Coming "Back"?

Jesus says: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Talk is increasing about churches opening up and getting “back to normal” after the pandemic (whenever that is).  As we prepare for this, let’s remember what Jesus says here.  Let’s remember that, in discipleship, there is no going “back.”

Some will show up at church expecting, hoping, even demanding that everything go back to the way it was.  They want to worship like it’s 2019.  It is an understandable sentiment, given all we have been through.  We may justifiably crave the stability, familiarity, and comfort of the church life we once knew.

But I wonder what stability, familiarity, and comfort 

have to do with discipleship.  

For there is no going back.  2020-2021 will not be a meaningless detour after which we may resume our journey where we left off.  Rather, like most detours, we will find ourselves in a very different place, much farther on up the road, maybe even on a different road altogether. 

The 18 months or so we will have slogged our way through the pandemic have changed us.  This difficult time has revealed things about us, good and bad.  It has changed relationships, the economy, and our politics.  The whole way we see society, each other, the planet, and ourselves has shifted.  Far from simply picking up the story in 2019 before we were so rudely interrupted, the world of 2021 and forward will be something new and unfamiliar.

And we will have to keep adjusting and adapting, even after the pandemic has run its course, as we try to find a new equilibrium together.  There will be a strong tendency to pretend like nothing has happened and we can get back to the way it was.  On the other hand, many will find opportunities and assume some changes are permanent.  I suggest nothing is permanent.  The days after the pandemic will not look like when we were in the middle of it any more than they will merely repeat the time before.

None of this should particularly bother Christians.  

Our life is not about the past or preserving an old social order or economy.  Disciples of Jesus Christ 

have an inherently an essentially future orientation.  

Christianity is at its heart an apocalyptic and eschatological faith.  

Our prayer is “Your Kingdom come,” 

which means we are always looking ahead, 

listening as God’s Word, Jesus Christ, 

calls us forward into the fullness of time, 

into the realization of his true humanity, 

when God is revealed as all in all.

If we are consumed with grief, wallowing in nostalgia, or even reacting in anger, over what we have lost; if we are craving a return to what is, after all, just the arbitrary “normal” of 2019; if we are looking to the Church to pat us on the head and oh-poor-baby us to sleep as a way to escape or avoid change, we will have missed the opportunity Jesus is placing in our lap.  For this is a kairos moment if there ever was one.  That is, in the same way that a personal crisis can lead a person to faith, so a global crisis can be the shock that causes a shift in the way we see and act in the world.  

I wonder if the pandemic will not serve as the final jumpstart of the next era in human history.  Maybe it is the terminus of the long-disintegrating Modern Age, and now the shape of the emerging new era will become more clear.  

And the Church has to consciously and intentionally inhabit its role as beachhead, vanguard, and model of the new humanity.  We are — and always have been, in spite of our historical addiction to serving as reactionary lapdog for the Empire — the Ministry of the Future.  

So rather than imagine we can settle back into old routines and habits, this will be a time for discernment, discipleship, and equipping ourselves for mission in a different and changing world.  If we blow this opportunity, and choose instead inertia, and merely continue to regurgitate the worship and mission structures of the 1950’s, or feed on the corpse of 16th century theologies, the Church will deserve its consequent demise.  The Spirit will have moved on.

The point is not innovation for innovation’s sake.  Neither is it to dispense with whatever is old.  It is following the liberating gospel of Jesus Christ in a new time.  It is about finding the future that is always breaking into our present.  It is about putting our hand to the plow and looking ahead.

+++++++