have been reduced with breathtaking speed to bare subsistence; the next paycheck, the next meal, the next night’s place to sleep. Dry bones.

We are cut off—from one another—working from home, meeting only in cyber space. The simple act of physical human contact is now suspect, and we long for a simple handshake or hug in a way that was inconceivable only a few weeks ago. Isolation—dry bones.

If only. So many if-onlys.

Our most plaintive if-onlys—the ones that we, like Martha and Mary, bring straight to Jesus—these if-onlys come from a place of deep loss and grief, compounding regrets and memories of the past with fear of a future that has a hole in it where something beloved used to be. But where the grief of Mary and Martha was for the loss of their brother, the grief that many of us experience now, at this point, is for something less tangible than the death of a loved one. Less tangible, but no less real. So first of all we need to understand and internalize the fact that the feeling that we have is grief. Then we try to wrap our minds around what– if it’s not an actual physical death—then what is it we are grieving–what it is that we have lost? A job? Autonomy? Health? Peace of mind? A sense of vocation, mission, the future? One of the most heartbreaking pieces I read this week was written by a college junior, entitled, “I Just Don’t Think We Have the Luxury to Have Dreams Anymore.’” To be twenty years old and so lost already. Dry bones.

Grief is a dry time; made all the harder if we feel that we grieve alone. Notice that Martha and Mary were surrounded by their community, as was the custom—all of them in solidarity with the pain and loss of the two sisters. That’s what we do, and why it is so hard now to be in isolation—we usually come together to support each other; to weep and commiserate at first, and then eventually, we hope, to make some kind of meaning out of the loss—to find that the gratitude for what has been loved and lost outweighs the ache. And then we try to find a way forward. In the burial service we say that in death life has been changed but not ended. But turn that around a bit; our life at the far end of the grief process—in spite of what we initially felt—by the grace of God we find that our life, our world, has been changed, but not ended. That’s how, if we will let it, we may discover that grief isn’t just a time of emotional adjustment to loss, it can be a process of transformation. These bones can live again.

How do we transform from the grief of this moment? How do we make meaning from this time without resorting to bromide and platitude?

Gaze upon Jesus. Look upon him in this moment as he stands with his friends and their community outside the tomb, his heart full of love and loss; the resolve in his face crumbling as the tears well up.

“Jesus began to weep.”

His tears have bound him to us. They are a visceral declaration that we are likewise bound to one another. We don’t suffer as individuals. We suffer together. Jesus didn’t—and doesn’t– weep in isolation—he wept in solidarity with the community.

When one is in pain, we all are.

I do not subscribe to the idea that God deliberately tests us by sending trials and tribulations to see how well we measure up. I do believe that the inevitable crises that we face provide opportunities for learning and making meaning. And in this moment, when we are wrapped up by the bindings of anxiety, fear, and isolation we can look upon the weeping face of Jesus and learn anew how deeply we are bound to each other and to realize that nothing, nothing can truly separate us from God or from one another.

The tears of Jesus break our hearts—open—to generosity, creativity, and yes, perhaps even joy as we see opportunities to reach out—safely—to our siblings in Christ in and around our community, as well as to honor and pray for the health and service workers whose caring reach puts themselves at risk for others’ sake. We now know more than ever that, in the words of poet Lynn Ungar, “our lives are in each other’s hands.” And while the moment is difficult, the lesson of that is a blessing.

“…suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them…” And the Lord said, “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”