I want to begin by telling you something about how I grew up, for it comes to my mind these days.  If you were a child, in suburban America at the end of the 1950’s, you assumed that the world was a stable place in which things were taken care, that the earth beneath you could not be shaken.  My mother was a microbiologist, the kind of person who would tell you all the microbes you were ingesting if you put a blade of grass in your mouth!  To be fair to her, she was also the one who brought us to the Cathedral every Sunday, not to mention Sunday School and memorizing the catechism (usually in the car).  She and my father were part of what is called ‘the great generation,’ formed in the fires of the Great Depression and the second world war.  When I was little, my father placed a record player in my room so I could hear two long playing albums of the speeches of Winston Churchill, so that at a very early age ‘blood, toil, tears, and sweat’, and ‘we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds… we shall never surrender’ would be a subliminal soundtrack to early life.  It was a kind of catechism from a veteran of that world to his son. But 60 years on, you and I are not Winston Churchill, but at least we can see these things, from long age, in a theological way.

    How weird it all is. Bat droppings, and a virus mutates in a market half the globe away, so as to be more contagious than the last of its kind, which I recall from Toronto.  It moves silently. Its replication is exponential. These are facts of this real and concrete world of which we are a part, we creatures too, we also subject to its laws as well as its seemingly random twists and turns.  The creation groans, real but broken, says Paul, and we groan with it, which is is why it is entailed in a sound theology of creation to listen to scientists who describe the real world we live in.  I once heard it said that the Christian way to wash dishes is to get them clean - the Christian way to deal with a pandemic is to hear the virologists and the epidemiologists. How shocking that our supposedly stable world can be turned upside down by such; we supposed that we were immune, as it were, to this.  We mourn normalcy. But closing our eyes and wishing it away would be faulty theology, not to mention that it doesn’t work.

My past two weeks have been with the budget, more Zoom than I could have dreamed, being encouraged by phone-time with you all. Not so much on the theology front. But if we had a chance to delve into the theology of the moment, our conversation would move from creation on to questions of contingency, providence, theodicy, angst (Luther’s Anfechtung), and suffering.  Theology not worked out in books but in your and my viscera!   

How we got here may feel like a terrible roll of the dice, a matter of bad fortune.  We feel hemmed-in by hard news and prognostication.  In an unlikely month all our best laid plans  for the next year and beyond fall to the ground. So let me remind you of what is most important and most real, first behind us and then before us.  Behind us is the death and resurrection of Jesus. That is what matters, whether we recall it in a beautiful holy week liturgy or a picture on a screen.  It is not some story told to a child, a religious convention. It is the rock on which our lives are built. It is what time cannot move when all these lives of ours are past.  The world shakes, and the ground holds.  Ahead? The day, I know not when, or how, or in what form, when our children will see the hand of God using contingencies for His purpose. Only looking back can we see how all things work for good to those who love God, again quoting Paul, as we see His loving and providential hand.

This is where the Gospel comes in. Jesus faces the terrible turn of events, one that seemed to make no sense. Let this cup pass Father!  But he surrenders himself, and goes through abandonment, the hell of the cross and then of death, as his self-offering. He who was a Son becomes a servant even unto death- we hear it from Jesus in our Gospel, confirmed by Paul in Philippians 2.  Contingency and theodicy, the theology of complaint, ascends into Christology, so as to make a theology of hope, of loving providence, of the day of the circle unbroken imaginable for us.

•  But here, in between, where we live today, in uncertainty, maybe in fear and trembling the odd three a.m., when we awake, things come down to us, here and now.  What a weird thing, that standing strong should look like hunkering down, that courage looks like patience, that faith looks like one foot in front of the other into the fog.  A contingency, a weird turn, an outlier, yes. But in truth this is what our catechism class, our earlier ministries, our whole lives, were preparing for us, it turns out. This is not some random mistake only. This is what exactly Christ is summoning us to. Not just the master, but then the disciple too is given the strength, even with a troubled spirit, to say, ‘Lord, do not save us from this hour, for it was for this very reason and this hour that we have come.’  The world around us, our neighbors, need us, unprepared and perplexed, as a sign of hope. We are to rise up as witnesses to human solidarity under God and servants of His good news, come what may. We will stand for all of us, the most vulnerable, in age of poverty, even in the day of triage.  Rising up will look different for all of us - counsel, patience, help, a prayer, an articulate helplessness. There lies freedom.  In the witness of the Church lies the encouragement of society. And there, by God’s grace, lies our own renewal, as a Church, as His followers. And I quote ‘success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.” What that dubious Anglican prime minister left out is that courage comes from above, and no strength of ours.

In this Spirit, with all our hearts, in thanksgiving, as one, let us renew our commitments as priests and deacons to our Lord. May God empower each one of us, halting, fearful, flawed, baffled though we be, to stand, to wait, to suffer, to help, to pray. Amen.