"Returning" by Jason Edwards
Our Re-opening the Church Building Task Force will meet again on March 7 to discuss how current COVID-19 data in the Kansas City area (increasingly impacted by good safety practices and this first phase of vaccinations), as well as the most recently updated guidelines from the Clay County Public Health Department, will impact our church’s ongoing COVID-19 response. You’ll find another blurb about this from the task force in this newsletter. As always, our task force will consider a wide range of issues in order to make decisions that help us do our best job honoring God and loving all of our neighbors as ourselves. With all that’s still unknown right now about all of this, there’s one thing I know for sure:
Most of us are ready for a returning.
A return to indoor worship experiences that are both safe and uninhibited by safety precautions.
A return to gathering indoors with loved ones from any household we choose without wondering whether or not simple interactions might have monumental consequences.
A return to school, church, work, service, and community where things only happen virtually on occasion to enhance or enrich our ongoing interactions, instead of as the primary medium for them.
Most of us are ready to return to a new normal that feels more like our old normal than our now normal. None of us possess complete clarity on the what and the when of that return, but we are surrounded by signs that it is coming. For that I am hopeful and grateful.
In the meantime, the season of Lent invites us to engage in another kind of returning, one some believe is as old as time itself. According to the Talmud, God created repentance before God made the physical universe, making it among the first created things. In the Old Testament, one Hebrew word translated “repentance” is the word “teshuva,” which literally means “to return.” Sinning is sometimes described biblically as going on a stray path. “Teshuva,” then, is a returning to God, others, and our better selves, which typically involves regret (understanding our actions have been wrong or harmful), confession (acknowledging this to God and others), and repentance (turning back toward God and the better path).
In simpler terms, “teshuva” is a returning to the person God created you to be, and actions in life that sustain and nurture that. Bound up within both the season of Lent and our 2021 Lenten series, is an invitation to this kind of returning, not only as preparation for Easter, but to form and enable us to live better lives in Christ and for Christ.
In this spirit, I hope all of us will consider using this season to examine our lives and commit to some specific ways of returning. I’d like to suggest three broad categories of returning that represent powerful practices people of faith have been employing to return to Christ and grow in Christ for centuries.
1. Return to Worship: If you haven’t been worshipping with us, I encourage you to make joining us for worship via Facebook or YouTube a weekly practice during Lent as we prepare for Easter and Easterly lives together.
2. Return to Scripture: This Bible is more than a book. God has been using these sacred words to form and transform people for centuries. If you are not spending regular time encountering God through Scripture, I encourage you to make this a Lenten practice. This may also mean reevaluating how you approach scripture. If this feels like a need for you, you might appreciate reading Eugene Peterson’s “Eat this Book,” Robert Mulholland Jr.’s “Shaped by the Word,” or Richard Peace’s study “Contemplative Bible Reading.”
3. Return to Prayer: We’re engaging several contemplative prayer practices in our worship and midweek study times right now. Through contemplative prayer we seek not only to encounter God but to be more present when God encounters us. These ways of prayer attune us more fully to God’s presence, even as they awaken us to see ourselves and others more clearly. If you’re looking for resources to help you practice contemplative prayer, you might appreciate: “Armchair Mystic,” by Mark Thibodaux, Richard Peace’s study “Meditative Prayer,” or “Mindful Silence,” by Phileena Heuertz.
May all of our returning be happy, holy, and full of hope in the days ahead…
Jason Edwards, Senior Pastor