Church After the Corona Pandemic: Consequences for Worship and Theology 3031237307, 9783031237300

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Kyle K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero   Editor

Church After the Corona Pandemic Consequences for Worship and Theology

Church After the Corona Pandemic

Kyle K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero Editor

Church After the Corona Pandemic Consequences for Worship and Theology

Editor Kyle K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero United Lutheran Seminary Gettysburg, PA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-23730-0    ISBN 978-3-031-23731-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23731-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

For several years, I have been reflecting on the intersection of worship and digital theology. My academic career has always been two-fold: teaching and research on worship and theology, and administrative work with digital learning. When I started my first post-dissertation administrative position, a colleague introduced me to a Finnish scholar working at the intersection of theology and computer science. That began my exploration of the emerging field of “digital theology,” one to which I have contributed through publications and presentations. Even though I had been engaged in the literature and research, the ideas were still somewhat abstract, not yet connecting this work concretely with weekly Christian worship. On occasion, I would lead prayer in Zoom meetings or post a video recording of a sermon on Facebook, but I had not yet thought about an immersive experience. In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Governments mandated public health restrictions, including the banning of mass gatherings. That following Sunday (March 15, 2020), I was thrust into the practicality of digital theology. Although I had already planned my cross-country trip for spring break and volunteered to preach at my former congregation upon my return, stay-at-home orders were already on the horizon. My congregation knew this would be the last Sunday for in-person worship, but no one knew how long the “exile” from the physical worship space would last. Like most congregations, we had to cobble-together some technology to livestream this worship service, knowing that subsequent ones would be online-only. Throughout the remainder of the Spring 2020 semester, I was drawn into discussions about how worship and technology impacted one another. At the request of a colleague who had begun to explore the option of celebrating Holy Communion online, I penned an essay that entertained that possibility, which was later published, and upon which I expand in my chapter of this book. A larger conversation among faculty at United Lutheran Seminary and regional Lutheran bishops emerged. What began as a narrow discussion about online sacramental practices quickly evolved into a broader discussion about theological commitments regarding online worship. Three of the four faculty members in that conversation are contributors to this book. v

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With contributions from scholars and practitioners, this book continues those initial conversations and advances the larger discourse about worship and theology. Exploring the lessons learned from the ongoing pandemic, the authors acknowledge that some assumptions cannot continue into the future. Although many of the contributors are Lutheran, COVID and post-COVID concerns are not limited to one theological tradition. This book does not provide a simple “solution” to liturgical and theological life in the future but rather serves as a conversation partner for readers in thinking through important topics moving forward. While this book is a contribution to the emerging discipline of digital theology and may sound like an apologia for online church or digital worship, that is not entirely the case. The authors contributing to this book operate with different theological presuppositions and come to different conclusions on what post-pandemic worship and theology is and can be. While many articles, blog posts, and books have been published in the last two years that can serve as a “how-to” when it comes to livestreaming worship or engaging in pastoral practices through Zoom, this book treats those practices only in passing. Rather, this book assumes that the church will not return to its pre-pandemic life, and thus the changes wrought by the pandemic are now part of the church’s identity and life. Contributed essays in this book are the result of pandemic-affected ministries. Authors share their reflections on how digital ministry is theologically and liturgically grounded. Using the four-fold pattern of the historic Western Christian mass structure of worship—Gathering, Word, Meal, Sending (with God as the one who initiates these movements)—as an organizational structure, this collection of essays discerns how the church exists during and after the pandemic. The essays provide source material for theological discernment and practical implementation, and an appendix provides some questions and activities that can augment discussions around the topics presented. Thanks are due to my colleagues at United Lutheran Seminary and new colleagues I met through this project. Special thanks are due for the copyediting work of Aileen G. Zaballero, and for contributor Kayko Driedger Hesslein who served as a conversation partner throughout this project. Philadelphia, PA, USA

Kyle K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero

Introduction

It would be an understatement to say that the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic changed the world; from domestic and international travel to education at all levels, from local economies to global relations—the pandemic drastically altered assumptions about public spaces. A whole host of activities were prioritized as health-­ related precautions, including physical distancing, wearing masks, avoiding crowds, and handwashing. While some of these practices have returned to a so-called state of “normal,” the world has changed and continues to change as the pandemic prevails. One significant (and historically central) aspect of life that changed was the church, both in its worship practices and in its theological reflections.

Worship and Theology Before COVID In February 2020, Living Lutheran, the official monthly magazine of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, published an issue devoted to “technology and the church.” One article is about living together in the digital age, written by one of this book’s contributors, as well as articles that highlight concrete tech-enabled worship and formation practices: using video conferencing to make baptismal sponsors present in worship, using technology to augment in-person worship, and constructing a tablet app for children to learn central biblical stories (Saunders 2020; Healy 2020; Favre 2020). For the most part, these latter articles deal primarily with in-person religious expression that has a technological component. An additional article goes to the next level by asking how congregations can have an online presence without necessarily tying it back to an in-person gathering. One pastor notes how congregations like his are “using the technology of our day to supplement the institution … We’re unbelievably connected, [like] no other generation has been. We’re trying to take advantage of that” (Grimoldby 2020, 27). In the same article, another pastor makes an even stronger case, arguing that avoiding technology could prevent people from encountering the world.

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Although not the first to address digital/online spaces regarding worship and theology seriously, the articles in Living Lutheran were published a mere month before congregations had to scramble to figure out the role of technology during a pandemic. Theologians and scholars of religion have debated the merits of technology for generations, and most congregations have incorporated some level of technology into worship spaces. While it is not possible to detail all the literature here, a couple of notable contributions shall suffice (see also Phillips, Schiefelbein-­ Guerrero and Kurlberg 2019; Sutinen and Cooper 2021). In her book Christian Worship and Technological Change, liturgical scholar Susan White was one of the earliest to look at technology’s impact on worship (1994). Heidi Campbell’s works on online religious communities and digital religion have assisted scholars in deciphering the interplay between technology and theology (2005; 2012; Campbell and Garner 2016). Liturgical scholar Teresa Berger’s @Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds brought new insights into White’s original observations, delving into specific worship practices happening in the online environment (2018).1

Then COVID Occurred This brief survey of the literature demonstrates that technology had already been on the minds of scholars and practitioners when the pandemic forced quick adjustments in March 2020. Yet, many seemed ill-prepared—for some, the intersection of theology and digitality was still an academic exercise, or seen as something only wealthy congregations could accomplish, or that such experience was less-than the “authentic” in-person gathering. Others had incorporated some level of technology into their congregational experience, but not to the level demanded by the pandemic’s restrictions. The quick shift to alternative forms of gathering for worship, whether online or outdoors, left little room to theologically reflect on what was happening, let alone what the church might be or do once the pandemic had dissipated. For some, there was denial that the pandemic would last as long as it has and that such anomaly would not impact the regular everyday operation of the church. Pastors adapted the best they could, quickly moving worship to pandemic-friendly spaces, venturing further into digital formats, and finding ways to connect with their parishioners when they physically cannot be present. Scholars dug into scriptural and theological sources from their traditions to speak about theodicy, presence, sacramental efficacy, and many other topics. Some pastors and theologians quickly responded to the pandemic by adapting practices to the context, while others advocated for a slower, reflective approach. One specific argument among some was the issue of communion, which for many

 Berger (2020) more recently expanded on her thoughts in “@Worship Goes Viral: Catholic Liturgy Online in a COVID-19 World.” 1

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Christians, is a central part of Sunday worship and thus a place where many theological topics come together. The topic of online communion spurred a meeting among my colleagues, me, and some of the regional Lutheran bishops. While communion was the immediate cause of the meetings, the participants soon realized that much larger theological and pastoral questions needed to be addressed. The group established a set of “key doctrines and shared affirmations” designed to guide further conversations about online communion specifically and worship in general. Some of those statements include (Happy Lutheran: Relating Faith to Life in Love & Hope, 19 June 2020): • [#1] The foundation of our faith is God’s love for God’s whole creation seen in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. • [#3] Theology and doctrine are always concerned about the usus practicus (the practical use)—theology is not done for the sake of argument alone. • [#7] Through the power of the Holy Spirit, humans across time and space, including technologically mediated spaces, are held together as the one body of Christ. Holy Communion is an essential, necessary sign of this union, and a means to grow that union. • [#8] Context matters. Even as we respect practices that unify us, congregational and denominational practices always should be interpreted faithfully by a specific community in a given situation, with particular attention paid to diverse voices that are too often marginalized or ignored. These statements can serve as a guide throughout this book.

Looking Ahead Organized around the four-fold pattern of Sunday worship—Called Together, Engaged in the Word, Fed by the Meal, Led Out into the World2—this collection of essays guides the reader to discern how the church exists during and after the pandemic, learning from the ever-evolving ministry practices during the pandemic. Each contributing author provides an informed opinion about the future of worship and theology. Scholar of digital religion Heidi Campbell identifies three strategies toward digitally mediated worship (2020, 51). The first is transferring, which attempts to move the standard physical in-person worship to the online environment. Many congregations accomplished this by engaging audio and video capturing equipment in their existing sanctuaries, like livestreaming via YouTube or Facebook. Minimal

 Sometimes abbreviated as Gathering, Word, Meal and Sending, this four-fold pattern draws on the second-century writings of Justin Martyr as an origin for the structure of Christian worship throughout history, at least in those traditions that have followed the western mass (Lathrop 1996, 67–75). The alternative language used above emphasizes God’s initiative in each section. 2

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modifications were made to ritual practices, although some refrained from sacramental rites during this time. The second is translating, in which worship leaders modified their ritual practices to fit the digital environment—for example, altering how the congregation engages in communal singing, including what styles/ approaches to music were better suited for the digital environment. The primary space conveyed through the digital environment was often the physical worship environment. These first two strategies attempt to replicate standard pre-pandemic practices. The third strategy that Campbell identifies is transforming, in which communities significantly change their worship practices and spaces specific to the digital environment. This could include creating new rituals that could only work in the digital space, altering how worship occurs, and employing digital art. Debates about digital communion or online Eucharist are often connected to this third strategy. However, this book is not an overall apologia for digital worship or online church.3 The fact that these authors do not agree on that overall subject allows the various essays to be in dialogue with one another, and thus groups of readers can model this dialogue when engaging in these very topics for themselves. Thus, the essays provide source material for both theological discernment and practical implementation. Together, these essays will help the reader envision worship and theology as the COVID pandemic wanes, and the church prepares for the ministry of the future.

References Berger, Teresa. 2018. @Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds. New York: Routledge. Berger, Teresa. 2020. @Worship Goes Viral: Catholic Liturgy Online in a COVID-19 World. In Digital Ecclesiology: A Global Conversation, ed. Heidi A. Campbell, 14–19, College Station, TX: Digital Religion Publications. Campbell, Heidi. 2005. Exploring Religious Community Online: We are One in the Network. New York: Peter Lang. Campbell, Heidi. 2012. Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds. New York: Routledge. Campbell, Heidi. 2020. What Religious Groups Need to Consider When Trying to Do Church Online. In The Distanced Church: Reflections on Doing Church Online, ed. Heidi A. Campbell, 49–52. College Station, TX: Digital Religion Publications. Campbell, Heidi A., and John Dyer, eds. 2021. Ecclesiology for a Digital Church: Theological Reflections on a New Normal. London: SCM. Campbell, Heidi A., and Stephen Garner. 2016. Networked Theology: Negotiating Faith in Digital Culture. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker. Favre, Jeff. 2020. “Reaching Kids Through God’s Love.” Living Lutheran 4(10): 30-31. https:// pubs.royle.com/publication/?m=62112&i=645426&p=30&article_id=3573434&ver=html5 Grimoldby, Stephanie. 2020. A 21st-Centry Church: How are Lutherans Expanding Faith Communities. Living Lutheran 4(10): 26–29. https://pubs.royle.com/publication/?m=62112& i=645426&p=30&article_id=3573434&ver=html5  Such works include Kurlberg and Phillips (2020), and Campbell and Dyer (2021).

