March 16, 2025 - Second Sunday in Lent - United Church of Chester

March 16, 2025 – Second Sunday in Lent

Psalm 27

Luke 10.38-42

Five Years Later

Second Sunday in Lent

“God’s focus is on us.” God’s focus is on us. These were the last words I wrote for a sermon I was preparing for Sunday March 15, 2020, exactly five years ago this weekend. The sermon was incomplete – that sentence dangles only about halfway down the second page, a sermonic symbol, perhaps, of all things that hung unfinished in the days and weeks to follow. I realized that what I was writing was woefully insufficient for the virus which at that moment was rapidly spreading around the world, and instead preached off the cuff that morning, knowing it would be the last time we would be worshiping together in a while, at least in person. It would be fourteen months before we gathered in this room again.

Five years since Covid 19 changed the world. In some respects five years is not that long a time. I remember sitting around the table at my high school’s five year reunion, and wondering why we had even bothered – it seemed like I had just graduated with all these people yesterday. But five years since the onset of Covid? It could be a generation ago – and in some ways, it is – yet I remember vividly how confusing and disorienting those early days were. It was like wandering around in a fog of disequilibrium. So many of us stayed away from work and school and church and restaurants and theaters and friends and even family, we became disconnected in spite of our best attempts to stay in touch. And we were at a loss to get our minds around the deadly virus. How do we contract it? How do we avoid it? What happens if we get it? Remember washing our groceries when we brought them home, or having them delivered to our door? I remember the first time I tried putting together an online grocery list with Instacart – it took me two hours! Remember the debate about masks, and the difficulty finding any at the outset? If we ventured out, should we social distance, or was herd immunity the way to overcome Covid? Remember when we thought health care facilities were safe places to be, before the tractor-trailer morgues began showing up outside hospitals and nursing homes? Too many people lost loved ones to that as-yet-undefined disease in the early days: a dear friend of mine lost her mother, and my mother’s cousin succumbed as well. Those were frightening days, all the more so because of the uncertainty of what we were facing and how to face it.

Incidentally, if you want to read a good though critical book about the period, Princeton University’s Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee have just published In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. It is a hard look at the ways scientists, politicians and public officials were unprepared for, and thus misreacted during the crisis, although hindsight is almost always 20/20.

I chose Psalm 27 this morning for two reasons. First, it is a solid declaration of confidence and trust in God: “The Lord is my light and salvation – whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life – of whom shall I be afraid? When evildoers assail me… though an army encamp against me… the war rise up against me, yet I will be confident… I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” When the world around me looks like its heading to you-know-where in a handbasket, the psalmist is saying, God remians faithful and true, and this is where I plant my flag and take my stand.

The other reason, which you may have noticed, is that this week two consecutive devotions in our 2025 Lent Devotionals use the 27^th psalm for their jumping-off point. Friday’s and yesterday’s reflections speak of fear and worry on the one hand, and affirmation and light on the other. Vicki Kemper wrote for Friday’s entry,

“The 27^th Psalm reads like the testimony of someone who thought they had everything under control… But after unsuccessfully trying to pray the jitters away, the psalmist had to admit they were afraid. That they couldn’t take on the world without help… And that is when after some time in the depths, self-affirmations became fervent prayers, which then became statements of hope and faith. Things like, ‘I can’t manage this, but God can. I know God won’t give up on me.’”

There is honesty in these words: sometimes we simply cannot do it alone, but we do know that God will get us through it. And there is courage in these words: Bring it on, give me your best shot; I am strong, because I am God’s. For me, I’m not at all certain I could have navigated the past five years by myself, and certainly not as your minister, without the confidence and trust in God evinced by the 27^th Psalm. I could not have done it without help.

And in yesterday’s piece, Kenneth Samuel’s words could have been written about our worst fears in those early springtime days of 2020: “Looking soberly at all the gruesome details of some living nightmare, the psalmist arrives upon two solutions found in [their] faith: light and liberation.”

My text for that Sunday March 15 2020 was the story of Mary and Martha we heard this morning. As Luke relates it, the story is a mere five verses long, but it is memorable and it packs a real punch. Mary and Martha, you may recall, were the sisters of one of Jesus’ very best friends, Lazarus. Jesus knew the family well, and they him. While Mary sat with Jesus listening to him speak, Martha kept busy with household chores. After a while she wondered, as many of us might, why she was doing all the work while her sister just sat there with their guest. And in a textbook example of triangulation, rather than confront her sister directly, she appealed to Jesus: “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?” Jesus answered her, “Martha, Martha… you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” At first blush, it appears that Jesus is suggesting it is better to sit at his feet and learn his teachings than to tend to such mundane tasks as housekeeping. In fact I have heard more than one sermon suggesting this very thing, and you may have too. But I don’t think this is the point of Jesus’ words. I read them more like the passage from Ecclesiastes we all know, there is a time and a season for everything under heaven, a time to rend and a time to sew, and so on. There is a time to go about our work as Martha was doing, and there is a time to stop and spend time steeped in the wisdom of God, as Mary was. Each one shapes and informs the other. Our understanding of the reality of God in our lives has a bearing on the tasks and responsibilities we undertake daily. To put it probably a little too simply, our faith informs our work, and our work expresses our faith. It is not an either/or; as we read in the letter of James, “If someone says, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith without works, and I by my works will show you my faith.” The two fit hand in glove.

What does this have to do with the pandemic? Well, I think we – all of us – did our best to let our faith shape our actions. Did my faith inform my grocery list? No, but it did inform our decision to be extra careful with one another. I was able to stay in touch with many folks during those long months, but when we had to meet, it was always outside. We found creative ways of remaining tethered without putting anyone in danger. We cared for each other. We called each other. We sent cards to each other. We cherished the fellowship that bound us together and we maintained covenant even when we were forced apart. We put one another first. And as I said our very first Sunday back, we did not lose a soul to Covid. I still thank God for this. Somehow we navigated through the confusion and disorientation, we cut through that fog of disequilibrium and with our faith in God as the lodestar, we made it through.

But that was five years ago. What about today? What about the confusion and disorientation and fog of disequilibrium so many in our nation and our world are experiencing in the present moment? About a month ago, my colleague The Rev. Dr. Steve Jungkeit at the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme made what I thought was a perspicacious parallel. So many of the feelings and emotions and reactions to the swirl of fog you and I are presently attempting to navigate as brother and sister citizens are not that far removed from the feelings and emotions and reactions we had during the pandemic. We are anxious. We are angry. We are flummoxed. We are appalled. We are worried. We are afraid. How different is this from the world of the psalmist? Listen again to Vicki Kemper’s words in Friday’s devotion and let’s try to hear them with ears that just heard the morning news:

“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? When evildoers assail me to devour my flesh – my adversaries and my foes – they shall stumble and fall. Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war rise up against me, yet I will be confident. One thing I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in the temple. For God will shelter me in the day of trouble; God will conceal me under the cover of the tent; God will set me high on a rock. Now my head is lifted up above my enemies all around me, and I will offer in sacrifices with shouts of joy; I will sing and make melody to the Lord.”

And I think that may season this affirmation of faith with the devotion of Mary and the dedication of Martha. That is, there is faith to be held and there work to be done. Whatever actions we feel compelled to undertake to pierce the fog of uncertainty and to rebalance the disequilibrium needs to be informed by what we believe. Faith and action are partners as inseparable as Mary and Martha. In Jesus’ words, we must choose the better part, which will never be taken away from us.

This is where we begin. Remember, as that sentence left dangling in my unpreached sermon in March 2020 reminds us, God’s focus is on us.