Hope Has You

Photo by Corey Hearne on Unsplash

I sit at my desk. A clean sheet of paper before me, a favorite pen in my hand, music streams in the background. On this late fall afternoon, sunlight floods through the stained-glass window in my office. The plan seemed simple: write an essay in which I would discuss ways and places for fellow leaders to find hope. I sit in this space for a good while, waiting until something comes, the way a poet might wait for a poem to arrive. I rise from my desk, and run my fingers against the smooth spines of the books on the shelf. I’ve read these volumes over the course of the pandemic.  I’m drawn in by the titles, with words like burnout, loneliness, loss, stuck, and trauma. I look to another shelf. One asks whether the Lord’s Supper can rightly be celebrated online. An issue of a journal leans against it, the theme’s focus is around what the new normal will look like. A few novels I had yet to read taunt me.  Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship, Letters and Papers from Prison, and Life Together stand next to a memoir about anxiety. Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time rests next to a volume of Luther’s Works. In my car, a list of podcasts flashes on the screen, ready to play with the push of my finger. Travel times are quicker because so many people now work from home. There doesn’t seem to be enough time to either listen in or pay attention. There’s barely a moment to breathe.

Each resource released into the world is meant to bring leaders help as we navigate pandemic realities. But where can leaders turn when the waters we navigate flow over our heads? Where can we turn when it feels as though there is no help – as though no one understands what we’re going through? What do we do when the hope we proclaim evaporates like steam before us?

At an appointment with a new physician, I’m asked what I do for a living. When I tell the doctor, she takes off her glasses and sits down next to me. She confides I’m not the first church leader she’s seen in the clinic during the pandemic. “I’m sure that’s true,” I said, and meant it. “So much depression and anxiety among church workers,” she said. “So much pressure.” I nod my head in agreement. “So many opinions to negotiate.” I agreed. “And the politics – as if the health of the congregation is somehow wrapped up in one’s political perspective.”

A familiar heaviness began to pulse within me. “Yes,” I said. “And for the life of me, I can’t find any hope anymore.” The doctor put down her glasses and leaned in. “How are you?” I felt her compassion and concern in the question. “I’m fine,” I said. This was a complete lie. I wanted to tell her that a series of text messages and anonymous notes left on my desk triggered memories from an traumatic childhood for which I had previously received a good amount of therapy. As a result, these things set loose a spiral of anxiety and despair I thought I’d never come out from. But I couldn’t locate the hope within me that would allow for me to tell the truth about how I was doing.

Eventually, hope was revealed to me once more in a hospital where I stayed for a week. It came through the voice of a paramedic (his name was Jésus – I’m not even kidding) who preached to me in the back of an ambulance, a nurse who declared me a child of God the first moment she met me, and a doctor who heard me tell my story many times over. “You are not what they say about you.” But what if I was? “You’re not,” he said. Later, he turned this into a question for me – one he’d ask with a smile. “Are you what they say of you,” he asked? “Hell no,” I said, and smiled.

But it was more than that. It was also the conversations I had with others that week – my friends, my family, and my wife. And, I began to listen again to and for God in the prayers I surprised myself by praying. It was in the middle-of-the-night check-ins the nurses did to make sure everything was alright. It was in the freedom to laugh, cry, to express doubts and fears, to name the pain and to find constructive ways to address what stirred within me. It was in the vulnerable stare in the mirror each morning and evening as I made the sign of the cross on my forehead, and reminded myself that whatever else was – and wasn’t – true about me, the one thing most true about me is that I’m a beloved child of God. Say it with me: I am a child of God.

I continue to be captivated by the story of the Road to Emmaus from Luke’s Gospel. There are two on the road, but only one is named. Could it be, as a former seminary professor once said, that the absence of a name in this story is so we can find ourselves in what unfolds there. You also are on the road. You’ve borne witness to a terrible catastrophe. You don’t know what to make of it. All you turn can do is turn toward Emmaus. The two of you try to make meaning of what has occurred. Yet, the language you have for these things doesn’t feel adequate. You don’t feel adequate to lead because of all that’s happened. Still, a stranger walks among you, asks you what’s happened, speaks into the silence. You invite them in to join you for dinner. This One speaks through bread broken and blood poured out for you. Your eyes are opened. Your heart beats once again in the rhythm of grace. You realize once more what has always been true. Hope isn’t something you have. Hope has you.

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Paul Lutter

Paul Lutter is an ELCA interim pastor, writer, and teacher. He lives with his family in Plymouth, MN.

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 Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.