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Happy Lutheran: Relating Faith to Life in Love & Hope. 2020. “A Conversation on Communion Amidst Covid-19.” 19 June. https://happylutheran.blog/2020/06/19/a-­conversation-­on-­communion-­ amidst-­covid-­19/ Healy, Wendy. 2020. “New Ways to Proclaim the Gospel,” Living Lutheran 4(10): 23. https://pubs. royle.com/publication/?m=62112&i=645426&p=30&article_id=3573434&ver=html5 Kurlberg, Jonas, and Peter M. Phillips, eds. 2020. Mission Dei in a Digital Age. London: SCM. Lathrop. Gordon W. 1996. The Shape of the Liturgy: A Framework for Contextualization. In Christian Worship: Unity and Cultural Diversity, ed. S.  Anita Stauffer, 67–75. Geneva: Lutheran World Federation. Phillips, Peter, Kyle Schiefelbein-Guerrero and Jonas Kurlberg. 2019. Defining Digital Theology: Digital Humanities, Digital Religion and the Particular Work of the CODEC Research Centre and Network. Open Theology 5(1): 29–43. https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-­2019-­0003 Saunders, Jay. 2020. “Virtual Witnesses: Congregation Brings Baptism Sponsors Together Digitally.” Living Lutheran 4, no. 10 (February): 22. https://pubs.royle.com/publication/? m=62112&i=645426&p=30&article_id=3573434&ver=html5 Sutinen, Erkki, and Anthony-Paul Cooper. 2021. Digital Theology: A Computer Science Perspective. Bingley, UK: Emerald. White, Susan J. 1994. Christian Worship and Technological Change. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

Contents

Part I Called Together 1

Worship in the Face of Corona: Ritual, Place, People, and Polymodality�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    3 Kyle K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero

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 Physicality and Relatedness When God’s People Gather��������������������   23 Kristin Johnston Largen

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Worship in the African American Tradition with a View Toward the Future��������������������������������������������������������������   35 Quintin L. Robertson

Part II Engaged in the Word 4

 Reimagining Preaching in a Post-pandemic Era����������������������������������   47 Karyn L. Wiseman

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 Church May Be Digital, But Is the Clergy’s Call?��������������������������������   67 Lisa Cressman

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 One Virus After Another: Composing the Weekly Intercessions��������   89 Gail Ramshaw

Part III Fed by the Meal 7

 Real Presence and Absent Bodies: Sacramental Practice Today��������  101 Dirk G. Lange

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 Toward a More Accessible Body of Christ��������������������������������������������  113 Deanna A. Thompson

9

 Holy Communion Under Quarantine����������������������������������������������������  125 Timothy J. Wengert

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10 A  Simple Way to Invoke: Seeing the Ubiquity of Christ Through a Mystagogical Look Behind the Veil of Covid-19����������������  135 Chad Rimmer Part IV Led Out into the World 11 “In  All Times and Places”: The Transcendence and Immanence of the Holy Spirit in a Diasporic Body of Christ ����������������������������������  147 Kayko Driedger Hesslein 12 Seeing  God in Christ, Being Seen as the Body of Christ, Seeing Others as GOD’S Beloved: A Lutheran Reflection on the Church Post-­COVID-­19��������������������������������������������������������������  163 Vincent Evener 13 One  Body, One Spirit, One Hope: We Are Part of this, Together...Intercultural Connectedness as a Church After Corona ����������������������������������������������������������������������  181 Sivin Kit Appendix ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  195 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  197

Part I

Called Together

Chapter 1

Worship in the Face of Corona: Ritual, Place, People, and Polymodality Kyle K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero

Introduction Setting the Scene The drastic changes in worship due to the COVID-19 pandemic have no comparison in church history. Although the world has previously been plagued by pandemics, such as the Great Influenza epidemic of 1918, and congregations responded accordingly, the possibilities of alternate forms of gathering have and continue to make this current pandemic unique. Some congregations were already prepared to shift and incorporate technological tools to extend their worship. However, many were building their systems day-by-day or Sunday-by-Sunday, tweaking the infrastructure after each iteration of worship to address any issues. In some communities, the turnaround time between deciding to suspend in-person worship and constructing plans to livestream, video conference, gather outdoors, or identify alternative forms of worship were implemented only within a couple of days. The immediacy of the situation required worship leaders and planners to focus on the question of “how.” How are we going to make this work? For those congregations where leaders preached from traditional worship spaces, this meant replicating the in-person worship experience with those outside the church building. Alternatively, worship leaders who could not physically be in their church created a different form of gathering from their homes or offices, some of which resembled a Bible study. No matter the place, worship leaders continue to focus on their mission to gather the faithful around the Word (and sometimes the Sacrament), pray communally, and join in the treasury of church music both past and present. The answers to the “how” K. K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero (*) United Lutheran Seminary, Gettysburg, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero (ed.), Church After the Corona Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23731-7_1

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have fallen into place for most congregations, and while it is tempting to construct a guide to implementing COVID and post-COVID liturgy, that is not the intention of this essay. Rather, this essay focuses on the “why” and “what” of Christian worship events with implications of “how” to worship in the future, with specific attention to ritual and interaction, space and place, community participation, and modality.1 Throughout this essay, I use the language of “event” as a reminder of the incarnational nature of the bodies that participate, no matter the mode(s) in which worship occurs, which prevents seeing the body as an object on the same level as others (Empereur 1999, 145).

Theologizing Worship At the outset, it is important to define what is meant by “worship” and why it is done before addressing how such worship practices may look. I draw on liturgical scholar Ruth Duck’s five theological emphases (ritual, revelation, response, relationship, and rehearsal) as a theological framework for this chapter. The first emphasis is “ritual,” which focuses on words and actions that help coalesce the community that performs them, and helps shape the participants’ personal and corporate identities (Duck 2021, 8). It is through these practices that congregations communicate and make meaning from one generation to the next. In one sense, the lack of this worship-as-ritual theology could be what separates digitally-­ mediated worship from an online Bible study; the former has the structure while the latter focuses on the proclamatory moment. As noted in the section below, rituals help create situations in which worship can occur and demarcate space (in this case, cyberspace) specific for worship; this is especially important for worshipers who use their computers for non-worship-related tasks. The second emphasis is “revelation,” which emphasizes God’s real presence among those gathered for worship, in which God makes God’s self known among the worshippers (Duck 2021, 10). Various theological traditions locate God’s presence in worship in different places: in the preached Word (sermon), in the sacramental word (Lord’s Supper, Eucharist), among the gathered community, in sung and/or heard music, through ritual practices, or a combination of these. God can also reveal God’s self through art, architecture, and ritual objects, which speaks to the presence of these things being incorporated into digitally-mediated worship. Like ritual described above, the presence of revelatory items and speech can provide the operations to understand God’s ubiquitous presence among those gathered in-person, online, or in some hybrid fashion. The third emphasis is “response,” which highlights the congregation’s “thank you” to what God has done and is doing in the world (Duck 2021, 11). Unlike the previous two emphases, this theological approach to worship often views God’s

 Liturgical scholar Teresa Berger notes that these categories require attention by liturgical scholars, especially when inhabiting the digital world (2018, 5). 1

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presence as outside of the worship space itself (primarily because God cannot be contained but rather is Sovereign) and that the worshipper’s role is to respond by witnessing to what God has done in their life. Traditions that highlight praise and worship as the main reason for gathering align with this response emphasis. This theology of worship may influence decisions of what kind of interactivity (and thus what technology platform) is necessary for worship: synchronous in which all participants can interact with one another, limited-synchronous that is live but does not allow for bidirectional participation, or asynchronous, which is usually recorded at a different time.2 The fourth emphasis is “relationship,” which can be understood as a combination of revelation and response (Duck 2021, 13). In his sermon at the dedication of the first newly-built Lutheran church, reformer Martin Luther describes worship in this relational way, such that nothing should happen in the worship space except that “our dear Lord himself may speak to us through his holy Word and we respond to him through prayer and praise” (Luther 1959, 333). Some literature describes this as the word-answer (Wort-Antwort in German) approach to worship, setting up a dialogue between God and the worshipper. The dialogical understanding certainly has implications for the “how” of worship in that it assumes a to-and-fro that could be assisted or hindered by particular operational practices. The fifth emphasis is “rehearsal,” which understands worship as participating in God’s work of justice and peace in the world (Duck 2021, 14). This approach brings together past, present and future, not by collapsing them but by describing them as part of God’s all-encompassing time. Duck notes that of all the emphases described, rehearsal is the one that is usually neglected in the United States, but that some resurgence in the relationship between worship and discipleship has called attention to it again (Duck 2021, 16). Concerns about ability and access to technology in digitally-mediated worship would connect to this emphasis. Most worshippers (scholars and practitioners) can find themselves in one or more of these five emphases. This theologizing of worship should be at the heart of determining worship practices in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. However worship is theologized, it can be assumed that the gospel in a multisensory and incarnational way through gestures, music, spoken and sung texts, and the like. Specifically, this chapter deals with three aspects: ritual, place, and people.3 Questions about liturgical participation are included in the section about people. These three aspects have been chosen because they tend to be the most changed aspects when engaging in alternative forms of gathering, whether in-person, online or a combination of the two.

 For further reflections on these modalities with regard to sacramental ministry, see SchiefelbeinGuerrero (2020b). Scholar of digital religion John Dyer uses different descriptors for these various modalities (2021, 11–13): “interactive” for synchronous, and “broadcast” for limited-synchronous. 3  Liturgical scholar Ruth Meyers describes these “dimensions of worship” as action, space, and people (2014, 201). 2

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Hybridity and Polymodality in Worship Before delving into those three aspects, it is necessary to go deeper into the phrase alternative forms of gathering. Technology has a permanent place in worship moving forward, although such places will differ in varying contexts. While some ministry leaders and congregations had already engaged with technology in a positive way, the pandemic has opened the possibility to others, including finding ways of bringing together the digital and in-person experience of worship and ministry. Since the global pandemic, literature about hybrid church has emerged, calling on scholars and practitioners to think through what church (loosely defined) may look like once pandemic-related restrictions are lifted, and worshipers re-enter the customary church spaces.4 A common definition from the literature describes hybrid church as the blending of in-person and online environments, allowing for interaction between the two, not privileging one over the other. This definition relates to worship and includes outreach, fellowship, education, stewardship, and the other ministries found in a congregation. Digital theologian Peter Phillips notes that hybrid church is not just about “digital communications, or God online,” but instead is about how the church can operate “beyond walls” (2020, 5). This claim is one reason I have opted to use alternative forms of gathering in what I described to include gathering through non-technological means. Even though the language of hybrid worship has appeared throughout the literature (see Dyer 2021, 13), I have opted for a different term, polymodal worship. I first encountered the adjective polymodal at a conference about inclusivity in online learning, which described different educational modalities coming together to construct a unique learning experience (Darby 2021). Due to my dual experience as a liturgical scholar and educational technologist, I saw parallels between what this pedagogical concept my emerging digital worship research about how it relates to in-person worship. Polymodal as the descriptor of worship has the advantage of preventing confusion around how hybrid (and its related word ‘blended’) has been used in the past, which usually has dealt with concerns about style. In fact, some have observed that the disagreement around modality can be similar to  the so-called worship wars about musical styles (Daubert and Jorgensen 2020, 19).

 As the reader will note below, my use of the term ‘hybrid’ deals primarily with modality (hence, my preference for ‘polymodal’). For a phenomenological overview of ‘hybridity’ and the related concept of ‘third space,’ see Bhabha (2004). 4

1  Worship in the Face of Corona: Ritual, Place, People, and Polymodality

Church with no online presence

Church with a website and are active on Facebook

Church where worship is regularly livestreamed

Church with clearly defined outreach online

Church where online and offline participants can and fully participate

Church where almost all is online, delivered by local team

Church where all is online and delivered by a mixed local and online team

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Completely online/digital church

Polymodal Worship

Fig. 1.1  Spectrum of hybrid church. (Adapted from Sanders)

Spectrum of a Hybrid Church and Polymodality Adam Sanders, mission advisor for the Birmingham District of the British Methodist Church, has proposed an eight-part spectrum of a hybrid church to account for the diversity of approaches as illustrated in Fig. 1.1 Spectrum of Hybrid Church (personal communication, 15 January 2021). In terms of worship, most pre-pandemic congregations were on the left side of the spectrum, either with technology having no role in the weekly Sunday gathering or with livestreaming as a secondary component to the worship space. However, the rush to alternative forms of gathering shifted most congregations toward the right of the spectrum. Some churches stopped at livestreaming (3rd on the spectrum), while others shifted to the furthest right-end, completely providing online/digital worship experience. As the current pandemic  continues to wane and more congregations return to their buildings, some congregations have resumed their pre-pandemic practices as a whole, with alternative forms of gathering as a secondary option. However, as illustrated in Fig. 1.1, polymodal worship (to the right of center on the spectrum), allows worshipers to fully participate in-person and at alternative places (including online). The alternative environment is not secondary to the in-person. At United Lutheran Seminary (ULS), my current institution, we implemented a Polymodal Service of the Word, which is the institution’s primary weekly worship service. Not only did ULS have to bridge the in-person and online communities, but it also had to bridge the two physical campuses (Gettysburg and Philadelphia). Before the pandemic, each campus worshiped in their own physical chapel, and the only events that brought the two together were institutional events like Commencement that would happen off-campus in a neutral location. Figure  1.2 Three “Locations” in Polymodal Worship and corresponding Fig.  1.3 Photos of “Locations” illustrate how each community was brought together through video conferencing software. Each location can see the other two during the weekly liturgy, modeling the worship-as-relationship emphasis, especially as the community connects to one another and to God. The two physical chapels have screens, webcams, and microphones. Worship leaders can be in any location, but ideally, the

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Fig. 1.2 Three “Locations” in polymodal worship

Philadelphia

Video conferencing software Distributed Learning

Gettysburg

Fig. 1.3  Photos of “Locations” (with ULS Prof. John Hoffmeyer leading worship physically in Philadelphia but present in the other two locations; photographs by Donald L.  Redman and the author)

liturgy would include leadership from each location. This approach allows ULS to equalize privilege across both locations transcending geography, with a concrete focus on the worship-as-ritual approach. While the experiment with polymodal worship only started at the end of August 2021, it builds on the location-neutral approach when fully online worship was implemented because physical campuses were closed during the height of the pandemic. A Eucharistic liturgy does occur each week on the separate physical campuses and does not incorporate an online component.5  The challenge (and theological disagreement) around sacraments in digitally-mediated worship is further explored in subsequent chapters of this book. 5

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For some, entering this digital space was temporary, akin to when congregations move their worship space temporarily due to remodeling. Others have seen the possibilities of digital worship and plan to engage in both the digital space and physical space. How the ritual, revelation, response, relationship, and rehearsal of worship are enacted is the concern of the remainder of this essay, focusing on the specific dimensions of action/ritual, people/participation, and space/place.

