WHEW! What a week this has been. It seems like each day brought news that overwhelmed or overturned everything that we had understood the day before. It seemed that a decision that we made one day was overturned by the news coming out the next day. To the point that if felt like at the end of the week that the decision we were agonizing over on Monday seemed quaint or unimportant by the time Friday rolled around. Over the course of the week more and more places were shut down, ceasing normal operations in order to achieve what is called social distancing, this idea of creating more physical space between us. Of course, we need to continue to wash our hands and use hand sanitizer, but we need to do something more extreme to create more space between us. The hope is that we will be able to slow down the spread of this disease. Slowing down the spread is not necessarily an effort to make fewer people sick in the long run. The hope is to have fewer people sick at one time so that we do not overwhelm the entire medical system. This disease will be much more manageable if we can flatten the curve, as we learned this week. (We are learning so many interesting new words and new phrases.) So if we flatten the curve with fewer people sick at any given time, even though the same number of people are sick over a longer period of time, that is better because fewer people will die.
So by last Friday we knew we had to make the same decision, and we had to cancel our normal operations, including our worship together. We realized we could not safely gather together in this space as a community, and so we cancelled. It was not an easy decision, in fact it was a painful decision because it seems to upend the things that we do. We gather in this place, this place that means so much to us, this place where we encounter the Holy, this place where we find communion with God and with one another. The relationships that we have here are so vital, seeing people here in this place week in and week out. It is important for our souls. Coming and gathering here is a reflection of our faith and it nourishes our faith. So deciding that we could not gather in this place together was hard, but it was the right decision.
The Gospel the lectionary has given us today is a rich and poignant story for this very moment that we find ourselves in. For in this story Jesus and the Samaritan woman conversing by the well cover many topics, and one of those topics is this very question of worship and place. Now Jesus is a Jew and the woman is a Samaritan. The Jews and Samaritans are religious cousins. They have a common lineage, in fact they have a lot in common, a lot of similar practices and similar scripture. And yet, at some point, they split off. Differences were formed and divisions created, and sometimes those divisions created enmity between them. We hear that in this Gospel reading when the woman says, how it is you, a Jew, are speaking to me, a Samaritan? It’s not what we do. Don’t you know that?
Now the division between them is not unlike our modern time differences between Protestants and Catholics. We have so much in common, you could argue that the bulk of our faith is in common, and yet there are some differences. Those differences sometime create enmity between us, and that enmity sometimes flares up in violence. Look at Ireland. In Ireland, during my childhood, there was a lot of violence. There has been peace and absence of that violence for many years, but I read that it is fragile. There are still those divisions, and they are still real and important. This is the same situation here for the Jews and the Samaritans. There is enmity. They are not at war at this time, but there is some tension that could flare up. And yet they have a lot in common.
One of those differences that Jesus and the woman talk about is the question of worship and place. The woman says, you are a Jew and so you worship God in Jerusalem, but we Samaritans worship God here at Mount Gerizim. She is naming this really important difference about where they worship God. Jesus does not say, no, that is not a real difference. He says, yes, I am a Jew and salvation comes from the Jews. But ultimately he says those differences are not the most important thing. What is truly important about worshiping God is in worshiping God in spirit and in truth. So while place matters and is important, it is not the most important thing. The important thing is worshiping God in spirit and in truth.
This place matters. This place is a place where we encounter God, where lives are transformed, where faith is nourished. And this place will be that again when we are able to gather here together. In the meantime, Jesus is reminding us in this Gospel reading today that the most important thing is that we continue to worship God in spirit and in truth. This will require some different ways of how that works at this time, but the core will still be there.
Our mission here at St. Mary’s, to worship, serve and grow in faith, is going to look very different for this season. But the core of our mission will remain. On Saturday morning we still held our Saturday breakfast to feed our hungry neighbors who need our support more than ever during this vulnerable time. But we had to do it differently. We served the meal in “to go” bags outside instead of bringing them in to sit inside. We were still able to engage in our mission to serve. We will be looking this week at how we can keep growing in faith, how we can keep interacting with each other to deepen our faith through our various educational programs. And of course, here we are at worship. We are trying out this digital, virtual way to worship together. It’s different, and I so long for the day when we can all be back together in this place. In the meantime, we’ll try out different ways of doing this. But at the core of all of it is the spirit and the truth. We need to remember that and hold on to that so we can continue to nourish our faith through this time. We know that a rich faith will help us navigate this moment that we face. This is not a time to cancel that, it is a time to deepen that faith, to continue to serve our neighbors in need, to continue to worship our God together in spirit and in truth.
AMEN
