The God of Paradox is at Work

“The God of Paradox is at Work”

“God, who is preached and represented in this world by the One who was crucified and rose from the dead, is the God of paradox: what people consider wise He considers folly, what people regard as madness He considers strength, what people consider great He sees as small, and what they find small He regards as great.”

- Tomáš Halík

After months of quarantine, stay-at-home orders, closed businesses, Church By Phone and Communion on Facebook, most of us have long since grown tired of Covid-19 and are desperate to move into the “new normal,” whatever that is going to look like. After all of the suffering and loss endured by the people of our region, our local leaders have moved cautiously and sometimes, as in the case of indoor dining, changed course, despite public pressure and the significant economic impact. Elsewhere in the country, as I’m sure you know, many leaders failed to learn from our painful experience, reopening too quickly and widely with predictably devastating consequences. We may be tired of the virus, but it seems the virus is not tired of us.

While eager to welcome as many of you as possible back to church, the leadership of our congregation is choosing to be cautious, not so much out of fear but out of love for one another. So, in-person worship and other events will resume no sooner than the first week of August. I know this is disappointing to many (and maybe a relief to others), but I hope that we will continue to look for the gifts that God continues to give us during this strange and difficult time.

God is the God of paradox. God sees the world in a downside-up way, and acts accordingly. So, in God’s view – in God’s “kingdom” – it’s the poor and the mournful and the suffering people who are the blessed ones. The God of paradox comes among us as a “nobody” born in the humblest of circumstances, raised in a small town not known for producing much good, and whose life and mission seemed to end as a miserable failure. But, as the theologian James Cone writes, when all hope seemed to be lost, God took the cross, “a symbol of death and defeat” and “turned into a sign of liberation and new life.”

God is the God of paradox. Our Christian faith is built on paradox, calling us to take up our cross, insisting that we must give up our life in order to save it. In the gospel lesson we will hear this Sunday, Jesus declares that God hides the truth from those who think they are wise and reveals it to “infants.”  If church has always been part of our lives, if we think we’ve somehow “figured out” Christianity, all of this paradox may be hidden from us, fading into the background of our faith and our lives, preventing us from seeing things as they really are.

But, God does not miss an opportunity! And, I believe God is hard at work, rearranging our vision, helping us to see the world through God’s eyes, inviting us to see – and maybe even help build – a downside-up world during this time of paradox.

So, in the eyes of the world, right now the church looks awfully weak. Never in our long history has the church been closed for more than a week or two, usually due to bad weather. Now, as you know, we haven’t been able to gather in-person since March. And yet, when we might expect that our bonds of commitment would have started to weaken, we have in fact grown even stronger. Way more of us are praying “together” during the week and on Sundays, and it sure sounds to me like we are praying with more depth and fervor than when we were sitting in our pews. The God of paradox is at work in this time of paradox.

Across our country, longstanding injustices are being exposed and long-demanded changes that used to seem just too hard to tackle are falling with little resistance. Statues of Confederate leaders (usually erected decades after the Civil War in an effort to rewrite history and to intimidate Black people) have been swiftly removed and hauled away. After years of stubborn resistance, the Mississippi legislature quickly voted to remove Confederate imagery from the state flag. And, it’s not just symbols, as important as they are. More people are looking carefully at government budgets, calling for resources to be shifted from the police (who, as Jon Stewart recently said, for too long have been asked to do more than they can manage, in effect serving as a kind of border patrol between the “two Americas,” the haves and the have-nots) to people and programs with a better chance at actually fixing our deep-seated problems. And, maybe most paradoxical of all, during a time when one would expect people to be circling the wagons and only looking out for themselves and those they love, it’s like our hearts have finally been cracked open and many more of us are able to empathize with the suffering and oppressed. The God of paradox is at work in this time of paradox.

And on Monday evening, several local pastors and I took to the Internet for a frank, and sometimes uncomfortable, conversation about racism and the church. I doubt that we would have had this discussion during normal times when we all would have been caught up in our daily routines and the usual demands of leading our churches. (Or, I should just speak for myself: I would have tried to use the excuse of busyness to avoid having this discussion.) But, it was during this time when we are apart that about 1,200 people (!) came together to watch us, and more have been catching up with the recording. Why did so many tune in? I’m sure there was some curiosity and maybe a sense of obligation to support the pastors, but I suspect that many recognized that this is a different kind of time when God is rearranging our vision, helping us to see the world through God’s eyes.

So, although it’s hard to be patient during this difficult and frightening time, God is not missing an opportunity to give us some unexpected but much-needed blessings. As we wait for the reopening of our church building, the God of paradox invites us to be even closer together while we are still apart, to continue opening our hearts and our eyes, and to help build the downside-up world that God has seen and hoped for all along.