A Word About Music David Gambell, in his appendix to Duck’s book, spells it out directly: “One of the most difficult – and frankly, deficient – aspects of online worship is congregational singing” (Duck 2021, 302). Communities for whom music is a central part of their worship practices grieved when worship migrated online because of the lack of communal singing. Communal is an important adjective here, as many congregations quickly adapted and provided music, but the communal aspect for many was lost. Intuitively, congregations know that the multidirectional hearing-and-being-­ heard aspect of congregational singing made the community vital and knit the people together (Meyers 2014, 224), in a similar way that ritual can coalesce a group. The incorporation of the music aligns with the worship-as-revelation approach. In ULS’s polymodal approach, music always comes from one location (Gettysburg) and is seen/heard at the other two. This allows participants in the remote locations to sing along with the instruments (and sometimes a cantor). Participants on the opposite campus (Philadelphia) can hear one another in that space and hear the communal singing from the campus from which the music is based. The main limitation is for those who participate away from either campus, whose voices resound only in their individual location. Music That Makes Community, an organization that advocates for paperless congregational singing, has offered workshops about adapting their call-and-response approach to communal musicmaking into the video conferencing environment. This provides a solution to the hearing-and-being-heard aspect of communal singing with relative simultaneity, while working within the noise cancellation limitations of the software. Certain musical styles, like Taizé and other a cappella-native genres, work well for this approach. The difficulty in technologizing congregational singing may provide renewed attention to the role of silence in worship, something that would counter the unending noise that is present in today’s consumer culture (Meyers 2014, 101). Silence should be thought of as another type of sound rather than the absence of sound.

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Ritual One aspect of most worship, as well as a theological emphasis, is ritual. For some worshippers, the inclusion of ritual practices distinguishes worship from other forms of spiritual practice. Attention to ritual takes seriously the embodied nature of worship, in which real bodies are interacting, either with one another physically (as with in-person worship) or through some technological means. Rituals in any context are powerful, but what sort of ‘power’ do they have? I propose different approaches to ritual efficacy to describe how rituals work.6

Ritual as Communication Rituals communicate the identity of the group performing the ritual and help maintain the structure in the group. The communicated text embodies the group’s belief system and edicts how to think and act (Wheelock 1982, 49). This understanding  can  assume that ritual actions themselves are unnecessary since the primary mode of communication is verbal, such that the ritual gestures reinforce what is being said and heard. However, rituals are more than a supplement to the verbal communication; they convey information and transmit symbols (Bell 1997, 44). Theologically, faith is experienced by hearing, and if this approach is understood as unidirectional, then asynchronous (or non-interactive) digital worship would be considered efficacious. Yet, rituals communicate something specific: messages that have to do with the relationships between ritual and social life, relationships that are significant or meaningful. A semiotic approach, which posits that rituals communicate meanings “largely about the world and the human condition as these are culturally constructed” (Hanson 1981, 177), understands liturgical rites as telling worshippers “something about God, Christ, church, sacraments, and living a life of faith or as referring to these realities in some way” (Aune 1996, 163) by organizing that information to bring meaning to one’s experience of those things. However, the question must be raised whether it is possible to communicate “meaning” since it is always “meaning-to-someone” (Grimes 1995, 42). Meanings themselves actually do things, and since that is the case, then rituals enacted in and/or constructed for digitallymediated spaces assist in ordering the lives of participants. As a function, rituals become especially important in a digital environment to align with the experience of in-person worship.7

 The foundation of this section originally appeared in Schiefelbein (2016).  This is especially true amid the physical, mental and emotional toll that the pandemic has taken. A further reflection on these issues is in Schiefelbein-Guerrero (2020a). 6 7

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Ritual as Performative and Situating Speech Philosopher of language J. L. Austin, in his book How to Do Things with Words, described what he called “performative utterances” in which saying something does something (Bell 1997, 68). For example, a liturgical leader saying “I bless you” causes a blessing to happen. Unlike the communicating understanding, performative speech does not convey statements of fact or meanings, but they actually “do” something (Wheelock 1982, 52). This approach to efficacy can be expanded to ritual since ritual itself can be seen as a “symbolic language” (Bell 1997, 69). Rituals transmit the ideas of a particular culture and help shape those ideas and construct/ create reality. Ritual speech-acts go beyond Austin’s characteristics because they do not necessarily require a “speaker” and a “hearer”; rather, such ritualized speech can be said to or by oneself, or both—that is, outside of the in-person worship space. In the polymodal environment, which can include worshippers at home, the speech-act and thus ritual can be efficacious, meaning that liturgical action is valid from a psychological or social perspective. Ritual speech goes beyond the giver/recipient needed in Austin’s speech-act paradigm. Ritual speech (by extension, action) be seen as situating speech (Wheelock 1982, 59), which presents the actual situation by speaking the text (or doing the ritual). The speaking of the text “presents” the situation, and its efficacy is evaluated by the ritual’s ability to create a particular situation and is separate from the beliefs of ritual participants. The text expresses an already-existing reality that demarcates the particularity of this time for worship. When these words are accompanied by gesture, ritual music, or both, they may express or create the situation differently than spoken text without gesture. Thus, one can speak of ritual as transformative. The situational approach also creates a ritualized body, which is a “body invested with a ‘sense’ of ritual” (Bell 1992, 98). The process of ritualization produces this particular body as the body interacts with the situation around it. The late ritual scholar Catherine Bell provides a helpful example with the ritual practice of kneeling: “Kneeling does not so much communicate a message about subordination as it generates a body identified with subordination” (1992, 99–100). For that reason, the body doing ritual in such a situation produces that particular body—in essence, this is its efficacy. While this understanding of efficacy may be complicated in a digitally-mediated environment, it is important to remember that ritual itself assumes embodiment, which theologically is linked to the Incarnation. Even rituals that take place in digital environments are performed by “enfleshed human beings … whose images are turned into data and reassembled on screens” (Phillips 2020, 7). Those who participate on either side of the screen can engage in the ritual, and therefore, be invested with a “sense of ritual.” Those tasked with developing polymodal liturgy need to be attentive to this engagement and potentially craft words and actions that allow worshippers to participate.

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Emerging Rituals and Media Adapting worship during a global pandemic drove worshipping communities to develop new rituals. Although “emerging rituals” are not new, ritual scholar Ronald Grimes’ work is a reminder that these practices  – “animated persons enact[ing] formative gestures in the face of receptivity during crucial times in founded places” (1995, 73) – are legitimate. He argues that practitioners should name the emerging ritual to give it authority in times of crisis. If rituals work by ordering experience, then emerging rituals allow practitioners to find some sort of grounding amid tragedies, like COVID. It must be acknowledged that using media not only affects ritual practices but can also create new rituals. Early on, when rituals were televised, scholars warned that recording, editing, and broadcasting would negatively affect the rituals, showing a polished (idealized) form of the ritual rather than what actually happened (Grimes 2006, 36). Others were concerned that broadcasting would not foster communal participation because it would ‘flatten’ the event into pure “spectacle” (Bell 1997, 243). Scholars cautioned against unidirectional media, meaning that one would just watch the ritual practices without being intentionally called to participate or join in via omnidirectional media. These critiques are important to consider when constructing rituals in a polymodal environment and aligning with the worship-as-­ response theology.

People Biblical Foundations The apostle Paul understood that the church is not meant to be a static entity but rather an establishment in motion. Ekklesia, the Greek word for “church,” is a combination of the preposition ek meaning “out” and the verb kaleo meaning “to call.” Thus, ekklesia is being “called out” and is often translated as an assembly (Lathrop 1999, 31–32; Dyer 2021, 8–10). Paul did not invent the word church, but he draws from the Greek culture and writes about in his letters that make up a significant portion of the New Testament. In ancient Greek society, around 500 BCE, the ekklesia was a political assembly organized for a common purpose, ideally for the citizenry’s well-being. Though it may appear that Paul is co-opting a political structure to describe the church, the Hebrew equivalent also describes God’s action of calling people together. The Septuagint, the Greek translation in the Hebrew Bible, uses the same root – ek-kaleo – as the translation of the Hebrew qahal, which refers to a convoked group, or literally, they who are called out. Paul’s use of the word is intentional and goes beyond a general assembly of people. The Pauline letters are filled with the word, and while we see it in translation as church and assume it to be an organizational structure or a building, Paul means it to be about activity – both in the local sense of a particular congregation and in the global sense as the entire body of

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Christ (Lathrop 1999, 66). Paul repeats church many times throughout his letters, and this repetition is a means of formation. Christians in the apostolic period did not have elaborate buildings in which to gather; instead, they met in homes that were sizable enough to hold a modest-sized congregation (Vosko 2006, 28). Christian worship, as seen with the gatherings of the apostles in both the gospels and Acts, began as a domestic endeavor, in common homes and most likely led by the head-of-the-household.

Gathering in Early and Reformation Churches About a century after Paul’s writings, Roman apologist Justin Martyr provides some insight into what the church does on a weekly basis with Word and Sacrament at the center (Lathrop 1993, 45). In the 67th chapter of his First Apology, he notes: And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons. And they who are well to do, and willing, give what each thinks fit; and what is collected is deposited with the president, who succors the orphans and widows and those who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want, and those who are in bonds and the strangers sojourning among us, and in a word takes care of all who are in need. But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly…8

The “common assembly,” in which everyone “gather[s] together” on Sunday, not only benefits those who are present; rather, those who are “called out” as church, are called to minister to those who are unable to be present. In the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, reformer Philipp Melanchthon notes that the church is “not only an association of external ties and rites like other civic organizations, but it is principally an association of faith and the Holy Spirit in the hearts of persons” (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 174.5). Drawing on Luther’s earlier description of the Holy Spirit’s role as the one who “calls, gathers, enlightens and makes holy the church,” the Apology redefines the ekklesia in a similar way that Paul does – it is not just some generic gathering but one called out and called together through faith and by the Holy Spirit. This convocation centers around the ministry of the gospel in Word and Sacrament. The late Luther scholar Eric Gritsch described this work of ministry as “gospelling,” which occurs in two different ways: “inwarddirected gospelling” as the task of those who have been set apart for ministry, and “outward-directed gospelling” as the task of all Christians (1980, 36–46). The called-out-ness of the Church is both this inward- and outward-directed approach.

 https://ccel.org/ccel/justin_martyr/first_apology/anf01.viii.ii.lxvii.html (emphasis added).

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The constantly changing nature of the Church is reflected in the dynamic interpretation of the Word and Sacrament. In addition to artful oration, bland-tasting bread, and grape juice or wine, the means of grace itself is always in motion. Preaching is a constant to-and-fro between biblical narratives and contemporary contexts. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper connect commonplace elements with ever-­ emerging layers of meaning, informed by and responding to our need for nourishment. Sacramental acts are not meant to be locked-up in church buildings, but as Justin emphasizes, they are intended for all, including those unable to be called together. Such proclamation of the gospel is not merely inward-directed but also outward-directed.

Gathering in the Face of Corona Although our theology – our ecclesiology – acknowledges that the Church is a gathering of people around Word and Sacrament, the trauma of being forced out of our regular and familiar worshipping spaces by an invisible virus partially blocked living into this theological claim. How can we gather if we are not together? The desire for continuity, a pastorally-sensitive debate, must not be an end unto itself but an opportunity for renewal, similar to how the Reformation took a step back from the hierarchical institutional church model and looked to Paul’s understanding of the Church. Paul’s letters and his famous description of the Body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12 are apt: the various body parts all working together as the one body, “the biological, social, cultural body which celebrates liturgy does so because it is a spiritual body, the body of Christ” (Kelleher 1999, 64). While the normal interpretation of Paul’s text addresses the diversity of the church and the various functions, it is an opportunity to further examine Paul’s metaphor and explore how his writings relate to polymodal ministry. Each mode is like a different body part. For most of Christian history, the primary focus has been on one part – in-person gathering – but the pandemic temporarily made that body part inoperable, so another body part has to take over its functions. Even if the first body part regains functionality, the other part does not cease to operate; rather, both work in tandem for the body’s overall wellness. Congregations are encouraged to continue offering rituals in both digital and domestic settings. Paul reminds us that the so-called “weaker” body parts are the indispensable ones. The same is true for those who cannot physically gather in-person; they are also indispensable to the community as the Body of Christ. The suffering of one member brings about the suffering of all members, for all are united in the Church, no matter the mode through which they participate. Living in this new or renewed reality does not mean solely celebrating what comes ahead. Lamenting the loss of life that happened because of the pandemic is necessary. Calls against injustice, both racially and in terms of healthcare, have been

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amplified by the coronavirus. These practices of lamentation and justice-seeking are again central to the Church’s identity as that which is called-out-together, the ekklesia, being both in the world and called out to the world. Denominational and congregation mission statements consistently speak to the need to go outside the buildings, to be the Church in and for the world.

