Advent 2021 - Walking the COVID Marathon
Autumn is the annual time for looking back, taking stock of summer crop, and recalling where we were this time last year. Which is a weird thing to do in 2021. Because in a certain way we’ve come so far, but in a deeper way we haven’t moved at all. And I’m sure you know I’m talking specifically about COVID and everything related to it, which pretty much includes everything in the world right now. I’m really narrowing it down, aren’t I?
I’m reminded of Pastor Jenny Smith’s recent blogpost The Second Marathon: A Thought for Pastors on Walking the New Normal. She speaks specifically to pastors but it basically applies to anyone who was trying to run anything in 2020. But it took me a full read of this blog to catch that word - walking - in the title. She describes in a very familiar way how beginning sometime around April 2020 we said to ourselves “This is a marathon, not a sprint” and how comforting that felt then. Yet over a year later many of us have realized that not only are we still running, but we’re running in a second marathon.
When we ask ourselves how we could possibly still be running, Pastor Smith says “Because our world doesn't know how to stop. (Unless a global virus shuts down the world.) White supremacy pushes and coerces and manipulates into productivity and results. Consumerism causes people to demand their preferences and tired pastors oblige. Capitalism relies on resisting rest and driving our bodies for the bottom line. These forces celebrate when we ignore what our souls whisper.”
So this advent, I want to stop running. I want to walk, and I want to rest. As was always Jesus’ hope for us, I want to use his teachings and the Christian wheel of the year to defeat capitalism in my own heart, and then in the world.
Advent is about expectation, waiting with a deep tolerance for ambiguity, and the unshakeable belief that God is doing something new in the world, opening doors that can be shut by no man.
Join me this advent, if walking is for you. Join me if you’d like to participate in radical restful hope that maybe this is our last marathon. Join me if you’d like to participate in the radical story of Jesus the anointed one and his imperfect friends to overturn, yet again, the crushing forces of empire beginning with nothing more than an unusual star in the sky.
