Dear Sisters and Brothers at Christ Church,
I'm writing this note on Thursday afternoon, sitting outside on my deck in a t-shirt because it's 75 degrees. In February. I guess this is climate change. I long for the days when the weather did what we expected it to do. Much of life is like that lately. I also long for the pre-covid days which I took for granted, when we could plan vacations, and family activities, and elective surgeries a few months out, without the threat of a variant washing everything away. Amidst these uncertain times I long for something solid to cling to.
The Psalms talk all about turning to God in times of uncertainty and danger:
The Lord is my rock, my fortress
The Lord is a stronghold
O Lord, make me lie down in safety
On God rests my deliverance
But you, O Lord, are a shield around me
You, O Lord, will protect us
Etc, etc, etc...
That language is beautiful, but it can also feel like pablum. Rather than comforting words, I want something more certain. That's the challenge inherent in faith: We want certainty and comfort in a fundamentally uncertain and uncomforting world. If we can't have faith in certainty, what can we have?
We can have each other. I am quite convinced that we'll learn more about God's presence from each other than we ever could from books of theology. In one another we can find some comfort, some hope and also some challenge. The last few years have shown us that there's not too much we can count on in this life, but that we can count on our community to help carry us through this uncertainty. We can count on our community to walk alongside of us through the valley of the shadow of death, as Psalm 23 puts it. All together, we make a body, a body that can walk through climate change, Covid and all of the other challenges of this life.
-Stephen