Liturgical Participation in the Future The pandemic intensified global discussions about the “digital divide” in education, even in countries supposedly at the forefront of technology, such as the United States. School districts have reported uneven educational experiences during the pandemic. This concern is compounded in the Church because of the multi-­ generational nature of congregations, which include people who are not supposedly “digital natives”; although that classification is inherently problematic. Livestreaming or web-conferencing worship assumes that everyone has access to a device with the appropriate bandwidth to make the experience spiritually formative. How can we ensure “fully conscious and active participation” (§14), the ecumenical liturgical renewal movement’s concern from the Second Vatican Council (Pope Paul VI December 4, 1963)? How do we create bridges rather than more barriers over the “digital divide”? What role do congregations have to ensure equitable access to connectivity and technology to participate in society and the church fully? The pandemic has expanded understandings of gathering as a church. It debunks the myth that physical proximity equates to relationality (Berger 2018, 37). Congregations have been able to gather despite physical limitations. Looking ahead, once the current pandemic has ended and restrictions on in-­ person gatherings are rescinded, the desire to return to normal may cause some churches to regress to their institutional and architectural modes. However, reverting to old practices rather than celebrating its domestic and digital modes as the total Body of Christ may cause a loss in participation.

Place Christians have historically appreciated visual and aural media for the glory of God and the spiritual benefit of believers (Crowley 2007, 8). While the level of appreciation changes depending on the century or theological tradition, Christian worship and art/architecture have historically gone together. This final section highlights important connections to space and its content in polymodal worship9.  An earlier version of this section was originally presented as “The Environs of the Digital Church: How Art and Space Form Community in Online Liturgical Events” at the annual meeting of Societas Liturgica, held online July 20–22, 2021 (originally scheduled to take place at the University of Notre Dame). 9

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Architecture Sacred space is an abstract idea of symbolism contained in a physical form (Jensen 2004, 102). The abstract notion of space provides a starting point for discerning digital space for churches. A unique quality of digital space is its porous boundaries creating a translucent border, so the church becomes visible to those outside the faith (Zsupan-Jerome 2020, 91). Even though sacred space has an abstract quality, Christians have historically described the church as worship space in two ways: Just as the term Church refers to the living temple, God’s People, the term church also has been used to describe “the building in which the Christian community gathers to hear the word of God, to pray together, to receive the sacraments, and to celebrate the eucharist.” That building is both the house of God on earth (domus Dei) and a house fit for the prayers of the saints (domus ecclesiae). Such a house of prayer must be expressive of the presence of God and suited for the celebration of the sacrifice of Christ, as well as reflective of the community that celebrates there. (Catholic Bishops as cited by Torgerson, 2007)

Thus, the space facilitates two types of relationships: one between God and the worshiper and one among the worshipers with themselves. The latter relationship is also a relationship with God since God is present in and among the worshipers. Paraphrased by liturgical scholar Mark Torgerson, “God is both with us and beyond us” (2007, 207). These two relationships can be described as transcendent and immanent. No matter the style of the space, one of its primary purposes is to be a “visible witness[] to the faith, capable of influencing the belief systems of Christians and non-­ Christians alike” (Torgerson 2007, 3); a physical and usually stately presence makes this understandable. The “church” has always been more than a place. Although locality still matters, it does not mean space must be restricted to one location. For some congregations engaging in digital worship, the online environment extends their building (such as livestreaming), but for others, the physical building is not part of the online worship experience. As discussed earlier with the worship-as-ritual theological emphasis and the role of ritual, the meanings of the space are created through experience, either personally or educationally, and may be beyond what the space may automatically convey. Noted liturgical architect Richard Vosko notes that churches can have multiple meanings, depending on the person, including “public venues for music, art and learned lectures,” and as “private sanctuaries of refuge, meditation, beauty, and prayer” for “times of fear and joy,” and for “where life cycle events are celebrated and remember” or they may not have any apparent meaning (2009, 233). These categories can transcend the physical/digital divide. Torgerson describes four critical factors that contribute to the overall emphasis on God’s transcendence and immanence: (1) scale and volume, (2) use of light, (3) articulation of décor, and (4) organization of space (2007, 6). While this list is about physical worship spaces, it is equally vital for digital worship in cyberspace. As a possible guide for live streaming or web-conferencing worship, it provides digital

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worship qualities that can be theologized. The fourth factor, organization of space, requires particular attention when investigating cyberspace. Organizing space should be designed to engage with identity, relationships, and our history; hence, the location of the relationship is more than just a “space” but rather what David Friend calls a “ritual-architectural event,” which describes the space in which meaning is made because of the interaction with experience and environment (2012, 10, 15). Rituals and the objects with which the people interact are brought together with space in the worship event. The organization of space in digital church requires the interaction of all three.

Art Art is often paired with architecture when describing space, and yet the two functions are significantly different. Prior to the pandemic, one major difference was that sacred art could appear in any context, while sacred architecture was primarily relegated to institutional spaces. The pandemic collapsed this dichotomy as worshipers’ homes became an extension of a sacred space. Nevertheless, art has provided additional historical criteria that assist in analyzing digital worship. Art can function as decorative, didactic, and devotional (Jensen 2004, 54). Those who view art as superfluous to worship view it as decorative and with less or secondary value. Others, particularly those from Reformation traditions, may view art as merely didactic, a mechanism to teach the faith by augmenting the preached and prayed word. PowerPoint slides on Zoom can serve as a decorative and didactic function, but a well-intentioned use of digital art is also devotional. Devotion is not separate from worship; therefore, it is appropriate to address devotion in a worshipful and even communal way (DeBoer 2016, 204). Art is always “specific, particular, and culturally located in space and time” and thus is both personal and communal (DeBoer 2016, 171). A collection of individuals each sitting in their own context participating in worship via YouTube does not negate the communal nature of the images; it perpetuates the communal nature of worship. Physical and digital materiality necessarily go together (see Berger 2018, 60). Questions may still be asked, what does art do or mean, especially as it appears in digital worship? “Perceived meaning of … art depends on the experience, social location, interests, needs, and predispositions of its audience,” and thus, it is not essentialist (Jensen 2004, 33). This relational understanding of meaning implies that the same piece of art traditionally viewed in a church building will have a different meaning when it is replicated in the digital church based on the physical location and device through which the worshipper views the art. The impact and concerns of digital art can find a parallel with the Iconoclastic Controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries. While it is not necessary to reproduce the debate here, it is important to recall that issues about idolatry and revelation were at the center. The winning side, the “Iconodules,” believed natural and human-made objects could reveal the invisible divine, even if such revelation is incomplete or mediated (Jensen 2004,

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58). The digital space contains such human-made objects capable of revelation, allowing for the worship to feel the presence of what is depicted in that image.

Church in Cyberspace Some customary understandings of worship art and architecture have already been made, but this section goes deeper into the environs of the digital church  – the cyberspace of worship. Liturgical scholar Eileen Crowley observes that “liturgy has always been multimedia,” the media traditionally understood as handcrafted products from natural elements, such as vestments and paraments, communion ware, icons, statuary, and stained-glass windows (2007, 8). A dichotomy has developed between physical human-created products and digital human-created products. Yet, digital artists reproduce (photographs or drawings) existing physical artwork as well as create brand new art created specifically for the digital environment. Both physical and digital art requires imagination, which helps to differentiate them from consumer products (Jensen 2004, 20). This differentiation helps address the critique of worship succumbing to consumerism, which is even more visible with the rise of digital liturgy. Furthermore, active viewing of art requires engagement with imagination, which allows the worshiper’s entire being to connect to the art (Jensen 2004, 23). Again, nothing should preclude digital art from having the same sort of relationship with the worshiper as in-person art, except for proximity. Friend notes that “intimate transcendence” is contained in the event and is free to expand where “nearness itself is a significant expression of relation” since proximity and memory are intertwined (2012, 53). Although proximity does not equal relationality nor requires physical nearness, there is a relationship between the two. The move to the online environment is an opportunity to offer interactive and unique space for relationships (Campbell 2020, 52), and a space for unique proximity. Even when things are not physically or digitally close, the construct of near, middle, or distant is determined by the simultaneity of the event and thus situating the relational proximity. This occurs in three ways: proximity to the Divine, proximity to one another, and proximity to the “central things” of worship, this latter also including various ritual objects. Proximity to the Divine is the primary concern for transcendence. Worship art and architecture help facilitate this proximity through its grandeur and style. The flattening of relationships in the digital environment can adversely affect this proximity, yet the previous discussion about icons can assist. Icons serve as proxies for what they depict, which is how they serve in physical worship spaces. Digital icons can serve the same role in digital worship spaces. Proximity to one another is heightened in some digital spaces, especially with web conferencing technology. In physical worship spaces with unmovable pews all facing the same direction (liturgical east), this level of proximity occurs through

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certain ritual practices (e.g., the passing of the peace or communal Eucharistic reception) during fellowship time. Physical worship spaces have limited interactions with those sitting adjacent to them and even less with those in front or behind them. The flattening in the digital environment has the advantage of placing worshipers near one another in some circumstances. The language of ‘friend’ and ‘neighbor’ places relationality at its core, which need not be restricted only to the physical world (Campbell and Garner 2016, 82–84). Proximity to the central things probably received the most attention as congregations quickly shifted from physical in-person gatherings to digital gatherings. One main difference with digital worship comes with specific ritual practices (Berger 2020, 16). Worship leaders were left struggling with how to best engage in gathering, movement, congregational, choir, baptismal, pulpit, and altar-table spaces, especially if those physical in-person spaces were not accessible. Liturgical traditions that emphasized the Service of the Word or Liturgy of the Hours focusing on congregational or choir spaces, had an easier time switching to the digital environment. In contrast, those traditions that emphasized the Eucharist and its surrounding rituals had more difficulty. Practical Proximity refers to the concerns about camera placement, digital icons, and the particular digital platform in which digital worship exists. One aspect of this Practical Proximity mirrors what occurs in physical spaces, being attentive to color, acoustics, and lighting (Vosko 2009, 238), while also paying attention to (1) “active communal worship,” (2) “devotional opportunities for personal faith expression,” (3) “beauty,” and (4) “public witness” (Torgerson 2007, 214). The same holds true for those building digital worship spaces. How well worship leaders and communities can manage their practical proximity (communal worship, faith expression, beauty, and public witness) depends on the strategies they employ for their venture into cyberspace.

Conclusion By understanding technology not only as a tool but an environment,10 polymodal worship can bridge the dichotomy of the private and public (Campbell and Garner 2016, 115). It can enhance communication, provide broader liturgical access, attend to various spiritual sensitivities, and even spark sacramental imagination (Crowley 2007, 47). From a practical perspective, polymodal worship does not leave out those who are unable to return to physical in-person worship, such as those who are medically vulnerable and those with additional life commitments (Garner 2021, 99). In this chapter I explored three aspects of worship – ritual, place and people – and connected them to polymodality. The theological and practical concerns that

 Scholar of digital religion Katherine Schmidt (2020, 26) describes “digital media” as a “culture unto itself.” 10

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were raised connect with any of the five theological emphases of worship that were introduced at the beginning of the essay. These emphases drive the approach a scholar or practitioner would take in determining the appropriate rituals, places, and people for enacting the worship event. The move online is not necessarily about diminishment (Berger 2020). Rather, this move may awaken new ways for spiritual development, ones that may not have been possible in the physical space. The common traits for online religious communities – (1) network of social relations, (2) space to give and receive care (outside the scope of this essay), (3) appreciation for online participation, (4) connection with others, (5) opportunity for people to be themselves, and (6) fellowship with shared faith (Campbell 2020, 50)  – are shared among Christian communities no matter their relationship to digitality or polymodality.

References Aune, Michael B. 1996. The Subject of Ritual: Ideology and Experience in Action. In Religious and Social Ritual: Interdisciplinary Explorations, ed. Michael B. Aune and Valerie M. DeMarinis, 147–173. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: New York. ———. 1997. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Oxford: New York. Berger, Teresa. 2018. @ Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds. New York: Routledge. ———. 2020. @ Worship Goes Viral: Catholic Liturgy Online in a COVID-19 World. In Digital Ecclesiology: A Global Conversation, ed. Heidi A. Campbell, 14–19. College Station: Digital Religion Publications. Bhabha, Homi K. 2004. The Location of Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Campbell, Heidi A. 2020. What Religious Groups Need to Consider When Trying to Do Church Online. In The Distanced Church: Reflections on Doing Church Online, ed. Heidi A. Campbell, 49–52. College Station: Digital Religion Publications. Campbell, Heidi A., and Stephen Garner. 2016. Networked Theology: Negotiating Faith in Digital Culture. Grand Rapids: Baker. Crowley, Eileen D. 2007. Liturgical Art for a Media Culture. Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Darby, Flower. 2021. Facilitating Equitable and Inclusive Student Learning Online. EDUCAUSE Learning Lab (April). https://www.credly.com/badges/ dd37b3f3-­a117-­4334-­a433-­a0e19e85edca Daubert, Dave, and Richard E.T. Jorgensen Jr. 2020. Becoming a Hybrid Church. Elgin: Day 8 Strategies. DeBoer, Lisa J. 2016. Visual Arts in the Worshiping Church. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Duck, Ruth C. 2021. Worship for the Whole People of God. 2nd ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Dyer, John. 2021. Exploring Mediated Ekklesia: How We Talk about Church in the Digital Age. In Ecclesiology for a Digital Church: Theological Reflections on a New Normal, ed. Heidi A. Campbell and John Dyer, 3–16. London: SCM. Empereur, James L. 1999. The Physicality of Worship. In Bodies of Worship: Explorations in Theory and Practice, ed. Bruce T. Morrill, 137–156. Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Friend, David. 2012. Intimate Transcendence: Proximity and Depth in Christian Architecture. Ph.D. dissertation, Graduate Theological Union. Garner, Stephen. 2021. From Distanced Church to Returning Church to Hybrid Church. In Revisiting the Distanced Church, ed. Heidi A.  Campbell, 97–106. College Station: Digital Religion Publications.

