A Return to Normalcy. Wait. What?

How is your Lenten journey going?  Have you been able to find time to be alone with God?

This year we are confronted with a different sort of Lent.  Covid-19 has forced us to make changes in pretty much every area of our lives.  Like church.  A few churches have taken a business as usual approach, while most others have restricted the worship services they offer.  Almost all now offer online worship.   Pastors and church workers are doing their best to retain the sense of community that is the beating heart of our faith.

While I firmly believe that sense of community has not and will not be broken, this Lenten season has perhaps placed more emphasis on individual spirituality than in seasons past.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Every crisis contains within itself an opportunity.  This crisis contains the opportunity for each one of us to make a deep dive into our personal faith.  This is an opportunity to grow and mature as disciples, and then come back together to form a stronger church community once the virus has been brought under control.

I don’t expect the church to be the same after this experience.  I don’t want the church to be the same.  And I am sure that is an uncomfortable thought for many.

The cry heard over and over for months now is that people want a “return to normalcy.”  I cringe every time I hear the word “normalcy.”  Let me explain. For one thing, it was part of a campaign slogan used by Warren G. Harding in the presidential campaign of 1920:

“America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.” 

Needless to say, his rhetoric worked and he was elected president. Americans wanted to return to a time before World War I, race riots and the Spanish flu pandemic changed the world.  Sound familiar?

Harding’s administration was riddled with scandal and in a 1948 poll he was voted the worst president in history.  I had a civics teacher in high school who hated Harding with a passion, especially his use of the word “normalcy.”  “There’s no such word,” my teacher would say.  “Harding just made it up”.  Actually, he didn’t.  But, it was a very obscure word only found in a few dictionaries.  Still, when I hear the word “normalcy” I think of Harding and his disastrous time as president.

The other reason I cringe at the word “normalcy” is that I don’t want things to return to normal.  Why settle for normal when things can be better?  Why try and go back to the same old same old when new and exciting opportunities await us.  The truth is, we can’t go back anyway.

As many of you probably know, the church is in the midst of another reformation.  As Phyllis Tickle put it in her book The Great Emergence, “Every 500 years, the church cleans out its attic and has a giant rummage sale.”  It’s been 500 years since the last “rummage sale,” the Protestant Reformation.  No one knows how long this one will last, it might take 10 years or 100, but there will be enormous changes in the way we are church. I believe it is the work of the Holy Spirit.  Everything in creation is in motion; we can’t expect the church to stand still.  However, that does not mean we leave behind our core beliefs or our relationships with God.  Right now is the perfect time to examine your beliefs, to read scripture, and most importantly to work on your relationship with God.

You could say we are entering into the age of the Holy Spirit.  Or you could call it the age of trust.  Do we trust God with our future?  Do we trust God to do what is best with God’s church?  Do we trust our brothers and sisters in the faith to accompany us through this time of uncertainty?

We may be separated physically at the moment, but that will end.  Soon we will be back together.  I pray that when we do gather again we will have new things to tell one another, new things to learn and a new sense of purpose.  You can have your “normalcy;” I’ll take a good rummage sale any day.

Grace and peace.