It's been a year of doing the same thing or the same nothing over and over again, a year of learning to do without so much we took for granted, a year of learning to do some things in different ways.
For many, it's been a year of anxiousness and weariness.
Elvis's words from 1970, “Make the world go away / Just get it off my shoulder” are a common desire.
But the world won’t go away. We've been through a season of USA politics (which has been crazier than usual), new strains of COVID, and the soul-sucking rodeo of rancour and self-justification known as social media. Some react with anger, others with sadness and the desire to retreat into nostalgia or the minutiae of life with small children.
But the main challenge is a loss of love. I don’t mean love for God or even love for neighbour. What I mean is, how do we keep engaging with the “world” without coming to hate it? Or without collapsing into cynicism? Because the world breaks your heart. Life breaks your heart. The closer you pay attention, the more you invest of yourself, the more painful it gets. Loss is paramount, this side of heaven. I’m not talking about specific cultural trends. I’m talking about all of it, what Johnny Cash sang about in "Hurt" — the whole “empire of dirt”, the sum of the ugliness that we contend with, day in and day out, right or left, male or female, Jew or Greek.
So what’s the solution? How do we keep “showing up” year after year — which I’m pretty sure is what we are called to do as Christians — when experience suggests that showing up leads to getting beat up... by sin, the flesh, the devil, the forces of vindictiveness and panic and everything else.
The partial answer is we don’t. We learn to lean on God. To let God be God and make it happen if it’s going to happen. Surrender or submission is what we are called to. God has to blow the fresh wind of the Spirit if the ship is to sail. Learning to wait, to practice patience, almost by default, cultivates generosity and cuts through self-righteousness — and one of the things we have realized over the last months is that social media de-incentivizes patience at every turn.
I think of a passage like Acts 19:1-8. Paul has arrived in Ephesus and has run into some disciples of John the Baptist. This is more than 30 years from John's ministry many kilometres away. But here they are, sitting around in what is modern-day Turkey, waiting for their hope to be realized in the form of the messiah that John told them about. Many years earlier they had gone out into the desert and repented of their sins and had been assured that God was the God of second chances. Then they moved away before the next chapter could unfold. I can imagine they felt abandoned.
Here we are almost a year into the pandemic and still waiting for it to end. Can you imagine waiting for 30+ years? Repentance is good. This season has shown us that there is much to repent for. So much to change our thinking and actions. But repentance on its own is not enough. Repentance on its own may even be a euphemism for nihilism.
But back to Ephesus. Along comes Paul and he asks John’s followers if they have received the Holy Spirit. They hadn't even heard about that, but before long they are baptized in Jesus’s name.
To be baptized in Jesus’s name represents an essential shift. Instead of putting their hope in their repentance — or in trying to do more and be better — like supercharged New Year's Resolutions —
in a mysterious way, the way for their lives going forward is the pronouncement that “You are my beloved child, with whom I am well pleased.”
Jesus's ministry began with that blessing. Jesus did not spend the next three years chasing after assurance or approval — or forcing the world to give it to him. It was already his. This is part of what freed him to love others, independent of their response. Even those who hated him.
That same pronouncement still applies in the midst of this lockdown, this feeling of Ground Hog Day over and over again. It transcends whatever success or failure we may experience this year — and we will probably experience both. It is not shaken or undermined by news headlines or social media.
The Holy Spirit is the bringer of peace, full stop, end of sentence. The Spirit brings love where there is none to be found, inspires sympathy for the unsympathetic, and conveys hope to the hopeless. The Spirit brings life to the dead. A way forward. Nothing else will do, nor should we expect it to.
This new reality in which we live — however tenuously or tentatively (Lord help our unbelief!) — doesn’t make the bad stuff in the world go away. Instead, like Jesus, we are thrown back into the world. Not in order to wrestle from it some sense of security or hope or kingdom. No, we are thrown back into the world to love it as it is, rather than as we would have it be. Or to put it another way, without optimism but full of faith.
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