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Grimes, Ronald L. 1995. Beginnings in Ritual Studies. Rev. ed. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. ———. 2006. Rite Out of Place: Ritual, Media, and the Arts. New York: Oxford University Press. Gritsch, Eric. 1980. The Function and Structure of Gospelling: An Essay on ‘Ministry’ According to the Augsburg Confession. Sixteenth Century Journal 11 (3): 36–46. Hanson, F. Allan. 1981. The Semiotics of Ritual. Semiotica 33 (1–2): 169–178. Jensen, Robin M. 2004. The Substance of Things Seen: Art, Faith, and the Christian Community. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Kelleher, Mary Margaret. 1999. The Liturgical Body: Symbol and Ritual. In Bodies of Worship: Explorations in Theory and Practice, ed. Bruce T. Morrill, 51–66. Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Kolb, Robert, and Timothy J. Wengert, eds. 2000. The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Minneapolis: Fortress. Lathrop, Gordon W. 1993. Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 1999. Holy People: A Liturgical Ecclesiology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Luther, Martin. 1959. Sermon at the Dedication of the Castle Church in Torgau (1544). In Sermons 1, Volume 51 of Luther’s Works. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Meyers, Ruth A. 2014. Missional Worship, Worshipful Mission: Gathering as God’s People, Going Out in God’s Name. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Phillips, Peter. 2020. A Church Without Walls. In Hybrid Church: Blending Online and Offline Community, ed. Peter Phillips, 3–7. MEv131. Cambridge: Grove Books. Pope Paul VI. 1963. Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy: Sacrosanctum Concilium, December 4. Schiefelbein, Kyle. 2016. Liturgy as Creation: How Rituals Communicate, Situation and Order Meaning. Cross Accent 24 (1): 26–31, 34–35. Schiefelbein-Guerrero, Kyle. 2020a. Healing Rites for a Post-Pandemic World. Cross Accent 28 (2): 50–59. ———. 2020b. Whether One May Flee from Digital Worship: Reflections on Sacramental Ministry in a Public Health Crisis. Dialog: A Journal of Theology 59 (2): 49–55. Schmidt, Katherine. 2020. Digital Inculturation. In Missio Dei in a Digital Age, ed. Jonas Kurlberg and Peter M. Phillips, 23–35. London: SCM. Torgerson, Mark A. 2007. An Architecture of Immanence: Architecture for Worship and Ministry Today. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Vosko, Richard S. 2006. God’s House Is Our House: Re-imagining the Environment for Worship. Collegeville: Liturgical Press. ———. 2009. Architecture for Christian Worship: The Emerging United States Experience. In Theology in Built Environments: Exploring Religion, Architecture, and Design, ed. Sigurd Bergmann, 223–246. New Brunswick: Transaction. Wheelock, Wade T. 1982. The Problem of Ritual Language: From Information to Situation. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 50 (1): 49–71. Zsupan-Jerome, Daniella. 2020. Is It Real? Mystagogizing the Live-Streamed Service. In The Distanced Church: Reflections on Doing Church Online, ed. Heidi A.  Campbell, 91–93. College Station: Digital Religion Publications. Kyle K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero is the Steck-Miller Assistant Professor of Worship and Liturgy at United Lutheran Seminary. Previously, he served as Director of Digital Learning and Lecturer at Graduate Theological Union, where he earned his PhD in liturgical studies and systematic theology. Currently, he serves as co-editor of the journal Teaching Theology & Religion and as convener of the Lutheran caucus of the North American Academy of Liturgy. He is an advisory board member of the Global Network for Digital Theology and an international network member of Churches Online in Times of Corona.  

Chapter 2

Physicality and Relatedness When God’s People Gather Kristin Johnston Largen

Introduction I began to write this chapter during the Easter season of 2021, and, at least in the United States, we seemed to be moving through toward the end of the pandemic. As I returned to this chapter a few months later in early fall 2021, with the surge in the Delta variant, it seemed safe to say that our progress has stalled. All states are now offering vaccines and multiple boosters to all adults, but some people continue to refuse to get vaccinated. At the same time, travel has resumed, businesses are fully open, and the vast majority of educational institutions are conducting in-person classes, though some have mask mandates in place as well as vaccination requirements. Churches, too, have reopened for in-person worship—although what worship looks like varies from state to state, town to town, even congregation to congregation within a single city. Earlier in the reopening, congregations, councils, and pastors faced a myriad of difficult decisions: masks or not—for everyone, or just some; communion or not, and if so, how; pew reservations or not; and how long and how to continue virtual services. None of these decisions were easy, and pressures remain on all sides, from people who are very eager to get back to “normal” in-­ person worship and those who remain cautious and are not ready to leave the safety and convenience of worshipping at home. These ongoing conversations in the church only reinforced a sense I had throughout the earlier years of the pandemic. In my view, we were light on theological reflection during this pandemic, although I do not cast any blame for that. When congregations in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the denomination with which I am affiliated, closed their physical doors in March 2020, what was K. J. Largen (*) Wartburg Theological Seminary, Dubuque, IA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero (ed.), Church After the Corona Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23731-7_2

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recommended was a “fast” from communion. At the time, this seemed like a decent and theologically appropriate option. It was Lent, after all, and none of us could have imagined that it would be months and months before congregations would again open their doors. I think most of us assumed that we would be back worshiping in person by Easter 2020, which certainly was not the case. Few of us had the capacity to step back and do rigorous theological thinking about the changes that were taking place, or the theological issues that were presenting themselves. Even after adapting to in extremis circumstances, questions around the Eucharist remain. During the height of the pandemic  itself, I experienced the following adaptations: • digital communion (both by myself and with others in the home) • in-person communion with the wafer only, and • what I call, pop-top communion –travel communion pods with either a communion Chicklet on the bottom and a thimble of grape juice on the top, or a small wafer and thimble of wine. One of my friends described a BYOB (bring your own beverage) communion service that she experienced, but I cannot testify personally to that option. Honestly, I cannot say that I found any of these options very satisfactory, but in my view, any one of them was better than an extended period with no communion at all. Now that we have gotten to a point where these in extremis practices are no longer the only options, we do well not to forget the critical theological challenges they raise and how those theological issues can and should shape our ongoing Eucharistic practices. I argue that, given the role of the incarnation in the Christian faith, embodiment is a core value and a critical aspect of Christian life together. While we certainly can and should think creatively about how digital technologies can mediate embodiment faithfully, we should not assume that such technologies can provide adequate equivalencies. Digital gatherings are inherently different from in-person gatherings, and I think it is more appropriate to view them as sui generis, and seek to shape and evaluate them on their own terms. If a specific congregation plans to continue some form of digital worship going forward, I think it would be more helpful and constructive to look at them as their own form of worship, not simply as a substitution for or an approximation of in-person worship. In this chapter, then, I discuss several issues of ‘embodiment’ and why they are at the core of both who we are as Christians and how we are called to live out our baptismal vocation together. It is my argument that, in all circumstances and situations, the church needs to keep our commitment to embodiment at the fore by asking hard questions and seeking creative solutions and alternative interpretations. There are no easy answers and no simple rulebook to follow—only core principles that can and should inspire our best thinking and practice. There are three specific iterations of embodiment that I discuss. The first iteration is the incarnation, specifically the principles of deep incarnation and deep resurrection, described by Niels Henrik Gregersen and Elizabeth Johnson, respectively. The entirety of the theological argument in this chapter is grounded in the incarnation;

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all other theological assertions around bodies and embodiment flow from this primary defining claim of the Christian faith. The second is the church as the body of Christ, and our physical membership in that body. Finally, the last is the dominant Lutheran interpretation of the Eucharist, focusing on the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, as well as the Eucharist as real food that feeds us for the life of Christian discipleship to which we are called. After I articulate the core Lutheran theological principles of these three instances of embodiment, I pose questions of theological interpretation for the practices of digital worship and communion. These are open questions meant to stimulate new theological reflection and conversation in light of what we have learned and experienced during the pandemic. The intention is to explore our hopes and dreams for the Church going forward.

Deep Incarnation The first concept of embodiment to examine is what has been called deep incarnation. Incarnation is the foundational principle on which the entire edifice of the Christian faith rests. While many Christians take this assertion for granted in the twenty-first century, originally, this was a very radical and counter-intuitive idea. The annals of the first few centuries of the church’s life reveal how the notion of “who” is Christ and “how” his embodiment unites divinity and humanity were hotly and intensely debated, particularly for those Christians steeped in Hellenistic philosophy. The idea that the divine and the human, the spirit and the flesh, could be fully and truly united was revolutionary yet challenging to grasp. Some would argue that it violated the core tenets of the Greek worldview. The theological resistance may explains the intense emphasis of the incarnation as reflected in the Athanasian Creed (but also, to a lesser extent, in the Nicene Creed), which reads, in part, as follows (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 24–25): [This, however, is the catholic faith]: that we worship one God in trinity, and the Trinity in unity; neither confusing the persons nor dividing the substance. For the person of the Father is one, that of the Son another, and that of the Holy Spirit still another, but the deity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is one—equal in glory, coequal in majesty. What the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit. The Father is uncreated; the Son is uncreated; the Holy Spirit is uncreated. The Father is unlimited; the Son is unlimited; the Holy Spirit is unlimited. The Father is eternal; the Son is eternal; the Holy Spirit is eternal—and yet there are not three eternal beings but one who is eternal, just as there are not three uncreated or unlimited beings, but one who is uncreated and unlimited. In the same way, the Father is almighty; the Son is almighty; the Holy Spirit is almighty—and yet there are not three almighty beings but one who is Almighty. Thus, the Father is God; the Son is God; the Holy Spirit is God—and yet there are not three gods but one God. Thus, the Father is Lord; the Son is Lord; the Holy Spirit is Lord— and yet there are not three lords, but one Lord. For just as we are compelled by the Christian truth to confess that each distinct person is God and Lord, so we are forbidden by the catholic religion to say that there are three gods or three lords.

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K. J. Largen But it is necessary for everlasting salvation that one also faithfully believe the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore it is the true faith that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is at once God and a human being. He is God, begotten from the substance of the Father before all ages, and a human being, born from the substance of his mother in this age. He is perfect God and a perfect human being, composed of a rational soul and human flesh. He is equal to the Father with respect to his divinity, less than the Father with respect to his humanity. Although he is God and a human being, nevertheless he is not two but one Christ. However, he is one not by the changing of the divinity in the flesh but by the taking up of the humanity in God. Indeed, he is one not by a confusion of substance but by a unity of person. For, as the rational soul and the flesh are one human being, so God and the human being are one Christ.