The Road to Re-open

What the Road to Emmaus teaches us about the road to re-opening our church buildings.

April sure was a long year, wasn’t it? Now that May is here and half of the country is preparing to reopen in some way, church leaders have an important decision to make.

To open? Or not to open? That is the question.

For those of us who follow the lectionary, we just journeyed with Luke the Evangelist down the Road to Emmaus. Roads are a common theme in Lukan stories of the Bible. For example, in the story of the Prodigal Son, a road leads the son back home to his father. Likewise, the primary scene of the Parable of the Good Samaritan is a road. And on the first day of the week, sometime between the resurrection and the disciples self-quarantining in a house for fear of the Jews, the two meet a mystery man on the Road to Emmaus.

For Luke, roads have a way of bringing us together—a way of connecting people of faith in untraditional settings such that roads become a symbol of a mobile faith. The events on the Road to Emmaus foreshadow the future of Christ’s church, and it begins with a chance encounter that has all the makings of modern-day worship, just without the building. Scripture was shared, there was even a little gossip, and then an invitation was extended to fellowship at the table and partake in the Eucharist. This story that Luke the Evangelist writes that no other Gospel tells, is a story about outreach. It’s the story of an agile and flexible faith where the road and the table meet in-spite of the absence of a physical church.

In the same way, God is calling us during this time apart to embrace a mobile model of evangelism that’s emblematic of a church on the move. One of the good things to come from COVID-19 is the opportunity to reimagine the ways in which God has equipped us to do ministry. I think we’ve proven over this last month that the holy spirit can certainly move virtually and even over the phone—reaching beyond the four walls of our faith houses. My small church has enjoyed more participation over the phone than we did in the sanctuary, and we’ve even hosted holy communion with whatever bread, cracker, or wafer one might have in their home accompanied by any fruit of the vine. I can attest that communion has been no less powerful, because God has been no less present.

God has been with us this whole time helping us to deliver what the world desperately needs right now—compassion for bodies beyond our buildings. Compassion for elderly and sick bodies; compassion for first responders who are putting their bodies on the frontline; compassion for black bodies that are disproportionately dying and Asian bodies facing discrimination. Compassion for the body of Christ. Given our current circumstances, people of faith are still in a divine position to deliver the compassion, care, and dignity needed to treat people, and not just disease.

If COVID-19 (and pandemics before it) has taught us anything, it’s that we are all connected, whether by our shared humanity, or globalization and technology, or by faith. In the same way we are experiencing this dis-ease together, our journey down the road to recovery, and ultimately the road to reopen, must also be together. Whether it’s one month from now or one year from now—our roads will again converge at the same table. And it won’t be because we missed our houses of worship so much that we went right back to doing church as usual, it will be because we loved each other enough not to.

So if you’re struggling with the freedom that’s been granted to many of us to once again worship inside our tabernacles, know that it’s a freedom rooted in economics and not epidemiology. Until public health experts give the “OK” to gather, pastors should plan to continue doing ministry virtually and telephonically, because Jesus is there with us too.

Many of us have been challenged to consider who we want to be as individuals when we come out of this. Now, God is challenging us to consider what kind of church we want to be down the road. My prayer is that Church will continue to be a ministry on the move, sent out by a Jesus who walks alongside us even when we don’t recognize him. My hope is that Church will be where Jesus continues to reveal himself through the breaking of bread, the drinking of wine, and tactile expressions of mutual care—the smile, the clasp of another's hand in the passing of peace, perhaps even a warm embrace after months of social distancing—but also a Church that recognizes that Jesus is ever present wherever we are, and even where we are not.

The country might be re-opening against the best advice of experts, but we certainly don’t have to, because God is with us.

Ulysses Burley III

Dr. Ulysses W. Burley III is the founder of UBtheCURE, LLC – a proprietary consulting company on the intersection of Faith, Health, and Human Rights. Ulysses served as a member of the Executive Committee of the World Council of Churches as well as the United States Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) under the Obama Administration. He has been recognized by the National Minority Quality Forum as a top 40 under 40 Minority Health Leader for his work in faith and HIV in communities of color and serves on the NMQF Advisory Board. Ulysses is an internationally recognized speaker and award winning writer on topics including faith, HIV/AIDS policy, LGBTQIA, gender and racial justice, food security, and peace in the Middle East. He is a lay leader at St. Stephen’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Chicago, IL.

Facebook | @UlyssesIII
Twitter | @ulyssesburley
Instagram | @ubthecure
Website | www.ubthecure.com
YouTube | Ulysses Burley

Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.

As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.