I’ve often noticed that the first thing that has to happen for worship to occur is that the people gather. If people do not show up, then how can we turn to one another in welcome?

How can we listen to what God is saying to us?

How can we hold God’s offering of Godself in bread and wine?

How can we wish each other the peace of God?

How can our prayers–not simply my prayers–ascend to God?

This assumption is being put to the test in the midst of a pandemic and God is raising up a people to respond to it. It turns out there is more than one way to gather as God’s people.

We are “gathering in place,” insisting that physical distance does not require spiritual distance.

Those who have told us for quite some time that digital encounters birth real relationships are finally getting their day. Even those who mocked the early adopters trust in virtual reality are now begging for advise on how to relate to each other in times like this.

(An apology might be in order!)

We have gathered to hear each other out and to offer support in ways that would have been impossible a decade ago as well as in ways we still depended upon for decades and even millenia.

Every media is coming to our aid to help us gather, from zoom meetings to live-streamed or filmed worship to telephone conversations to letters hand-written to greetings shouted across the other side of the street to words whispered as the lights are turned off.

We will be changed by this experience but our community will get through it … because we gather.

One thing that gives me hope for this time of scattered-ness is that one of the greatest spiritual gifts I have received came out of times like this: the Word of God.

The Gospel of Mark that has sustained me and just about the whole New Testament came together when the world was coming apart. A devastating war filled Israel with death and scattered God’s people in all directions. So the people made efforts to remember the God who held them together in their scattered-ness.

The scriptures that those early Christians had to this point–what we have come to call the Old Testment–also was born of trauma. The people of God felt decimated after the Babylonians crushed them; in their scattered existence they pulled together the laws, poems, and stories of God’s solidarity with them that they might be sustained in spite of the day’s troubles.

David Carr states, “It was during periods of crisis that the overall shape and emphases of the scripture were shaped the most. … The story that one learns to tell after trauma must encompass that experience and transcend it.” And thus of trauma is born sources that could withstand the troubles trafficked by trauma.

The people of God gathered by gathering their thoughts around God’s continual faithfulness in times of trouble.

And so in many and various ways we gather even when the social fabric around us is coming apart. We gather across space; we gather our thoughts and reshape our witness; we discard the flimsy platitudes that cannot hold us in times like this.

We speak of hope that encompasses the woes of the world and transcends them, gathering together a witness worthy of the God who brings life out of death, worthy of the risen One whose coming again we await.

About Philip Ruge-Jones

After I served for eighteen years as a professor of theology at Texas Lutheran University, my family decided to return to the Midwest where my wife and I grew up, attended college and seminary. Read more...