Christ is one, not two—both divine and human, and it is only this God-human who could save us. God was not play-acting in Jesus Christ—putting on a human cloak that God could throw off and discard at any moment, revealing the “true” divinity underneath. The incarnation is no subterfuge, no temporary iteration of the divine nature. Instead, the incarnation both reveals an eternal truth about whom God has chosen to be in relationship to with the world, and also how God is intimately and eternally bound together with the cosmos through this act of radical love in through the person of Jesus Christ. Niels Henrik Gregersen has interpreted the principle of incarnation in a particularly powerful and resonant way for our twenty-first-century context, using the language of deep incarnation (2009). For those who are unfamiliar with the term, he describes it this way: “My proposal is that the divine logos . . . has assumed not only humanity, but the whole malleable matrix of materiality. By becoming ‘flesh’ in Jesus, God’s eternal logos entered into all dimensions of God’s world of creation” (Gregersen 2009, 168–169). The ramifications of this interpretation of incarnation are profound—not only for human beings but for the entire cosmos, especially as we think about what it means to be saved. If God entered the whole cosmos, not exclusive to humans—then the saving relationship that Christ embodies exists between God and all that exists, not just God and people. If it is true, as Gregory of Nazianzus asserted, “What has not been assumed is not redeemed,” then the principle of deep incarnation radically expands the idea of redemption. “The flesh that is assumed in Jesus Christ is not only the particular [hu]man Jesus but the entire realm of humanity, living creatures and earthly soil” (Gregersen 2015, 174). This description of the incarnation means that not just our human bodies are the bearers of the divine presence, but all material things, including our flesh, the soil, the waters, and the stardust, are bound up with the divine life. Incarnation signifies coming-into-flesh, so that God, the Creator, and the world of the flesh are conjoined in Jesus Christ. God connects with all vulnerable creatures, with the sparrows in their flight as well as in their fall (cf. Mt. 10:29), indeed, with all the grass that comes into being one day and fades the next day. In Christ, God is conjoining all creatures and enters into the biological tissue of creation itself in order to share the fate of biological existence. God becomes Jesus, and in him God becomes human, and (by implication) foxes and sparrows, grass and soil. (Gregersen 2015, 174)

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In her work, Elizabeth Johnson has built on this principle and described a concept of deep resurrection, which she intends to “extend the risen Christ’s affiliation to the whole natural world” (2014, 208). In this way, Johnson emphasizes that the corporeality of Christ’s life does not end with his death but continues into his eternal, transformed life. She writes that, contrary to the idea that Easter marks “simply the spiritual survival of the crucified one after death,” Christ “rose again in his body and lives united with the flesh forever. Herein lies the hinge of hope for all physical beings. Johnson quotes Brian Robinette, who contends that, in the risen Christ, by an act of infinite mercy and fidelity, ‘the eternal God has assumed the corporeality of the world into the heart of divine life—not just for time but for eternity’” The point is made vividly with these words: “In Jesus, God joins the web of life, becomes part of Earth’s biology … God becomes flesh, the Creator becomes clay, the Word becomes Earth” (Davis 2019, par 6). Finally, as a complement to both of these ideas, I want to posit the concept of deep crucifixion. Particularly because of these terrible pandemic months, deep crucifixion reflects the way in which Christ embraces us in our darkest moments, shares with us our deepest sorrows, and walks with us through our deepest hells (isolation, abandonment, and suffering). Moreover, as we reflect on the fact that the crucifixion was an agonizing physical experience for Jesus, it can be a source of comfort for us that the crucified Christ knows intimately the agonies of our physical bodies, including, in this context, COVID symptoms of suffocation, dehydration, and exhaustion. Furthermore, Christ also knows the emotional pain of alienation, loss, and abandonment. Like the incarnation, the crucifixion was not a show, a moment of divine theater, or even an experience confined to the human Jesus (something that did not touch Christ’s divine nature). Instead, in the crucifixion, God takes the physical pain and suffering of the whole world into God’s very being and redeems them. Johnson acknowledges this as well: “…. the ineffable, living God also freely joins the world and drinks the cup of suffering, even unto death. Looking back and ahead from the cross, theology can posit divine presence to all suffering and dying creatures, an infinitely compassionate presence that accompanies them knowingly in their pain” (2014, 210). As we have seen, this presence is no mere spiritual, theoretical idea; instead, it is a vivid, bodily, tangible presence that abides with and redeems our physical bodies. How do deep resurrection and deep crucifixion relate to deep incarnation? These concepts highlight and emphasize the core doctrine on which the Christian faith rests, and the principles that continue to give the church life in the twenty-first-­ century. In Jesus Christ, God draws near to humanity and the whole world and is deeply, physically, tangibly united to us, binding God’s very life to the life of the cosmos. The incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection are physical events (events that happen in Christ’s physical human body) and affect our physical bodies and the body of the whole world. In Jesus Christ, our salvation is not purely or even primarily individualistic but communal; because of God’s love for the whole world, God was incarnate in Jesus Christ. Being human, created in the image of God, then, means being physically connected, in embodied relationships: not only to God, but

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also to other people—family, neighbors, and strangers—to animals, to places, and to the earth itself. Our bodies matter to God: we bear the imago Dei both in our flesh and in our corporate gatherings as the body of Christ. Everything about the Christian faith is embodied—we know God in the flesh, we share Christ with one another in the flesh, we are joined to God and God’s family in the flesh.

Many Members, but One Body The foundational metaphor that describes the church comes from Paul’s description in 1 Corinthians 12: For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot were to say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear were to say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as [God] chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’, nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

Paul’s vivid use of the corporeal body as the image of community in Christ is notable here. Paul commends that the church is the physical body of Christ. The Book of Concord, which serves as a principal interpretation of Scripture and the theological tradition for Lutherans, emphasizes this same reality, calling the church “the living body of Christ” (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 175.12). The emphasis is two-fold: first, the fundamental definition of the church as people—not buildings, doctrines, or hierarchies; and second, the interconnected nature of all of us who are a part of the church. The point is clear: we, all of us together—not in some theoretical or abstract way, but in and through our physical bodies—make up Christ’s body in the world. What is particularly helpful about this image is that it makes very clear that one’s membership in the church is not dependent on any “spiritual” attribute, moral standing, or ethical standard; instead, it is the physical (baptized) body that is one’s membership card. And, indeed, in the traditional descriptions of the Sacrament of Baptism itself, the physicality and tangibility of one’s place in the true body of Christ is highlighted. To describe the reality of baptism, these physical, corporeal images are used: Christ is born in us; the old Adam is drowned; we die to sin and

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rise to Christ; we are reborn in the Holy Spirit; we are washed clean; we are grafted into the true vine, Christ himself; we are physically marked with the cross of Christ forever. Our membership in the church is signaled by a tangible experience, a physical transformation; and this experience is not private. Rather, the new member of the church is welcomed by her siblings and promises are made by her new family members to nurture and support her. And, to be clear, our physical membership in the body of Christ is also defined by physical activities: attending services (and all that takes place there), praying, singing, reading scripture, visiting the sick and imprisoned,  participating in various service ministries, sharing the story of Christ with others—and those are just a very few examples. The point is that being a member of the body of Christ is a call to action, a call to engagement, a call to discipleship, all of which take place through our tangible, corporeal engagement in the world. It is not in abstract theories or mental pondering that we live out our call to be disciples—“little Christs” to our neighbors. Instead, we respond to God’s call with our hands, our hearts, and our voices, bringing our whole bodies into Christ’s service in the world. This call is shaped by the four classic “marks” of the church, which, in their best interpretation, also point to our lived experience in the world. Traditionally, the church has been defined by “marks,” laid out in the Nicene Creed, where Christians confess their faith in the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic” church. Jürgen Moltmann describes them as statements of faith, hope, and action (1993). Cheryl Peterson calls them “dimensions of the Spirit’s activity in and amidst this ‘holy community’” (2013, 131). Rather than adjectives of classification, these descriptions are adverbs of engagement. In other words, they herald a way of being in the world. Through the hands and hearts of church members, they are inspired to embrace the ongoing empowerment of the Holy Spirit. The different ways of interpreting and describing these marks are legion, but one of the most interesting and helpful analysis can be found in Craig Nessan’s book Shalom Church. Nessan writes, “The four classical marks of the church provide a constructive agenda delineating what the church is ‘for’ in its corporate life” (2010, 2). He uses marks to offer a concrete strategy for understanding and undergirding the church’s life in today’s world. Specifically in the face of twin “spiritual maladies” facing the church “the disease of rampant individualism that conceives religiosity primarily as a matter of personal preferences rather than communal responsibility” and the “increasing gravitational pull toward construing [the church’s] mission most ardently in relationship to those things it ‘opposes’” (2010, 1). In light of these maladies, Nessan argues that the church is called to be a “shalom church,” a church of peace, justice, care, and respect for all people and the whole world. Using the concept of tikkun olam, Nessan writes, “God is calling the church as the body of Christ to act as a servant for the minding of creation. By giving itself away to nourish a world in need, the church discovers its vocation as a ministering community” (2010, 7). The marks of the church are turned outward, defined not primarily with a description of what happens inside the sanctuary walls but how the church orients itself ethically toward the rest of the world. The church’s oneness is not seen in a creedal confession but in the practice of reconciliation and peacemaking. “The members of

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the body of Christ are formed by the biblical narrative to be the people of peace” (Nessan 2010, 69). The church’s holiness is not manifested in the personal piety of individuals or congregations but instead in the practice of justice. “The vocation to be a holy people who demonstrate justice to the poor and powerless” (2010, 87). The catholicity of the church is not merely the sum of its disparate parts, emphasizing the unity of the whole ecclesial body around the world; instead, catholicity points to something even more universal, a wholeness that “entails the incorporation of all creation into Christ” (2010, 114) and calls for faithful care of the whole creation. Finally, the apostolic character of the church serves as a reminder that the church is called to conform its teaching to the gospel message as first proclaimed by the apostles. What that message looks like today is embodying “the vital affirmation that every human person has been created in the image of God (imago Dei) and for that reason alone is deserving of infinite respect” (2010, 143). The interpretation of the marks serves as a helpful reminder that the church’s unique identity is not meant to isolate and segregate its members from the rest of the world. Nor is it meant to nurture a relationship of judgment, antagonism, or even indifference. Instead, the particular identity of each member is a tool of empowerment for our own physical life. It is a way to draw strength from our connection to Christ, the apostles, and all of the other members of the body around the world, in order to be a presence of shalom to all those we meet—human and non-human— wherever we find ourselves. We embody the church, the body of Christ, insofar as we, together, live physical lives of worship and service in all the myriad places in which we find ourselves.

Taste and See that the Lord Is Good Overwhelmingly, the Lutheran Church has supported the theological interpretation whereby sacraments are seen as supremely embodied experiences of God’s grace. In the Book of Concord, the sacraments are described as visible signs of God’s will toward us and the tangible means through which God works to bring people to faith. Augustine also famously emphasized this embodied character of the sacraments, calling them visible words, visible signs through which God’s gracious disposition toward humanity is made evident. For Luther, this was so important because, in this way, the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist give Christians an external place to anchor their faith—something beyond just how a Christian is feeling about their relationship with God on any given day. Luther was vividly aware of human frailty and sinfulness; for this reason, he knew firsthand the perils that could result if one attempted to base one’s justification on one’s own words, actions, or disposition—how one “feels” in any particular moment or stage of life. Human nature and human reason simply cannot provide a solid enough foundation to guarantee our forgiveness, redemption and new life— only Christ can do that. And, in the Sacraments (and the Word), that is exactly what we have: a sure guarantee that we can touch, taste, see and smell.

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Luther describes the fundamental definition of Sacrament of the Altar in the Large Catechism as “the true body and blood of the Lord Christ, in and under the bread and wine, which we Christian are commanded by Christ’s word to eat and drink”(Kolb and Wengert 2000, 467.8) The presence of Christ is indubitably present for everyone, not just the worthy; and it is this presence that defends and strongholds against fear and doubt. According to Luther, the Eucharist “is appropriately called food of the soul, for it nourishes and strengthens the new creature… Therefore the Lord’s Supper is given as a daily food and sustenance so that our faith may be refreshed and strengthened that it may not succumb in the struggle but become stronger and stronger” (2000, 469.24). For this reason, Luther counseled that Christians should receive the Eucharist frequently, lest they become “more callous and cold” (2000, 471.40). Indeed, he wrote, “if you are burdened and feel your weakness, go joyfully to the sacrament and let yourself be refreshed, comforted, and strengthened” (2000, 474.72). Even if one doubts oneself, one can hold fast to the promise in Scripture, which does not lie. There are several options in the Lutheran eucharistic liturgy with which one can invite the congregation to the table. My personal favorite, and the one I prefer to use, given what I have just said, is “taste and see that the Lord is good.” I am aware that at this point in the service, perhaps not everyone is paying attention to the phrase, as they may already be preparing themselves for the distribution, and some may even view these words as a throw-away catchphrase, a functional transition from one moment to another in the liturgy. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, this little phrase speaks volumes to the heart of Luther’s theological interpretation of the Eucharist, and the significance he believed it had for the believer. In this phrase, Christians are being invited to taste their Lord; as Luther once said, to masticate on Christ in our very mouths. It is a vivid affirmation that, in communion, Christ does not come to us spiritually, theoretically, or metaphorically. Instead, in our consumption of the bread and wine, Christ is literally, physically, taken into our own bodies and our physical connection with Jesus Christ is reinforced and renewed. In the Lutheran tradition, Jesus Christ is not just spiritually present in the elements; he is really there. Hence, the doctrine of ‘real presence,’ as has been described in Lutheran theology for centuries. This description is different from the Catholic understanding of the elements, whereby the elements miraculously transform into the blood and flesh of Jesus Christ, such that they permanently cease to be bread and wine; and it is undoubtedly different from the interpretations of Calvin and Zwingli, who posited a spiritual connection. The traditional Lutheran interpretation of Christ’s real presence in and with the elements emphasizes that Christ really and truly comes to us in the flesh, and when we commune, our flesh is united to his. The core of Luther’s argument here is that “the finite is capable of bearing the infinite”— finitum capax infinite. This is no mere idea or concept; this is a physical transformation that takes place every Sunday. The important ramifications this theology of the Eucharist can be seen in a particular understanding of creation, Christ, and humanity. Lutheran theologian Kurt Hendel describes it this way:

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K. J. Largen As has become apparent, this crucial affirmation is informed by and confirms central themes in Luther’s theology. The confession that God is the creator and preserver of all that is; the crucial importance of Christ’s incarnation for God’s self-revelation and God’s saving acts; a conscious affirmation of Chalcedonian Christology, with a particular emphasis on the unity of the two natures; a focus on the means of grace and a physical, material understanding of Christ’s eucharistic presence all reflect and necessitate [Luther’s] positive view of created matter and his insistence that the divine and the material are intimately and necessarily related. Luther was, therefore, an ardent proponent of the sacred, spiritual nature of the material, not only as God’s good creation but also as the unique means of God’s intimate presence in the world and as the instrument of God’s redemptive and justifying activity. The Reformer’s soteriological perspective obviously necessitates an intimate relationship between God who is Creator and Redeemer and the creation. While he strives diligently to avoid pantheism and panentheism, he also rejects all dualistic and iconoclastic tendencies which have, too often, manifested themselves within the Christian tradition. The Reformer’s stance has crucial implications for God’s nature and work. Luther’s God is a relational, immanent God, and this God works through means, the material means of God’s creation. The notion that the finite is a vehicle of the divine also necessitates a particular attitude toward and relationship with the material and has very practical implications for the life and ministry of people of faith. (2008, par 32)

The Eucharist is food, real food for real bodies, which strengthens the weak and gives confidence and endurance to follow God’s call to serve the neighbor and the stranger and glorify Christ in the world. This theological interpretation strongly affirms God’s physical, tangible presence in the created world, human experience, and the eucharistic elements. Bodies matter to God, and repeatedly, in the places where it matters most, the Christian tradition has affirmed the divine presence in the material, in the physical.

