From the Pastors Desk

As I type this article (I decided not to use the one I’ve been working

From the Pastors Desk - April 03, 2020

As I type this article (I decided not to use the one I’ve been working on last night so I am changing perspectives) it is April 1. Holy Week is coming, but we will not be able to gather together as a church family.

Years ago, I remember walking through a church narthex and hearing a beautiful, haunting trio singing. I slipped into a back pew and just listened.

“I gave you a royal scepter, but you gave me a crown of thorns; I gave you the kingdom and crowned you with eternal life, but you have prepared a cross for your Savior.”

The Solemn Reproaches, which would be sung at that evening’s Good Friday service. This ninth-century liturgical text gained popularity over the years and was eventually added to the Western church’s liturgy for Holy Week. The Solemn Reproaches are often used on Good Friday as a companion to the Adoration of the Cross. A reproach expresses deep hurt or blame, and such a statement can be used for good or for ill. In the Solemn Reproaches, Jesus addresses people who have harmed him. Unfortunately, the text has a long history of stirring up violence against Jewish people. Many times, over the centuries, in many places, Christians bowed before the cross on Good Friday and heard or sang some version of these words:

O my people, O my church, what more could I have done for you? Answer me. Forty years I led you through the desert, feeding you with manna on the way; I saved you from the time of trial and gave you my body, the bread of heaven, but you have prepared a cross for your Savior.

Then they’d leave the church, form a mob, and attack Jewish communities. Our current hymnal, Evangelical Lutheran Worship (ELW) has an updated version. It adds New Testament imagery and words like church to clarify who it is that Jesus is reproaching. It also adds a stanza that explicitly condemns this history of misplaced blame: “O my people, O my church, what more could I have done for you? Answer me. I grafted you into my people Israel, but you made them scapegoats for your own guilt, and you have prepared a cross for your Savior.”
I think about the Solemn Reproaches a lot these days. Maybe because we “filmed” Good Friday worship on March 29. I have “had” Good Friday, but you have not. A virus that looks like a crown of thorns is multiplying uncontrollably, and our collective anxiety about it has left us alternating between language of reproach and language of pleading.

The pleas have been fairly straightforward, even as they’ve increased in urgency and intensity: Wash your hands. Stay home if you’re sick. Don’t hoard face masks. Cancel all large gatherings. Pass legislation that guarantees paid sick leave. Shut down schools.
The reproaches have been more complicated, as we’ve struggled to understand the causes of the pandemic. I’ve heard people blame globalization, secretive governments, unequal access to health care, an unregulated market that made it easy for a virus to jump across the animal-human barrier, the narcissism and denial of world leaders, people who don’t cough into their elbows, climate change, delayed test kits, cruise ships, handshakes, political appointments motivated by loyalty instead of competence, overcrowded prisons and detention centers, open work spaces, communion by intinction, and asymptomatic carriers.

Reproaches can be useful—particularly if we direct them toward ourselves, naming our sins and striving to correct our errors as we move forward. But as resources become scarce and panic increases, it can be easy for our reproaches instead to turn outward and morph into violence—whether that means overtly xenophobic mob actions or just the cumulative harm caused by millions of small decisions made out of anxiety.

Christians have responded to past pandemics in a variety of ways. In February 1349, with the plague looming, the municipal authorities of Strasbourg in Alsace rounded up the city’s Jewish people, accused them of poisoning the Christians’ wells, demanded that they convert on the spot, and burned about 1,000 of them alive. But it’s also true that in the third century, when a plague nearly wiped out the Roman Empire, Christians became known for perform-ing unsolicited acts of compassion and self-sacrifice.
On March 29, in the Sanctuary we share every Sunday, a tiny number of us were confessing the sins of all Christians across the centuries. The heaviness of our guilt—as individuals, and as the body of Christ in a world marred with violence and inequity—was palpable. The need for God’s mercy felt thick.

But just as thick was the presumption that God would indeed grant that mercy. I knew even as we were pleading for it that it was already ours. I remembered that we were singing to a God who had jumped across the divine-human barrier in order to be able to bleed and sweat and catch viruses and weep and ache and die.
This year, many churches will be empty on Good Friday because of the pandemic. But I’d like to think that the singing of prior generations will resonate even in those stark, still sanc-tuaries: “Holy God, holy and glorious, holy and immortal, have mercy on us.”

N.B. If you are one who appreciates the video worship, please give a thank you to Anne Fahrner. She is the one recording, splicing and uploading these online services.

Pastor Leah Schafer