In our little corner of New Jersey, it’s been a year since the world shut down (ha, remember “Two weeks to stop the spread?”Alas.) At the beginning of March our church plant was not yet 11 months old— a baby church with all of the hope, potential, energy, and, of course, growing pains of a young child. On March 8, 2020 we held our last in-person gathering. And though the shadow of the pandemic loomed larger than we knew at the time, it was a beautiful celebration— and to think how we would have sung had we known it would be our last chance? That week, I went back and forth in my own mind about what was the wise course of action. Wasn’t the early church known for their steadfastness in the face of deadly plagues? Doesn’t Hebrews tell us to not stop meeting together? But doesn’t this virus seem to uniquely designed to spread in church settings? How do I hold all of this together?
On March 13th, I sent a letter to our congregation detailing why we would not be gathering for the foreseeable future. We are still waiting to behold that unknown date when we can gather again, the hour which, it seems, only the Father knows. I have found myself reflecting quite a bit on the past year, what it means to be the church and what it means to be a pastor. I wanted to get some of my thoughts down as a way of processing and also, I hope, as a way of inviting others to offer their insights.
Through the duration of the pandemic, we as a church, my family, and me personally have all seen God’s hand of provision, correction, and encouragement. We’ve also shared great anguish at the way the pandemic has affected different segments of our already fragmented and unjust society. We’ve sent people out with blessing who have been with us since the very beginning of the life of our church not with a hug and laying on of hands but with the awkward Zoom goodbye. We’ve had seasons of collective malaise, where the thought of one more Zoom call, one more digital church service (an oxymoron if there ever was one), one more sermon preached to an audience of one (the lens of the camera not God), one more Sunday morning with no hugs, no songs, no table was too much to bear.
I see so much of this past year through the lens of John 6. I wanted to offer a summary and some thoughts on this passage but if you’re just here for the bulletpoint reading, you can scroll down to the next section:
John 6
Most of Jesus’ miracles involve an incredible reversal in the life of a small few. In John 6, Jesus performs an astonishing miracle, but this time he does it at scale. At least 5,000 people are with Jesus and his closest followers far from the city center. Jesus, turns to Philip, and says, “Where are we to buy bread for all these people to eat?” Philip is stunned at even the question. He responds to Jesus, “If we had six months wages we couldn’t feed all of these people!” But one of Jesus’ other disciples chimes in, “One of the boys here has some fish and bread.” You know those ideas you have that sort of escape your mouth before you realize how dumb they are? The fish and the bread the boy are carrying are enough to feed the boy and maybe two-three members of his family. The math is still decidedly not in their favor.
But the arithmetic of the Kingdom of God has its own intractable rules: an abundance quotient, the constant of God’s love, pouring himself out into the world. Jesus doesn’t think Andrew’s suggestion is foolish at all, his eyes light up and he says, “tell the people to sit down in groups.” Jesus takes the meager lunch, lifts it towards the heavens and pronounces blessing over it. And then they start passing it out. And, amazingly, everyone has not only just enough, but eats until they are filled.
John 6vv12-13 says:
John 6:12 When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.”
We’ve also shared great anguish at the way the pandemic has affected different segments of our already fragmented and unjust society. We’ve sent people out with blessing who have been with us since the very beginning of the life of our church not with a hug and laying on of hands but with the awkward Zoom goodbye. We’ve had seasons of collective malaise, where the thought of one more Zoom call, one more digital church service (an oxymoron if there ever was one), one more sermon preached to an audience of one (the lens of the camera not God), one more Sunday morning with no hugs, no songs, no table was too much to bear
This is the kind of miracle people don’t just witness, they participate in it, they receive from it, they are nourished by it. And, well, they look at what has transpired and they say, “This is the prophet! This Jesus will be our king! We’ll never go hungry again!” They saw Jesus as a meal ticket. You can’t blame them, really. Most of them were peasants, living a largely subsistence life, burdened by taxes from the Roman Empire and trying to provide for their families. They tried to make him king by force, but Jesus in John’s gospel is not subjected to anybody else’s whims, he simply withdraws from the crowd.
During the night, Jesus casually takes a stroll on the water, joins his disciples in a boat and they sail to the other side of the sea. The crowds wake up the next morning, realize that Jesus is gone and set out in pursuit. They come to Jesus at the other side of the sea. They say to Jesus, “Hey we came here after you, we want you to be our king, but we need some more of that bread.” Jesus, though, does not oblige them. He says to them, “You’re here because you want something to eat but there’s something deeper going on here.
John 6v35
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.
And then he says, to the crowds:
“Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. (John 6v53)
This understandably perplexes the crowds and as they continue to talk, they grow more and more agitated with Jesus and they realize that he’s not going to do what they want him to do, not going to be king on their terms.
Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. (John 6vv66)
Then, in a moment I’ve always found incredibly moving, Jesus turns to the twelve disciples and says, “Are you going to go too?” I think we read this, and thus Jesus, poorly if we hear any callousness or indifference in this question. As the crowds walk away disappointed in Jesus, he turns to his closest companions wondering if they are leaving now as well. But Peter, with his ever-present un-beguiled erudition responds:
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.
We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God. (John 6vv68-69)
Where else would we go? Peter asks.
Through the ongoing pandemic, in tracing back the moments in my life as a pastor and in our life as a church this past year, I see the following:
- The Church Is Incarnate Or Nothing
Karl Rahner once remarked that the Christian of the future was mystical or wouldn’t exist at all. The crisis of the pandemic has reinforced to me the notion that the church of the future is physical, embodied, incarnate presence or non-existent. I have heard the term “phygital” used on several occasions and it offends just about every one of my sensibilities—most notably my love for the English language and my disdain for cliches. I know many have theorized that the pandemic marks a crisis accelerant towards digital everything— even church— but I’m just not so sure. Even as people are hailing the triumph of the work from home experiment (and, in my house we benefit from this shift greatly), I am just not so sure that the lesson that we are learning is that everything can, or should, be done digitally. In John 6, the message Jesus is telling to the people is not that there’s physical bread and spiritual bread and you need spiritual bread. No, Jesus literally tells them to feed on his flesh and blood (which of course is never not a weird thing to say). But Jesus is not telling us to become vampires or cannibals he is re-orienting the focus of the people. They are focused on the bread, Jesus is saying turn your attention towards me, no less physical, seek me first.
A related note, in John’s gospel Jesus is the word made flesh (John 1v14). Paul describes the church as the body of Jesus (1 Cor. 12). I have been very reluctant to call what I have been doing in giving talks during the pandemic as preaching sermons. A sermon is an embodied word, a sacrament shared where the preacher, much like the boy in John 6, offers our pittance of loaves and fish, Jesus takes our work and offerings and blesses it, and through his power it nourishes the world. On the other side of the absence of presence that this pandemic has necessarily created, I feel strongly that we are going to see a revival of the preached word and people’s response to it.
2. We Are A Loaves and Fish People
Being 11 months old when all of this really erupted, I had my share of worries about what the pandemic would mean for the viability of our church. Planting a church is hard in the best of times (most don’t make it). Planting a church whose core values all revolved around being present with one another seemed impossible. And though we’ve had to say goodbye to so many dear friends who have finished their time in Princeton, I have seen God take our small offerings and multiply them.
I have seen our church continue to pour out, to give to feed hungry families in our community who were affected by the shutdowns. I have seen the resilient folks in our church continue to show up on the Zoom calls, to offer that small boxed version of themselves through awkward interruptions and the longing to be near. I have seen worship leaders recording songs on their phones without all the compression, reverb, and grace of live sound (and still sound stunningly clear and beautiful, no less).
Many churches have closed throughout this time, many more will follow. I don’t know what the future holds for Ecclesia (right now, I think it’s nothing but bright and a servant in our community) and really, there’s this weird triumphalism that often is implied when churches talk about what they have accomplished as if it were their own strategy or brand that succeeded as opposed to factors like God’s grace, the privilege of different segments of society, or just dumb luck. But what I do know, is that Jesus offers himself to bless, to multiply, to take what’s placed in his careful hands and bring us our daily bread.
3. We Only Get Fed In Community
Jesus when he enacts his profound miracle in John 6 has the people sit down in groups. There’s such a beautiful pace and dignity to this picture. Jesus providing this profound blessing and people sharing in it together, seated. Can you imagine the laughter and wonder present in this scene?
In the slogan machine that is the modern evangelical industrial complex, the notion of “getting smaller” is nothing new. Pastors of huge churches, in medium-sized arenas, from high-tech stages lit by tens of thousands of dollars worth of theater lighting are always trying to tell us to get smaller. I really have no inherent reaction to the setting nor do I presume bad motives on the part of those saying these things, but the juxtapositions are always a bit ironic.
But through the course of the pandemic, whether due to crowd size limitations or just the practical difficulties having too many boxes trying to converse on a zoom call, the church has had to really embrace what it means to get smaller. I sure I am like many pastors when I think about the fierce love and leadership our Ecclesia Community Leaders (our version of small groups) have demonstrated. These leaders have been endlessly creative hosting game nights and watching movies together over Zoom, having bonfires outside in the frigid cold of winter, bringing groceries to the front door when one of their group has contracted covid. These communities and the leaders have been the lifeblood of our church and I think we can see from John 6 a principal emerging: we only get fed in community.
For my part, the faithful work of the pastoral visit has become front and center again. Without the front door on a Sunday morning for those casual check-in’s and “I see you’s,” I’ve had to make a concerted effort with more phone calls and messages. The emphasis on the local and the relational has only been further impressed on me and what it means to be a pastor and for us to be a church.