Conclusion As I said in the introduction, I believe that, given the urgent nature of the extreme circumstances we experienced during the pandemic, we as a church, and in individual ministry settings, were light on critical, explicit theological reflection on our various practices of virtual worship and digital communion. Now, however, we are in a different situation. Most, if not all, congregations have returned to physical, in-­ person worship services, including in-person communion. At the same time, however, many, if not most, of these congregations have committed to some form of ongoing virtual worship and perhaps even digital communion. I firmly believe that such decisions should not be governed by convenience, members’ expectations or simply habit. Instead, decisions to continue with virtual worship services and digital communion, when the circumstances no longer demand it, should be made following careful and thoughtful theological reflection, including conversations with ecumenical partners, global Church bodies and other partners as appropriate. I am not opposed to such practices, only opposed to a theologically lazy posture that acquiesces to them by default. Both the church and the world deserve more; God calls us to more.

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References Davis, Elizabeth, RSM. 2019. https://www.mercyworld.org/f/45074/x/20e689fd1d/edavisrsm-­ introduction-­for-­monthfour-­a4.pdf. Accessed 1 July 2021. Gregersen, Niels Henrik. 2009. Deep Incarnation: The Logos Became Flesh. In Transformative Theological Perspectives, ed. Karen Bloomquist, 167–181. Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press. Gregersen, Niels Henrik. 2015. The Extended Body of Christ: Three Dimensions of Deep Incarnation. Deep Incarnation: On the Scope of Christology, ed. Niels Henrik Gregersen, 225–254. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Hendel, Kurt K. 2008. Finitum Capax Infiniti: Luther’s Radical Incarnational Perspective. Currents in Theology and Mission 35 (6): 420–433. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/ Finitum+capax+infiniti%3A+Luther%27s+radical+incarnational+perspective.-­a0203607095. Accessed 1 July 2021. Johnson, Elizabeth A. 2014. Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love. Edinburgh: A & C Black. Kolb, Robert, and Timothy J. Wengert, eds. 2000. The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Moltmann, Jürgen. 1993. The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology. Trans. Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Nessan, Craig L. 2010. Shalom Church: The Body of Christ as Ministering Community. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Peterson, Cheryl M. 2013. Who Is the Church? An Ecclesiology for the Twenty-First Century. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Kristin Johnston Largen is the President of Wartburg Seminary. Before coming to Wartburg, she served as Professor of Systematic Theology at United Lutheran Seminary and Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life/College Chaplain at Gettysburg College. She graduated with her PhD in systematic theology from Graduate Theological Union. She is the author of several books, including Finding God among our Neighbors, vol. 1 & 2, and A Christian Exploration of Women’s Bodies and Rebirth in Shin Buddhism. She was most recently the editor of Dialog: a Journal of Theology.  

Chapter 3

Worship in the African American Tradition with a View Toward the Future Quintin L. Robertson

Past: Traditional African American Worship Pre-Pandemic Traditional worship in the African American church shares activities with most Christian churches in the United States: worship includes prayer, singing, preaching, offering, and a time for fellowship with fellow believers. The Rev. Dr. J. Wendell Mapson, in his book Strange Fire: Worship in the African American Church, says, “worship is … both worth and work.” This is based on the etymology of the word worship, meaning worth, and the definition of liturgy as the work of the people. He goes on to indicate worship as the “ideal of bowing down and touching God’s hand, as it were, but only because God takes the initiative to be touched, to be known” (2017, 8). The ideal of worship described above is universal. However, in most African American churches, there is a spontaneous call and response during the worship service. The responses are immediate vocal affirmations to what is taking place in the order of worship, such as singing, praying, and preaching. This call and response tradition comes from enslaved Africans who met for worship at brush harbors to express their style of worship in a free environment (Costen, 1993, 50). The preacher would proclaim the message like the griots in African tribes where there was a tuning up of the griot’s voice, and those listening would respond to his message; this is known as call and response (Croft 2019, 2).

Q. L. Robertson (*) Urban Theological Institute and Black Church Studies, United Lutheran Seminary, Gettysburg and Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero (ed.), Church After the Corona Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23731-7_3

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I write this chapter as an African American preacher in both the Baptist and Pentecostal traditions.1 In addition, I write as an academician who continues to study the history and tradition of the Black Church. There is no monolithic form of worship within the African American community; it is diverse because the African American community is diverse. The Black Church exists in both Catholicism and Protestantism, it exists in both mainline protestant denominations and traditional African American denominations, and it exists in both denominational and non-­ denominational churches. I state this to point out that there is no one description of worship in the African American Tradition. However, I will share worship from the two traditions that I was raised and nurtured in: The Black Baptist Church and Church of God in Christ (Holiness/Pentecostal denomination). Therefore, for the purpose of this chapter, I will share with you the worship experiences of two local churches in Philadelphia, PA, before and since the COVID-19 global pandemic. The two churches are Monumental Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. J. Wendell Mapson, Jr. serves as pastor, and Sanctuary Church of God in Christ, where Bishop Guy L. Glimp serves as pastor. In addition, I will share the results of my interview with the Rev. Dr. Jerry M. Carter, Jr., who serves as pastor of the Calvary Baptist Church in Morristown, NJ. Dr. Carter was the presenter for the 2021 Annual UTI Lecture sponsored by the Urban Theological Institute (UTI) at United Lutheran Seminary. He presented his lecture in a webinar format where I asked him questions about his work as a pastor and the response of his local church during this COVID-19 global pandemic. His lecture addressed worship and church life before, during, and after the COVID-19 global pandemic. Furthermore, he shared what he expects in the future. Note that the elements of worship in the African American Church tradition are not unique (Duck 2021, 38–41). A church’s liturgy is defined more by its denominational affiliation than its demographics of ethnicity. There are many elements in public worship in the African American Church; therefore, I will highlight just three for brevity. Those three elements I want to discuss are music, preaching, and fellowship. Worship music encompasses singing by both the congregation and choir. Preaching includes a call and response feature. Fellowship happens before and after worship and during worship with the passing of the peace for those who walk to give their tithes and offerings around the offering table.

Music I start with music because it is essential to worship, and I would dare say that there is no congregational worship without singing. When reading Christian scriptures, one sees many places where believers are admonished to sing unto the Lord.

 The Association of Religion Data Archives has helpful overviews of the various denominations in the United States (www.thearda.com) 1

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Throughout the order of worship, music plays an integral part. In essence, music is the key component to corporate worship because all are invited to participate by listening and singing along with others. The Bible speaks powerfully about singing from creation (Job 38:7: “when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”) to eternity (Revelation 5:13: “Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing, …”). The ministry of music precedes and follows the sermon, and it is quintessence. Therefore, I list it first as the most important worship experience; music. As an integral part of worship, music prepares our hearts to hear and respond to the message. Melva Costen connects the importance of music with the dialogical understanding of worship, as mentioned by Mapson. For Costen, music provides a pivotal way to attend to the “vertical and horizontal,” responding to God and expressing their humanity with one another (1993, 93). Like worship music in other denominations and theological traditions, the genre and style of congregational singing vary depending on the community and context.

Preaching Another element of worship is preaching. In his book, Come Sunday: The Liturgy of Zion, the late Rev. Dr. William McClain says, “Preaching is central in the black church. There is a saying among some … that people will forgive you for anything but not preaching… They expect an answer to Jeremiah’s question: ‘Is there any word from the Lord?’ (Jeremiah 37:17) Moreover, they have subtle and not-so-­ subtle ways of letting the preacher know when that Word is not forthcoming” (1990, 61–62). Preaching may be the most central element of worship in the Black Church. Throughout the years of my ministry, I have witnessed many church attendees arriving late and leaving early; but coming in time to hear the message and avoid other parts of the worship experience. Preaching is essential because the average person attending worship seeks to hear a word from the Lord regarding their existential experience (Costen 1993, 105). As a preacher, I am uplifted when someone after worship informs me that the message spoke directly to them. Furthermore, in the preaching segment of worship in a typical African American worship experience, there is a call and response. In other words, when the listeners hear the message, they respond to the preacher with loud statements such as “amen,” “yes Lord,” “preach,” or sometimes, if the preacher is not doing well, “help Lord.” The call and response in African American preaching sometimes are rhythmic (Noel 1994). Before there were instruments in worship, the preacher and people would go back and forth speaking and responding with a musical rhythm (Croft 2019).

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Fellowship Finally, worship is fellowship and is both vertical and horizontal. In other words, we gather as a community of faith to worship God and thereby gain strength from each other. Dr. Jerry M. Carter, Jr., in his presentation for the Annual UTI Lecture on September 21, 2021, stated that “Jesus called the disciples not just to Him, but to each other.” Analogous to the Hebrew writings, “… let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together … but encouraging one another” (Hebrews 10:24–25). Thus, public worship is vertical and horizontal because it calls believers to worship and discipleship. We recognize that humans are social beings, and we are formed and developed in a community. Likewise, Christian believers grow and gain strength when we gather for worship. I would suggest that the interaction of fellow believers with the presence of the Holy Spirit is what happens in worship that makes fellowship essential (Duck 2021, 13–14).2 The churches identified earlier are strong because of fellowship. In addition to good music and preaching, a key factor that helps maintain church attendance is fellowship.

 resent: Traditional African American Worship During P a Pandemic Currently, worship in African American churches is online via social media and has three formats. The first format is where a small number gather as a congregation in the sanctuary and worship like they did before the pandemic with the remaining members of the congregation worshiping virtually. The second format is where the pastor and a few participants deliver a message and sing in the sanctuary in front of a camera to empty pews. The third format is where the pastor delivers a message from his/her home or office and may play music before delivering their message. In all three formats, the service appears to be shorter than worshiping in person prior to the COVID-19 global pandemic. In each case, every church has been forced to worship outside the sanctuary’s four walls and remain in fellowship with their members virtually. This virtual experience has placed each church in the same position of worshiping and reaching a larger population. And even as the virus seems to be under some control, this experience may cause churches to maintain their worship virtually in the long-term future. The global pandemic has caused each church to examine itself more strategically by analyzing its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). As an  This understanding connects to Duck’s idea of “worship as relationship,” in that God reveals God’s self through the Holy Spirit interacting among the worshippers, and those worshippers engage in praise. This relational approach brings together music, preaching, and fellowship (2021, 13–14). 2

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analytical tool, SWOT can identify what is currently working and devise a strategy for future success. A SWOT analysis table is available in the appendix of the book.

