Editor’s Note: We’ve been quarantined, locked down, and obliged to forego in-person worship. And like never before, we’ve come to see the hope of our faith in unexpected places. In a special section of our Summer issue, 10 of our brothers and sisters reflect on the thoughts that have come to their minds.
Here, James Kessler of New City Presbyterian Church in Hilliard, Ohio, reflects on the reality clinging to each of us, just out of sight but never far away.
Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, tells the story of an eagle, shot out of the sky and found with the bleached skull of a weasel still clinging to its neck. The eagle received the bite after snatching the weasel from the ground, and the eagle, patiently pruning the rest of the body away, was left with the one thing it couldn’t reach, and couldn’t dislodge: the skull. Bleached by days, weeks, months, years in the sun, wind whistling through the jaw, the glenoid fossa, the rattle it made when the eagle twisted its head to pull body lice and parasites out of its wing. The reminder was always there, right at the neck.
Every human being, certainly every Christian woman and man, lives with a weasel at their neck. In the day of coronavirus, which is rapidly moving on from an event, to a trial, to a season, the fear rattles. As a minister, it has been my hope to help Christians know how to live in this hour. Particularly hard-hit are singles and introverts who discovered that they need interaction more than they thought. Our response has not been to pretend that worship can be replaced by livestreaming. It can’t. It’s not worship, and it’s not not-worship. So we mourn it, and we do a third thing: We gather with a weasel at our neck.
This crisis is catechizing us again. I suspect we will learn a great many things about each other, but more about God.
Three different places in the book of Proverbs — a book that tells us, among other things, how to live when there’s not much of a living to be made — the son is told to remember what’s important by binding them around his neck. The things of God, the life of steadfastness and faithfulness that he’s learned from Yahweh, must be clutched at the vitals. In Proverbs is the life-giving truth that when the weasel is at your neck, the steadfast love that comes from God clings nearer. We are called, skulls jangling, to live out our calling. How are we to do this? We rattle while giving our very hearts, and whatever else we have to offer.
On April 2 I saw that the choir of Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis, Tennessee, stood, 6 feet apart from one another, outside the house of the newly widowed wife of Pastor Tim Russell. With grief at their throats, they sang. In this season there will be no heroic proclamations of the gospel, just the heroic good news told commonly. Without social distancing at our necks, maybe we don’t understand union with Christ, or the Spirit who laughs at physical distance, or even the dogged, beautiful, unexpected, lockjaw determination of God to show that the gospel is not chained.
The first week we live-streamed worship it was fairly simple, just my oldest daughter and me. Just as we got started and the church was tuned in, my youngest daughter leaned into the frame behind me and fish-hooked her mouth in a perfect not-ready-for-primetime reminder. Our congregants began typing their greetings on the right side of the screen. I watched the names as I began the service and played a prelude on my guitar. One name floored me.
Before March of 2019 my father didn’t know I existed. I did not know his identity. But just weeks before my 40th birthday we had both submitted samples to a DNA website — for no other reason than that Christ is King. He found me and reached out. I discovered I was half-Jewish. He still speaks with a heavy Israeli accent. Here he was now, listening to me preach for the first time. Without our strange season, this beautiful thing does not happen. I felt the binding on my neck, close enough to feel the blood in my veins, of my Heavenly Father’s commandments, His way and His grace. I’d worn my fatherlessness for 40 years, whistling at my neck, but that morning, weasel or no weasel, I was a son twice over.
There will be lots of ways to bind the commandments of our Heavenly Father and His steadfast love around our necks, and to bear them for the fearful world. Through such binding, God will surprise us by the way His redemption works its way into our quarantines, like water finding every crack in the pavement.
My own church is engaged in a new discovery of daily, morning, and evening prayer. In this time of disembodied communication, incarnation means the world. The mystery of the incarnation is re-examined and re-marveled every time we show up physically in this socially distanced hour. When we drop off a bag of flour to someone who needs to bake bread for their very sanity or when we confess our sin to one another and confess our hope. This crisis is catechizing us again. I suspect we will learn a great many things about each other, but more about God. That the gates of hell cannot prevail against His kingdom, that His creativity and pursuing love knows no boundaries, that ministers and congregants must be meek enough to wear their fears just a finger’s width looser than the love of God.
James Kessler is pastor of New City Presbyterian Church in Hilliard, Ohio.