Waking Up Still in the Tomb

Who lives their life without seeing death?
    Who is ever rescued from the grip of the grave? Selah (Psalm 89:48, CEB translation)

I am worried about pastors.

Before I get to that, though, let’s acknowledge how this pandemic has impacted all of us. I know that practically everyone has faced great disruption to their lives. I know that many people are having to balance work and teaching children. I know some have loved ones or are themselves fighting the virus. Some have already lost their lives, and then families have had minimal space to gather and mourn that loss.  I know that some have lost their jobs, and life feels very tenuous to us all right now.

All those things apply to pastors too. And while they are not out of work for the most part, they did lose their job, at least metaphorically. They can’t gather with their people and praise the Lord in one place, checking in with more than half of their flock at one time, and then offer the sacraments freely and without theological hurdles to jump (other than the hurdles their own people bring). They can’t visit people who are homebound or in the nursing homes or even in the hospital. They can offer a brief graveside service with just a few people gathered around a casket, but that is not the same as a memorial service in the sanctuary celebrating the life of a beloved saint. Same for weddings. And some of these have not even taken place face-to-face but over the internet. Even the most future leaning pastors didn’t go into this work to avoid contact with people. On the contrary, most of us are drawn to the fact that we will walk closely with people through the highs and lows of life, and we will help the gathered community offer those lives to God. All of that, while it hasn’t stopped entirely, is not how we mean to walk alongside people. In fact, we are not alongside them. We are in the general vicinity instead. It is too distant for us.

And then there are the massive number of skills we have collectively had to pick up, largely around social media and video editing skills. We had to learn how to do church, and none of us were trained in this way of church in seminary. Now, not all of us have had to do that because some were already streaming and had trained teams, but so many of us did not. And while ultimately that can translate into a new platform for reaching our community, right now it is just an overwhelming set of new tricks for some old dogs. Plus, now you add worship practice, worship filming, worship editing… And that doesn’t even count trying to figure out giving, Bible studies, and continued ministry to the community. And the expectations parishioners have on the pastors to make all this happen… some have been supportive, but a good number have just been insistent and judgmental of how successful their pastor has been at pulling off a miracle practically overnight. And whether it is right or not, the voices of critique are so much louder in our heads and hearts than the voices of support.

All of those are things that have my heart going out to all the pastors. But the thing heaviest on my mind right now is that we will lack the catharsis of Holy Week. We won’t have it because on Easter Sunday, and then again on Easter Monday, and perhaps all the forty* Easter days to follow, we will wake up and still be in the tomb.

Holy Week for pastors feels like a long march to the tomb. And while we lead congregations into the Resurrection on Easter, we do not usually feel resurrected until Easter Monday. Or maybe Easter Tuesday, because Easter Monday is like sleeping off the Holy Week hangover. But the frantic and also emotionally and spiritually draining journey of Holy Week is very cathartic for us. We get to expend all the love and the pain and the anxiety and the joy of the prior year in that week. Whether we admit it or not, it is a clearing of the decks. Lent has helped lead us into that, but Holy Week really allows us all the freedom to express the highs and lows of a life following Christ. We hope our people experience that clearing too, but we know we will. And it prepares us for the next 12 months of this madness that is leading a church.

But this Holy Week… it has not been the same. The energy is different. It is still taking a tremendous amount of work. It has involved rethinking what is important about this week, and that will prove to be invaluable in our churches going forward. But for the most part it has taken place in isolation from our people. And weirdly we have in many cases sat at home and watched ourselves lead worship, which we are doing with disturbing regularity now.  And we may actually sleep in on Easter Sunday. And we may have Easter dinner with our families, which is not always our tradition. Those are wonderful things, and at some point we will be able to see the gift of them.

But then Monday will come. And instead of the catharsis of surviving Holy Week, we will instead face the reality that we are still cooped up. We are still trapped in this new reality. We face who knows how many weeks of giving up again. It is like Lent is repeating. Like Easter didn’t count for anything. Easter didn’t change anything. We are still facing death. And we are still away from our people.

And that has me worried about our pastors.

The first three weeks of this, we were running on adrenaline. Trying to figure out what church looks like in this reality. Then we had Holy Week, when we had enough figured out to try some new things. But Easter Monday… what now? And for how long now? The adrenaline has worn off. Now we just have the fatigue, and it is not fatigue that we can sleep one day and come out of. It is a fatigue of uncertainty and irritation and isolation and near desperation.

Pastors, if this is you, please admit this reality, and do not walk this walk alone.

One of the shining pieces of this pandemic has been to bring pastors together in intentional community. So many of us are gathering intentionally over Zoom. But if you are a pastor in isolation, please reach out. Please don’t go it alone. If you don’t have anyone around you that you can go to, think about the people you went to school with and reach out to them. And if you don’t have them, then reach out to me! My regular email is michelle.morris@arumc.org. I check that one every day.

And then, let’s acknowledge that we still need Easter Monday. But maybe instead of needing it to rest and recover, we need it for weeping and gnashing of teeth. We need the space to name for ourselves that this is not how we envisioned serving Christ. And we do not need to rescue it so quickly by pointing out all the new ways we can share the Gospel, but instead give the space for the anger. Give the space for the sadness. Give the space for the fear. Give the space for the exhaustion. Give the space for the tears.

I hope that Lent part 2 will come to a close around Pentecost, but there is no guarantee of that. We are going to have to figure out how to manage the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical challenge of these days.  While we can and should share that burden and that honesty on some level with our parishioners, we still have to lead them and we need some boundaries within that space. We should not need those boundaries with each other.

So just remember, you are not alone in the tomb. We are all there this year. But we are yet alive. And one of these days, really not so far from now in the grand scheme of things, we will watch the stone roll away. But until then, we can hate this. But we will also manage. Just reach for the others here, even if it is virtually. Life in the tomb is scary, but less so when you are there with ones who love you.  And I love you. And you are not alone. You are never alone.

*So there are actually 50 days in Easter, unless we count like we do for Lent, where we do not count the Sundays, and since this feels more like Lent than Easter, and like another 40 in the wilderness, I advocate for less exact and more symbolically accurate numbering.