Body of Christ

Worship and Communion in a Pandemic

jamescalvindavis

I am leading a study for my home congregation on “Being the Body of Christ in a Socially Distant World.” We are considering the ways in which the pandemic has challenged our habits of being church, but we also are talking about the new practices we have discovered that may be useful to our ministry and fellowship even when this present darkness is behind us. This coming week, we will be talking about virtual worship, particularly the virtual practice of Communion, or the Lord’s Supper. The following are resources I assembled to give them food for thought on the subject. Perhaps they will be useful to some of you as well.

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Take a look at these five short and accessible articles wrestling with the impact of COVID-19 on Christian worship, especially the celebration of Communion.

  1. An NPR story that confirms that much of our experience with virtual church—good and bad—is being felt by churchgoers all over the country:

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/20/858918339/things-will-never-be-the-same-how-the-pandemic-has-changed-worship

2. A Lutheran makes the argument for why we should not do the Lord’s Supper at home during the pandemic. Does his argument hold if we don’t subscribe to the Lutheran understanding of Communion? What is the Lutheran understanding? Wait—what is our understanding of Communion?

https://logia.org/logia-online/faith-love-and-the-lords-supper-in-the-pandemic2020

3. An “advisory opinion” of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) on whether it is appropriate to celebrate Communion virtually. Try to read past all of the polity references (i.e., who has authority) to understand what the meaning of the Lord’s Supper normally is in this denominational tradition, and how it can be justified virtually in times of pandemic. Does this perspective from the UCC’s “cousin” in Reformed Christianity help us think about our practice?

https://www.pcusa.org/site_media/media/uploads/oga/pdf/advisory_opinion_communion_in_an_emergency_or_pandemic.pdf

4. A theological historian argues how a 13th-century Catholic theologian might help us think about the Lord’s Supper in pandemic:

https://garynealhansen.com/lords-supper-and-the-coronavirus-wisdom-st-thomas-aquinas/?fbclid=IwAR0LzPxI1XkNrUeSi7V4l9KMfJQmYe-t-HTTp93VIeG0eKIQ2tqZ3wXXZ-U

5. Finally, a “plague song” written by Protestant Reformer Ulrich Zwingli when he was struggling with his own pandemic experience:

https://phs-app-media.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/RefSunday_full_2020.pdf

Click to access advisory_opinion_communion_in_an_emergency_or_pandemic.pdf

Witnesses of These Things

jamescalvindavis

A sermon preached at the Congregational Church of Middlebury, Vermont

April 15, 2018 (Third Sunday of Easter)
Text: Luke 24: 36-49

I was having breakfast with a friend of mine this week, a colleague at the college, and the subject of church came up. My friend grew up in the Roman Catholic Church, but he doesn’t associate with his religion anymore. “Someday you and I need to have a conversation about this church thing,” he said to me. “I have to admit that I’ve distanced myself from that stuff in my middle age. I guess I’m too much of a scientist; I need things to be empirically validated to believe them. I’d love to talk to you about how you keep religion and the life of the mind together.”

Many of us have had similar conversations; some of us have had them with ourselves. We’re not always sure we buy all of the things read and mentioned and claimed here at church. What do we do with the disconnect between the assertions of the faith and the requirements of the critical mind?

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Long Live the Reformation!

jamescalvindavis

On October 31, 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther publicly protested what he considered to be profound abuses in the Roman Church by posting a list of his objections to the church door in Wittenberg. Nailing matters like these on the church door was a customary way of initiating debate in that time and place. Despite the common practice, though, those 95 Theses were no ordinary bulletin board material. Luther was calling into question deeply rooted practices in the medieval church—the paying of indulgences to buy loved ones out of purgatory, the assumption that the pope’s mediation was necessary for Christians to experience the grace of Christ, and the emphasis on deeds performed as a way of earning one’s way into God’s mercy.  Dissatisfaction in the church over these practices and others had simmered for centuries in the medieval church, but in the 16th century Luther’s 95 Theses became a flashpoint for reform, igniting revolutionary changes in the Christian Church all across Europe—turning the Church upside down.

From that revolution was born Lutheran Churches, Calvinist Churches, Anglican Churches, and eventually Methodists, Mennonites, Baptists, and others. From that revolution also emerged a Roman Catholic Church that was significantly different than the one from which Luther broke. Reformation Sunday—this year on October 29—annually celebrates the richness of Christian pluralism and the beginning of Christianity’s entrance into modernity. Reformation Sunday also reminds us of some of the fundamental theological convictions for which our Protestant ancestors labored so mightily. In an age in which most American Protestants struggle to define Protestant identity as anything beyond being generically “American,” it seems good to reserve a day each year to think intentionally about our Reformation inheritance. And it’s especially appropriate this year, as we commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of the 95 Theses. Here, then, are seven examples of the theological legacy of the Reformers.

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God In the Hurricanes

jamescalvindavis

I love the Book of Job. Job is the place in the Bible for cranks. You may know the story, but perhaps a quick review is in order: the Book of Job imagines a little wager between God and Satan, where Satan bets God that if the fortunate and pious Job were deprived of his fortunes long enough, if he were made to really suffer, he would abandon his loyalty to God and curse God. God puts his money on Job, and the wager is on, as God allows Satan to inflict Job’s family, his financial circumstances, and his physical health with trial after trial. When Job responds, he is not the “patient Job” we are taught to expect in the story. He endures his sufferings without abandoning God, but he does not do so quietly. He complains. Job is a crank, as he goes on and on about the unfortunate, undeserved circumstances he is enduring. And God is a crank, when God finally responds to all of Job’s laments and accusations with the perfectly parental, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, little man.” The whole book is a contest of crankiness (and a fitting reflection of my disposition much of the time, which might explain my affinity for it).

Of course, I also love the Book of Job because of its substance, its preoccupation. The Book is trying to take seriously something with which we all struggle, the reality that bad things happen to good people, and the fact that it can be hard to locate God in all of that bad stuff. Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people? How is this fair or good? What I love about the Book of Job is that it refuses to answer the question easily—you could argue that it refuses to answer the question at all. Job asks God for a justification of his misfortune and gets from God in return a lesson in the grandness of the cosmos and the smallness of human knowledge and experience. And Job’s response is to acknowledge that yes, he is guilty of speaking “things too wonderful for me.” (Job 42:3)

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