4. Jesus Loves You Enough To Tell You To Drink His Blood
The people, as we saw in John 6 have designs on Jesus and what he can do for them. What they get in response is Jesus’ cryptic, “eat my flesh, drink my blood?” What on earth? When the pandemic shut everything down, our church was starting to see that ever-elusive momentum really present in our community. New people were coming each week, many students from the local university were wandering through our doors for the first time, our kids leaders and volunteers had come to an incredibly hard-won equilibrium that is providing a space for honoring children in a church that only has one gathering. Stuff was happening.
And then, over night (literally), the campus shut down, the world stopped and much of that up and to the right energy was just gone. As the leader, I was looking at things and just feeling a bit like “really?” And then as the pandemic dragged ever on, the gradual feeling of dread: “We just got this thing off the ground, are we going to have to start all over?”
I had my expectations and my hopes and many of them were turning out to be dreams deferred or all out destroyed. But in the midst of this shaking of my vision of the future, what I found was Jesus. Jesus telling the people in John 6 to “drink his blood” is not some hopelessly evasive, intentionally enigmatic statement, it’s Jesus’ genuine offer of himself, his life. C. S. Lewis says in the face of grieving his beloved wife, “I need Christ not something that resembles him.”
The pandemic has deepened the notion in me that I need Christ not something successful I can do for him. I need Christ not my best-laid projections of what I want God to be like and do for me. I need Christ more than food, more than water.
Also instructive here is the way that Jesus’ response functions as one of differentiation. Jesus is marked by the desire to do the will of the father, he will not receive any extraneous identity to that one. The crowds in their anxiety try to project an identity upon Jesus. Ironically, they have the right title, but the fact that Jesus is king can never be separated from the way that Jesus is king. Jesus rejects the projections of the mob. As a pastor, this year it has been tempting, especially with everything being online, to adopt a different persona, to grasp, rather than receive. The crowd wants to “take Jesus” and make him king by force. Jesus will later tell Pilate, who is reveling in his perceived authority over Jesus that Pilate would have no power were it not given to him from above. Jesus’ example here is one that empowers us as leaders, to not grasp, to not allow our vocations to be seized by the crowd and used for their own ends, but to receive our designation as beloved of God.
John artfully juxtaposes Peter’s response with that of the crowds. Remember who has the food in this story? It’s not the disciples who say to Jesus, “look in our collective purse, we have some food.” It’s a random boy. Peter and the rest of the disciples don’t have much to eat either. But when Jesus turns to them and asks them, “Are you leaving too?” Peter answers lucidly: where else would we go, you alone have the words of life. Peter’s answer is an invitation to us all, when all is not going the way we want it to, when it doesn’t seem like God’s responding to our agenda, when we’re hungry, tired, and want to stop, we find Jesus. Dallas Willard says “God’s address is at the end of your rope.”
I know it sounds like a small comfort, or like a pat spiritual answer to urgent, here-and-now issues. But the pandemic has taught me anew, Jesus is not just enough, not just a scraping out a subsistence life. He is extravagant, lavishing upon us an abundance not just found in the smallness of the blessings I seek from his hands but in the world-creating power of the words of his mouth and the radiant bliss of the joy of his face. Even in the face of disappointment, perplexity, uncertainty he alone has the words of life, and his words bring forth a life without lack.
5. Nothing Will Be Wasted
After the miracle moment has passed and everybody has eaten their fill, Jesus instructs the disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” Though in John 6, the fragments are the afterglow of God’s provision, we see throughout the scriptures, this God who makes the ruins come to life, who makes a forest grow from a field of tree stumps, who tells the dead bones to live. This past year has been filled with fragments, shards of sorrow, ache, and fear. We’ve all suffered to one degree or another. And yes some of us have suffered more.
For those of us who hearts are broken or are visions for our lives seem like they are forever altered, Jesus is gathering up the pieces.
For those who have felt completely abandoned, Jesus is gathering up the pieces.
For those pastors who have tried to hold it all together who have asked themselves, “what’s the point?” Jesus is gathering up the pieces.
For those who saw glimpses of a real reckoning around the racial past of America only to be disappointed again by churches who rushed into the fray, hosting “conversations” and have now, just as quickly, moved on with the news cycle, Jesus is gathering up the pieces.
This past year feels like a lost year in so many ways. Time with family and church, jobs, perhaps even a loved one, lost. For some, a whole year of school, gone. Such a strange paradoxical time where time is at once moving so quickly yet seems to be standing still. But this last lesson, for me, is the most crucial.
Nothing will be lost. Nothing will be wasted.
Jesus in his careful hands of blessing will gather up the fragments of the past year with all of its joy and sorrow and, through his resurrection life, will craft a work of kintsugi, of something unforeseen, something new— something beautiful— in our midst.
I have been praying that I’m learning the “right” lessons. These are some of the things I’m processing. I’d love to hear what you’ve been thinking about. Grace and peace to you.