Come and Welcome

For the past 7 months we have been trained to regard ourselves as quite dangerous. We’re surrounded by signs and policies commanding us to keep our distance from one another. We quarantine the healthy. We are told we must cover our faces for the sake of love. Even our skin color has become a source of danger for others. Whiteness needs to be isolated just as the old racists believed (and believe) that blackness should be. We’ve been catechized, discipled to believe that in order to love our neighbor we must repent of our skin, stay away from one another, and cover our faces - the part of us designed to uniquely reflect God’s glory (2 Corinthians 3-4). This is a catechism from hell and it must be resisted.

The church’s witness has been badly compromised in these days. Not because we’ve necessarily abandoned the creeds, but because we’ve abandoned or neglected what is the necessary fruit of those creeds. We’ve forsaken the gathering of the church for disembodied video streaming, reinforcing the message that everyone is safer at home. We’ve abandoned the one table where we share bread and wine together, adopting instead individualized communion, segregated seminars where we are sheltered from one another’s skin, and buffet-style Sundays where the people of God eat one church’s online music, drink another’s online preaching, and abandon the practice of hospitality for one another and to our neighbors. We’ve done these things in the name of love and justice, destroying both in the process.  Hell wants this - to call evil good and to call good evil. Hell wants this - to reinforce the animosities that have haunted our nation’s past. Hell wants this- a people fearful of what the other people might be carrying, what they might breathe, or even who they are. In the name of love, indeed in the name of justice, such madness must be resisted. 

Each Sunday the liturgy begins with a call to worship. Here God calls his people together, as their father, to worship, to pray, to read, to baptize and to eat. He welcomes us as his children -brothers and sisters, not as potential disease-carrying threats. He brings us together, not as embodiments of racist oppression or victimization, but as one family, one tribe gathered from the nations of the earth. He calls us to testify in song and prayer with faces reflecting his glory and grace. He issues an invitation to come and be welcomed home, to be together in his presence with lives that overlap, breath and song that overlaps, and even bread and wine that overlap. We meet one another as a redeemed people. We meet one another as forgiven people. We meet one another, with bodies and faces and stories to tell. Unlearn the unhuman catechism. Worship the triune God with body and with people. Go to church. Come and Welcome.