Lent 3A: Exodus 17:1-7  • Psalm 95  • Romans 5:1-11  • John 4:5-42

Note: The video cut out after seven and a half minutes, so I apologize there isn’t a full sermon. That’s what I get for taking 800,000 pictures of my cute kids and never freeing up space!

Is the Lord among us, or not?

Panic buying. Cancelled events. School closures. The words “Global Pandemic” inescapable on TV, online, in newspapers, and right now, here in church. With social distancing becoming more of a mandate than suggestion, we are aware that this is an event that is unlike any other in our lifetime. So is the Lord among us, or not?

Moses has led the Israelites out into the wilderness in our Hebrew Scriptures for this morning. Though they know what God has done for them to release them from bondage, once you’ve been wandering around in the desert for a while, mouth dry, throat dry, faith dry, things become less optimistic. The joy of release from captivity dries up in the painfully hot sun, and any droplet of thanksgiving has long since been absorbed by the billions of particles of sand that are everywhere—in the shoes, their hair, their mouths. This disruption to their lives was such a promising one, but now, it feels like unending torment. There are murmurs that we would have been better off with Pharaoh instead of following this guy around to our death.

A week ago, my family did its shopping as usual. We went in with our 2-week meal plan list, mostly stuck to basics, and didn’t encounter a line at the checkout. We bought a normal sized pack of toilet paper, refilled our two 5-gallon bottles, bought zero hand sanitizer. This week, as we’ve witnessed photo and video from our friends while at Costco, Food Maxx, and anywhere else one can buy “provisions”, the empty shelves, the lines wrapping around Wal Mart, the police escorts for the water delivery trucks, we started to wonder if we made a mistake in only buying one pack of TP, how long could this shortage last? How long might we be stuck in THAT particular wilderness? While we haven’t done much of the cart-filling shopping sprees ourselves, I understand how it’s happening. The fear of being sentenced to life inside the home for an indeterminate amount of time, with all the kids 24/7… we all know what the “locusts” plague looks like, and that’s what having kids in the house with a well-stocked pantry can look like after a few unsupervised hours. There is an uncertainty to whether there will be enough, whether our social structures will hold in place while county departments transition to working from home. Will our utilities continue to function, will our lights switch on and off, toilets flush, water flow from the tap? Will our Wi-Fi hold out so we can at least binge watch Netflix? Is it safe to visit Grandma yet? What if we don’t get to go back to normal? Is the Lord among us, or not?

Here at Grace, we have been recalibrating our lives this Lent to care for our souls rather than to give up or go without, and the work we have done in the beginning weeks of this journey will strengthen us for the coming weeks of what ifs. I want to share a poem by Rev. Lynn Ungar that I came across this week with you all:

Pandemic

What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.
 
And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.
 
Promise this world your love–
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.
 
–Lynn Ungar 3/11/20

            We are in a new wilderness for most of us. Unless one of us is an expert in epidemiology, this level of quarantine and isolation is completely unfathomable until we have found ourselves in the middle of it. And while it is serious, it too will pass. Moses didn’t ask the question, “Is the Lord among us, or not?” He named the site where he struck the rock and sweet, pure, fresh water flowed from, “Is the Lord among us, or not?” It is a marker, showing where the Israelites were at that moment in their wilderness. It is a rhetorical question, because of course, the answer was, and is “Yes.”

            People may be lined up at Costco as it opens like it’s Black Friday to get their cases of water, but it is because we are wilderness people who have experienced thirst in our remembered corporate histories, and we are afraid of the possibility of being without as we wander this socially distanced desert. How can we make sure we don’t run out? How can we see the “Yes” to the question “Is the lord among us, or not?”

             We can remember that we are the church. We are positioned to be a calmness in the middle of the chaos and panic because we know what it means to drink deeply from the cup of Living Water. With our own existential crisis quenched by our relationship with Jesus, we know that our souls are tended to. We can then do what must be done. We can reach out to those who social distancing might mean they are more susceptible to depression; we can pick up the phone and talk to our friends who are not next to us in the pews this week. For those of us who fall into the young and healthy category, we can arrange food deliveries for those who are staying home with compromised immune systems or ailments that could complicate things when mixed with COVID-19. We can all act as a beacon of hope to our friends and families that social distancing never means being distanced from God.

So is the Lord among us, or not? Even as we ask the question, we already know the answer.

Amen.