Isolated

It was on March 14th that I received an email from our bishop encouraging us to cancel worship in light of COVID-19 and the shutdowns the federal and state governments were enacting. It is now April 26th and we are still at home either with our families or by ourselves. Some people are getting antsy and upset at the continued stay-at-home orders. There are protests in parts of the country to re-open. All states are working on plans to do that, with some opening sooner than others. There is a lot of talk about what to do and what is the best plan and I don’t know that there is a right answer.

What I can say is that it has now been 44 days (if I can do my math correctly) since we have been away from church and from our body of Christ. I know it’s hard, and painful, and lonely. I am feeling all of that as well. I feel isolated. I am so grateful for technology to be able to FaceTime my friends and family. I am thankful for the ability to use Zoom to continue to have Pub Theology and our church council meetings. I am leaning on YouTube to bring these weekly services to you and to provide daily readings from scripture that I then post to Facebook. All of this technology truly is a blessing, and is keeping us connected, but at the same time there is no mistaken that we feel isolated. Some more than others because of who we have in our homes with us. Some of us have families and loved ones while others don’t. Still others don’t even have internet and can’t even connect with us in all the ways that I just mentioned. I cannot even imagine what it must be like for them and what kind of feelings of loneliness and isolation they must be feeling.

That has all been on my mind because more than anything else in this text and that Friday for Jesus I can’t help but see and focus on how alone Jesus was. Admittedly he was with a cohort of people as they clothed him in purple and gave him a crown made out of thorns. He was in front of and around all the people as he was taken up to the hill to be crucified. They had guards standing by watching and keeping the peace as he was on the cross. He even had two criminals on either side of him that day as well. So he wasn’t ‘alone’, but where were his friends? Where were the disciples and all of his other followers? Where were the people that loved him? Jesus may have been surrounded by people the rest of Thursday night and into Friday, but to be honest he was utterly alone and isolated from any friends and family.

I have always had a hard time understanding what it was like for Jesus to experience that. And I will say that I still don’t in any way fully grasp it, but staying at home away from all of you and from family kind of gives me a small glimpse of the kind of feelings and emotions that Jesus might have been feeling that day. I mean the very last words that Jesus ever says in the gospel of Mark is, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” If that is not a sense of loneliness and isolation I don’t know what is.

And with those last words of Jesus and with his last breath, in his loneliness, the temple curtain is torn in half, the curtain that symbolized the separation of holy God from imperfect and sinful humankind. In Jesus’ act of taking on the sins of the world on the cross and taking on this complete isolation from everything brings about the joining together of the holiness of God with common everyday sinful humans.

Out of loneliness and death Jesus breaks the barriers that had kept God and humans separated. Or to put it another way through Jesus’ isolation from everything else in the world, he was able to connect everything together. Through separation Jesus joined us together forever with our Holy God. We as sinful, imperfect humans now have the opportunity to approach and be with our God as if face to face. That is the power of his death on the cross. The forgiveness of all the things in our life that had kept us apart/separated/isolated from God. The cross is the act in which our separation from God is put to an end. The idea that we are not good enough to come to God, to speak to God, is put to an end. The fact that it took the very thing of isolation to remove isolation between us and God is unimaginable and beautiful at the same time. And it is all made perfect and complete through the resurrection of Easter Sunday.

I know that we are still literally living in our own Good Friday experiences through our isolations and stay-at-home orders, but know that though we as the body of Christ are physically apart, Jesus as made it possible so that we are never apart from our God who makes us one and who connects us together regardless of age, gender, race, or how physically close we are or aren’t to one another. God through Christ Jesus has removed all barriers and one day this barrier of physical distancing will be removed also and what a joyous move we will be able to make from Friday to Sunday. Amen.