Sabbath and Sickness


Until we gather again as a community, CTK will release a daily devotional each morning. Each devotional will include a song to sing, a short devotional (to be read alone or with your family), questions for discussion or reflection, and a prayer. This is the first in our series.

Devotional:
Anytime we are faced with a situation that is dangerous, uncertain, or out of our control, we feel afraid. Our responses to that fear vary widely. Some of us paradoxically love that feeling of fear, and we search for it like adrenaline junkies at an amusement park. Others of us long to escape the discomfort of new surroundings, where our old routines and habits don't provide the comfort we sought, and where our carefully manicured image of calm control might be exposed to be the flimsy charade that we know deep down that it is. And in the midst of these various responses. there is always a cacophony of voices telling us to not be afraid. Some of them masquerade as voices of faith ("fear is a lack of faith!"), some of them as voices of reason ("Live your life, don't let fear guide you!"), all of them seeming tinny and hollow. If they are so unafraid, why are they shouting so loud?

But rarely do we ask the deeper, more spiritual question, "Why, exactly, are we afraid?" That would demand that we sit with our fear, question it, get to know it a little bit. But this is no prison-cell interrogation, with our fear safely locked in handcuffs on the other side of the class. To interrogate our fear is to recognize our weakness.

There are many legitimate reasons to be afraid of COVID-19, or sickness at all: they physical symptoms, consequences for loved ones, social and economic disruption. I don't mean to minimize these at all. But when I interrogate my fear a little, when I sit across from my own personal Hannibal Lecter, I find something else, right alongside these other fears.

I find the fear of rest. 

Experts are agreed that the best way to combat the spread of this outbreak is to stop what we are doing: stop our work, stop our commerce, stop our play, stop our gathering. To stop and rest. And if we are honest, stopping is not something we are good at. Our restless relentlessness as human beings, our drive to transcend all barriers, to maximize productivity, to hustle and grind and produce and make something out of ourselves... this is a good desire gone haywire; the sixth day of creation ("fill the earth and have dominion") without the seventh ("and God rested from all that he had done"). To rest forces us to engage with the voices inside of us, the people and neighbors immediately around us- the people who don't but our charade. We are restless, not because home is boring, but because it is far too dangerous. This restlessness gave us a world where physical and geographic boundaries were transcended, where production continued day and night, where people went everywhere always in pursuit of the objective, building restless roads that a plague could walk on.

When I was a campus minister with RUF at SCAD, I would work furiously all through the academic year- nights, weekends, whatever it took. Then Christmas break or summer would come, and my body would collapse, and I would get sick. Sick from lack of rest. Jesus was trying to tell me something.

JRR Tolkien once wrote, "What punishments of God are not gifts?" Maybe, maybe, maybe in some small way, the fact that rest is, at present. the only vaccine for COVID-19 should cause us to stop. To stop and think. Why are we so unable to rest? What are we afraid we might find, if we stopped are were alone with ourselves?

A quote:
"You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you." - St. Augustine

For discussion:
1. What is it like being alone/with just your family? What tensions and anxieties do you feel between one another? What joys are there?
2. What patterns can you cultivate in your house to make this a restful time? What do you need to stop doing? What do you need to start doing?
3. What or who do you notice about your room/house/family/street that you did not notice before rest?

A prayer for rest:
Click here to read a prayer from Scotty Smith.

CTK And Coronavirus (I know I know. Just hear me out).

Love God. Love Neighbor. Love Savannah

That's why we are here (Jer. 29:4-7). What does that mean for our church during the time of coronavirus? It's not a simple question to answer- most of us exist along a continuum between EVERYBODY CALM DOWN and PANIC! I'd like to offer a couple thoughts, as well as deal with some practical matters as it will affect our community. 

