There’s a preaching podcast I listen to most weeks while I’m walking up or down Main Street to church, early in the week; two preachers reflect on the readings for the upcoming Sunday and what’s speaking to them this week. It’s always nice to have another perspective on the texts.
This week, one of them mentioned that this Sunday’s psalm is the Venite, Psalm 95, a psalm I know quite well. And I was suddenly overcome by a memory: the memory of preaching on this very psalm on the Third Sunday in Lent three years ago, March 15, 2020, the very first Sunday of remote digital worship.
We’ve made it through the lectionary cycle, once more.
Since I was at a different parish that Sunday, and since I won’t be preaching on the psalm this Sunday, I thought I’d share with you an excerpt from my sermon on that day. I’ll preface it by saying that as I read it, I was reminded of a lesson I’ve learned again and again over the last few years: what is true of God in the great and global crises of our lives is also true of God in our smaller, more personal crises.
Come, let us sing to the Lord; *
let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving *
and raise a loud shout to him with psalms.
For the Lord is a great God, *
and a great King above all gods.
In his hand are the caverns of the earth, *
and the heights of the hills are his also.
The sea is his, for he made it, *
and his hands have molded the dry land.
Come, let us bow down, and bend the knee, *
and kneel before the Lord our Maker
For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. *
Oh, that today you would hearken to his voice!
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said these verses of Psalm 95. These words, known as the Venite, are the default opening prayer of Morning Prayer in our prayer book, which I’ve said more or less every day for more or less eight years, and so I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation—to be honest, I did a type-it-into-the-computer calculation—and realized I must’ve said these words about 2,500 times. [2023 note: Add another thousand or so over the last three years.]
Okay, let’s say I took off Saturdays for most of that time and skipped a few weeks on vacation and used a different psalm occasionally, and so I’ve said them, what—2,200 times? [Say, 3000…]
And they’ve never felt more true to me than they do today.
I feel right now as though we’re the residents of a seaside community who’ve just been warned that a tsunami is coming. The local university’s seismographers have detected a massive earthquake far out in the ocean, and we’ve been given a couple hours’ warning that something big is coming. So we’ve packed our bags and gathered our families and fled to higher ground, and now we’re sitting behind our sandbag walls and waiting for the waves to come.
Some of you, like Garrett [the Rector of St Anne’s] and I, have spent the last week inundated with emails and phone calls and meetings as you try to figure out how to prepare for what’s coming. Some of you have probably not seen that behind-the-scenes activity. Maybe you wonder what all the fuss is about. In any case, as a society we’ve pooled our wisdom and our resources and settled on our plans, and now we settle down to wait.
I don’t know what you’re feeling right now. Confusion, or fear? Anxiety, or panic? Exasperation that we’re all overreacting to something that might just flop? To be honest, I’m praying that it flops. I’m praying that the coronavirus-skeptics are right, in the same way that I pray that climate-change deniers are right. I hope that in 50 years we look back and laugh at the climate catastrophe we thought we coming, and I hope that in six months we look back and laugh at how silly we were for canceling all these events. Because if we look like fools in six months, it will be because we took the right precautions today. [Alas.]
Whatever you’re feeling, though, God is right there with you. If you can’t “shout for joy to the Rock of [your] salvation” right now, then wail in lamentation. If you can’t “come before [God’s] presence with thanksgiving,” then “raise a loud shout” of fear or frustration. Trust me, there are plenty of psalms for that.
“For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.” God is with us when we’re down in the darkest caverns of the earth, and she’s with us up on the highest hills of joy. The tumult of the sea is his, for he made it; and her hands have molded the driest wildernesses of our lives.
If you ask me where God is a global pandemic, I can’t in good conscience just quote St. Paul in this morning’s epistle and say that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” (Romans 5:3-4) Maybe that kind of thing is helpful to you; it’s cold comfort to me. But I can tell you that wherever you are today—not only literally, on this Sunday of live streams, but emotionally—wherever you are, God himself is there, right beside you.
There’s so much to say about the events of the last three years, more than I can put in any newsletter article. We are, in nearly every way, “back to normal.” But we will never be back to normal. There are people we lost—who died, or moved away, or became strangers to us—to whom we never had the chance to say goodbye. There are memories of fear, or hope, or joy that have reshaped how we think about our lives. For many of us, there is unexamined pain inside those three years that we’ve never had the time to really let heal.
This was not the first global pandemic, and it will not be the last. It was not the first crisis that upended our daily lives and shook the Church, and it will not be the last. It was a new and an extraordinary experience for all of us, in a way that I hope we’ll never encounter again. For a time, we all experienced many of the same experiences of grief, anxiety, fear, loss, and hope; now, we’ve returned to experiencing these things in our own cycles and our own ways. But whatever any one of us encounters in our lives, God is there.
I pray, this week, for the nearly seven million people who have died during the course of this pandemic. May their souls, and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.