by Zach Kincaid
I wonder. As I approach history, visiting churches dating well before the declaration of our independence and the security of our constitution with its promise to make no laws that prohibit the free exercise of religion and the right for any of us to peaceably assemble together… I wonder... why are all these churches locked, boarded up, empty shells?
You can say it’s disease, plague, COVID within and without us. It’s one thing for people to voluntarily retire any effort to care for faith. It’s an entirely different thing for us to voluntarily disassemble and begin to dismantle the fabric of faith, changing what pointed heavenward to the charade that only casts shadows across firewalls, into lonely living rooms where the huddled masses now torn to ones and twos yearn to breathe free.
Shame on you, American church. Your rooted legs that found pilgrimage a home in this country now bend in homage to something far more sinister than old world politics. As you creep back into darkened sanctuaries by slight percentages of your whole, as you look first to sanitize the people through the goddess Hygieia’s blessing, as you muffle all mouths of a new song, to whom do you report? To whom is your highest authority? By what measure do you dwarf the sovereignty of God into tiny margins of what-ifs?
I’ll give you a what if. What if churches never closed but kept praying, kept singing, kept preaching, kept in actual community? What then? Would we be like the three who did not bow to the government’s commands that took the highest honor from God? Would we be like the one who would not pray in the comfort of his home, but against the government’s authorization, prayed openly to the God who he knew would save him? Would we be like the ones who did not bend under the decrees of the Roman Emperors Nero, Decius or Diocletian? Would we be like those who risked everything to worship freely - without government controls - here in America?
We might. And, we might be seized and thrown into a fiery furnace or tossed among hungry lions. We might be made scapegoats like those in the Roman world, persecuted on the basis of ardent lies, blamed for a virus that ravaged so many, or put to death because Christian beliefs just don’t jive with the world’s ways of seeing health and stability, neither then, nor now… at least that’s what we thought. Today’s practices look very akin to those ways all around us. Don’t they?
No wonder we won’t meet an angel in the fire or see God mask the mouths of hungry lions. We won’t hear the martyr cry: “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” Not here, not now. We’ve turned upside down the sign over our doors - the one that signaled something higher, something mystical, something other. Now… we’re just in the fray of it all.
May we pray the prayer of the Puritans:
O that I could be a flame of fire in your service, always burning out in one continual blaze. Fit me for singular usefulness in this world. Fit me to exult in distresses of every kind if they, but promote the advancement of your kingdom. Fit me to quit all hopes of the world’s friendship, and give me a deeper sense of my sinfulness. Fit me to accept as just desert from you any trial that may befall me…. Fit me to enter the blessed world where no unclean thing is, and to know you are with me always.