1) What will we do?
A. We will obey all government instructions and restrictions about meetings, if such a thing occurs.
B. Until that time, we will continue to meet for worship and a meal, with appropriate hygienic considerations for the meal and communion as the situation calls for. Those preparations have already been made.
C. I have contacted the Chatham Emergency Managament Authority (CEMA), volunteering our congregation to help in case we are needed in the Edgemere, Ardsley, or Parkside area. I will be in touch about what that may mean for us when I hear back from them.

2) How should we feel?
At the beginning of the Second War World, CS Lewis gave an address to young scholars who were attending university at the beginning of a world- and epoch-defining event. He argues that the war (or in our case, the pandemic) is not an abnormal event; instead, it is an event which pulls us closer to the truly normal which we are prone to forget. The speech is worth quoting at length (simply substitute "war" for pandemic):
"The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal life". Life has never been normal."
Because of this, Lewis argues that we should fight our own tendencies to excitement (thinking about pandemic when we should be thinking about our daily lives), frustration (anger that we will not be able to finish what we have started because of our lives being disrupted- this is what it means to live in a community!), and fear ("The Christians of the past thought it was a great blessing to be aware of your mortality... That is one of the pandemics great blessings. I am inclined to think they were right."). Read the whole thing if you want.

3) What examples shape our imagination?
We must both live as people who are confident in the promises of God, and willing to love our neighbors in costly ways. There are numerous examples in church history of Christians who, motivated by faith in God and love towards neighbor, served and sacrificed for their community in various ways. Here are examples from the early church and its response to Roman plagues, and here is the personal story of Martin Luther during the Black Death. Here is the example of some Christians from the modern Ebola outbreak. Let their examples inspire and give you confidence, even as we recognize that the impact of coronavirus will be much smaller than these examples.

4) What is our spiritual response?
Here is a prayer from the 8th century which many Christians have found helpful to pray in times of sickness:

Almighty God,
you know that we are surrounded by many great dangers,
and because of our human frailty
we cannot withstand them.
Give us health of mind and body
so that we who suffer under sin
may overcome and win the victory in you;
Give us courage to be a healing people
in our place and time.
Through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and forever.
Amen.
 

Please feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions, needs for help, or suggestions. See you Sunday!

What To Do When Being Kicked In The Head

“When I was nine, some kid beat me up for amusement, and when I came home crying to my father, his answer- Fight that boy or fight me- was godless, because it told me that there was no justice in the world, save the justice we dish out with our own hands. When I was twelve, six boys jumped off the number 28 bus headed to Mondawin Mall, threw me to the ground, and stomped on my head. But what struck me most that afternoon was not those boys but the godless, heathen adults walking by. Down there on the ground, my head literally being kicked in, I understood: no one, not my father, not the cops, and certainly not anyone’s God, was coming to save me.”

  • Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy.

James KA Smith calls this “a respectable atheism.” There is no pretense of cool detachment or objectivity; only the visceral emotional objection to an unjust world. What does Jesus say to people getting kicked in the head? Or better, what does he do when he is getting kicked in the head? Check out our sermon on revenge and love below!

The Dying Church

“I ain’t afraid to die anymore. I done it already.” - Hugh Glass, The Revenant

What kind of church is ready to plant a church? What kind of people are ready to be a part of a church plant? Its simple: the kind that are ready to die. Because death in Christ is life forever.

Our pastor had the opportunity to speak on this topic this past Sunday to our brothers and sisters at Reformation Presbyterian Church in Hendersonville, NC. Listen here!

Ordinary Light

We live in a world where BIG matters- big money, big business, big followers, big. In a world that privileges economies of scale, it can be tough to feel like an ordinary life matters.

Jesus disagrees.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus takes a bunch of ordinary people and tells them that they can be the light of the world. The question is, How?

New Sermon Below!

Putting the "Local" in Local Church

“Rather than calling us to transcendence, God forms us and guides us through place.”

- Hannah Anderson

What if part of our problem as Christians in the West is that we have swallowed the lie of “liquid modernity”: That the place where you are at present is secondary to where you are going, and what you might become? Read this excellent article on the importance of place in the Christian tradition.