SWOT: Strengths and Opportunities Monumental Baptist Church is a church that has been in the West Philadelphia community since 1826, and the Sanctuary Church of God in Christ has been a church in the Mt. Airy community of Philadelphia since 1979. Both churches share similar strengths in providing excellent music, powerful preaching, and an opportunity for fellowship via their social media platforms. These two churches represent the two scenarios that many churches found themselves in when forced to cease in-person public worship. Monumental Baptist Church had already started livestreaming their worship a year earlier. It was a way for members who could not physically attend worship due to relocating, illness, or work schedules to participate in the life of the church on Sunday mornings. However, Sanctuary Church of God in Christ did not record or livestream its worship service and had to respond quickly to maintain worship for its members who now could not worship in-person. Both churches met the challenge and maintained their dedicated membership via virtual worship every Sunday. Livestreaming worship became an opportunity for the church to grow. No longer was the rich worship experience limited to only those who attended in a particular space and at a particular time. Both churches were reaching many people around the nation and the world who would not have visited in person but were now visiting online. They were not limited to the worship service hour, but that service remained online for others to watch hours and days later. Many were moved that they joined the church without setting foot within the church’s doors, and many donated, thus increasing the church’s budget. The strengths of music, preaching, and fellowship are displayed virtually each Sunday for corporate worship. Before returning to in-person worship, members gathered online via Facebook and YouTube to participate. Posting comments is a way to participate in the “call and response” interaction, while singers and soloists minister in song and the preacher proclaims the message. Many of the verbal expressions in public worship were now taking place in the chat area of the churches’ social media platforms. Expressions such as “amen,” “yes Lord,” “say it,” and “sing it.” In essence, worship during the global pandemic made have taken worship outside of the four walls of the sanctuary, but it did not change the style of worship. Although in-person worship is limited, it has not reduced the meaningful presence of livestreaming. Worship leaders are cognizant that their audience is not limited to those in the physical pews. Preaching changed as the minister had to preach messages that were relevant to the current condition. In his address during the Annual UTI Lecture on September 21, 2021, Dr. Jerry M.  Carter, Jr., stated that his sermons became topical. First addressing anxiety, then theodicy (asking where God is), and finally, eschatological

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hope, including emotional and physical well-being. Furthermore, he stated that his sermons had to address endurance since it appeared that COVID-19 would be with us for an extended time. In addition to sermons addressing the COVID-19 health crisis, the Rev. J. Wendell Mapson and Bishop Guy L. Glimp preached sermons addressing issues that members of their congregations witnessed on the streets of Philadelphia and viewed on every news outlet. These issues were related to “Black Lives Matter,” with the killing of black and brown persons at the hands of law enforcement. In addition, their sermons had to deal with the heightened racial tension in the nation and the politics surrounding it. For example, they had to preach messages that would address the concerns of their congregants, who were and still are concern about voter suppression and an insurrection at the nation’s capital on January 6, 2021. Fellowship took place in worship to see what other members posted instead of hearing what members said in public worship. Even for both churches that practiced walking around the sanctuary to give their offerings, members were now able to send direct messages like they did when they walked past each other during worship service. Fellowship continued via Zoom gatherings for Bible Study, workshops, conferences, and auxiliary meetings. All of the elements of worship that took place in person were now taking place virtually. There has been an increase in Bible Study attendance because of the convenience of zoom video communication. The SWOT analysis on both churches is not exhaustive, but it indicates their ability to succeed in a long-term global pandemic. For example, both churches have maintained their dedicated membership, and that membership has continued to support the church financially. In some cases, revenue has increased because of donations from viewers who shared the worship experience via their social media platforms. In addition, the strength of such a robust social media presence has maintained the continuity of the congregations.

SWOT: Weaknesses and Threats However, the effects of the pandemic continue, with many worshippers concerned about returning to in-person public worship. Many churches have returned to in-­ person worship with limited seating capacity, but some only offer virtual worship. Monumental Baptist Church returned in July 2021 for limited in-person worship. The church was able to do that because the sanctuary is large enough to practice social distancing. Masks are required while attending worship, and each week those desiring to attend must register for a limited number of seats. However, as of September 1, 2021, Sanctuary Church of God in Christ has not yet returned to in-­ person worship because the sanctuary space and design cannot accommodate social distancing. Therefore, the church is going through a physical renovation so that can take place soon. Sanctuary Church of God in Christ plans to implement the same

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practice as Monumental Baptist Church in practicing social distancing during worship and will require all persons to wear a mask. Considering the SWOT analysis, both churches have learned the importance of time. Two to three hours of services have been reduced to one hour or no more than one and half hours of worship. Online presence for worship and meetings will continue; this is the future. Members will gather as a body both in-person and virtually from this day forward. Nevertheless, the question all churches must face is, will the members return? Although strong and vibrant congregations have been presented, overall church attendance has decreased nationally. The three local churches identified in this essay have also seen a decrease in attendance before the global pandemic over the last few years. Dr. Carter pointed out that his church, Calvary Baptist Church in Morristown, NJ, had seen a slight decline in attendance over the last five years. Ironically, it was just five years ago that they began livestreaming their worship services. He states that livestreaming was seen as a tool for evangelism and keeping members connected who could not attend due to illness, relocation, school schedule, military obligation, or workload. However, many more members began livestreaming worship at home because it was convenient. Many churches have returned to in-person worship with limited seating due to social distancing. However, the trauma of COVID-19 has many members afraid to return to in-person worship. Furthermore, the convenience to worship at home begs the question, ‘will they return?’ When or will churches fill their sanctuaries to full capacity?

Future: Traditional African American Worship Post Pandemic The church may never be the same as in the past. In an interview with Bishop Guy L.  Glimp, who presides over the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction of the Church of God in Christ, stated that “the church that left the building will not be the church that returns to the building” (June 23, 2021). Even when we return to our sanctuaries for corporate worship, the need to continue to livestream our worship service via social media will remain. In other words, churches will need to embrace a hybrid format of worship where the congregation gathers simultaneously in person and virtually; this will require church leaders and members to be cognizant that they are a part of a more extensive network of believers and seekers. As a result of this larger network, preachers must attempt to create worship for all to experience an encounter with God both in person and virtually. Ironically, this was happening before the global pandemic. In the Annual UTI Lecture, Dr. Carter stated that he saw a rise in virtual worship as early as 2015 (September 21, 2021). Livestreaming was implemented for those members who were shut-in or away due to college or military duty. It was assumed that livestreaming would be a tool for evangelism, but those who could–would attend in-person worship. Although membership did not necessarily decline, attendance began to

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decline as more congregation members opted for the convenience of worshipping online. In essence, he saw a decline in physical attendance and an increase in virtual attendance in the five years leading up to the pandemic. Dr. Carter believes the force behind this trend is the notion of “American Individualism.” In the previous section, I briefly discussed that churches were forced to do a general SWOT analysis. They were forced to look inward to see what was working and what was not working. In doing this, a shift took place. That shift impacted the format/litany of worship, and in all the cases I observed, the time allotted for worship was significantly reduced. The shift also brought about a change in leadership and volunteer work. New talent was discovered to help the church remain relevant. Because just like air travel changed forever after the attack on our nation on September 11, 2001, likewise, the COVID-19 global pandemic will change how we worship. The experience is so traumatic that it will be years before we stop social distancing. We will forever be a church with both physical and virtual worship. Just like the persecution of the first century Christians that caused the message to be spread beyond Jerusalem, likewise, our small, insulated congregations are now virtual congregations with members worldwide. Christians were persecuted in the first century within the Roman Empire, and since the first Christians were identified as a Jewish sect, they dispersed throughout the Roman Empire, thus carrying with them the Christian message (Tucker 2011, 41). I hypothesize that the COVID-19 global pandemic has provided an opportunity for the average local church to spread the Christian message more vastly utilizing the world wide web via available social media platforms. Our perception of the impact of the global pandemic in 2020–2021 will be our guide in the future. In the words of Bishop Guy L. Glimp, do we view our absence from physical worship in the sanctuary as a “disruption or interruption”? If we perceive this pandemic as an interruption, then we will return to business as usual. However, if we view it as a disruption, we will carefully evaluate what we have done in the past, examine what we are currently doing, and prepare for a future that is evolving. The future of worship in the church will be different! As previously stated, the hybrid format of worship where the congregation gathers simultaneously in person and virtually is our future. Since this is the future of the church, we must grapple with how we keep our members engaged in congregational life. We must accept that our members may not have the same level of engagement they had before the COVID-19 global pandemic. In other words, the habit of weekly attendance has ceased, and an attempt to recreate the habit of weekly attendance will be difficult at best. We must accept the fact that COVID-19 has had a very traumatic effect on us. All at once, our world stopped, and we are all trying to regain a sense of normalcy. Believers and seekers who may or may not be members of our local churches are seeking answers. Moreover, we must be a place of worship where all can gather in person or virtually to heal from the trauma and seek divine answers together as a community of faith. We may need to consider ourselves as a new church start in this

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post-pandemic age. Because in the words of Bishop Guy L. Glimp, “the church that left the building will not be the church that returns to the building.”

References Carter, Jerry M., with Quintin L. Roberson. 2021. Unpublished Personal Interview. Recorded on the United Lutheran Seminary YouTube channel, 21 September. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1yocCyPPU3Q Costen, Melva Wilson. 1993. African American Christian Worship. Nashville: Abingdon. Croft, Wayne E., Sr. 2019. The Motif of Hope in African American Preaching during Slavery and the Post-Civil War Era: There’s a Bright Side Somewhere. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Duck, Ruth C. 2021. Worship for the Whole People of God. 2nd ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Glimp, Guy L., with Quintin L. Roberson. 2021. Unpublished Personal Interview. Philadelphia, PA. Mapson, J. Wendell. 2017. Strange Fire: Worship in the African American Church. Maitland, FL: Xulon Press. Mapson, J.  Wendell, with Quintin L.  Roberson. 2021. Unpublished Personal Interview. Philadelphia, PA. McClain, William. 1990. Come Sunday: The Liturgy of Zion. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. Noel, James A. 1994. Call and Response: The Meaning of the Moan and Significance of the Shout in Black Worship. Reformed Liturgy & Music 23: 72–76. Tucker, Ruth A. 2011. Parade of Faith: A Biographical History of the Christian Church. Grand Rapids: MI: Zondervan. Quintin L.  Robertson serves as Director of the Urban Theological Institute (UTI) and Black Church Studies at United Lutheran Seminary and has served as Interim Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia (founded in 1698) and Interim Pastor of the Grace Baptist Church of Germantown in Philadelphia, PA. He has preached and lectured throughout North America and Southeast Asia at many churches across denominational lines and has preached and lectured at more than twenty-five colleges, universities, and seminaries. After receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration  from Howard University and Clark Atlanta University, respectively, he earned the Master of Divinity and Doctor of Ministry degrees at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.  

Part II

Engaged in the Word

Chapter 4

Reimagining Preaching in a Post-pandemic Era Karyn L. Wiseman

Introduction Preaching, first in a pandemic world, and then in a post-pandemic world requires us to think carefully and imaginatively about post-pandemic preaching. Important considerations are the role and craft of preaching, the contextual needs, and how the pandemic has impacted preaching at every level. To see where preaching might be going, we need to see where preaching has been. I start with my own introduction to the craft of preaching. I grew up hearing and seeing great preaching every week and every Sunday. My dad was a United Methodist preacher for over 60 years. I loved watching him write out his sermon notes on a legal pad. He did his research and thought through the options for each Sunday carefully and deliberately. He is a man of consistency, using the row of The Interpreter’s Bible and Barclay’s Daily Study Bible Commentary series on his bookshelf. He always used his silver Cross-pen, and his legal pad was always yellow (see Fig. 4.1).1 I watched him practice and putter around, changing things as he went through the week. On Sundays when I was younger, I sat on one of the front rows with whoever had agreed to sit with my sisters and me while dad preached, and my mom played the organ. I listened but not really for what he said, I watched and listened because it was my daddy in the pulpit speaking with passion and energy about faith, life, and love. I thought that he was closer to God than I was. There was a bit of a supernatural nature to how I revered him in the pulpit. That changed some as I  My parents came to visit, and my dad preached on that Sunday. He is pictured here with my son, Shelby, who was four at the time. Dad forgot his Cross pen, but you can clearly see him crafting on a yellow legal pad and my son is copying him. 1

K. L. Wiseman (*) United Lutheran Seminary, Gettysburg and Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero (ed.), Church After the Corona Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23731-7_4

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Fig. 4.1  Father. (Photograph by Karyn L Wiseman, October 29, 2005. The parsonage for the church, Hasbrouck Heights, NJ)

grew up, but his example as a profoundly passionate, creative, and capable preacher has never left my mind. In my youth, I sat on the last row playing tic-tac-toe or connect the dots with my friends on the back of offering envelopes or prayer request cards. I did not always pay attention to the entire service, but I always listened to the sermon. I listened to my dad preach the Word, and I wondered if he would change something from his practice sessions and notes as he preached live. His amazing storytelling was spellbinding. He preached a sermon years ago about Jacob and Esau, but he changed the story to connect to his listeners on a personal level. Since we lived in West Texas at the time, he changed the two characters to a rancher and a farmer in keeping with the context: he changed the meal to a plate of brisket and beans, a West Texas tradition, and he changed the primary characters’ names to “Hairy” and “Grabby” while using their physical descriptions in the Bible. He connected to the listeners and the text in a profound, contextual, and personal way. People were sitting on the edge of their seats as he told this story with his clear and confident Texas accent. I can still see and hear him preaching this sermon 45+ years later. I have used those elements of the story in my own life as a preacher, with a few minor changes for the context I was preaching. I have also used that story several times in my teaching career as a professor of homiletics. This story always connects on some level. It is a vivid memory that makes me smile. My dad was using the technology of his day to craft his sermons. His process was the same: a Cross pen, a yellow legal pad, a Bible, a commentary, a microphone, and a pulpit. It was adequate for that time. Now, laptops and tablets are utilized to read

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the sermon and preach, and online exegetical software is used for original language study. Listeners are reached through contemporary, traditional, or liturgical worship styles using lights and cameras. Advanced microphones and lit-up “stage” areas are being used in many churches. We are also connecting more and more through online platforms. Many churches have been live-streaming their worship services for several years utilizing Facebook Live, YouTube, Boxcast, or other streaming sites. They send services live into the homes of their members and often gain online visitors, which has been a bonus. There have been many changes in the preparation, delivery, transmission, and reception of preaching since my dad sat at his desk with a yellow legal pad and a Cross pen. Many churches have been archiving their sermons for decades – some by sending out the printed sermon manuscript to their shut-ins, recording sermons on cassette tapes or DVDs to share, or uploading them onto their websites so people could access them outside of the in-person, sitting in the pew’s normative reality. I remember my dad’s filing cabinet that we packed up and moved from one parsonage to the next. It was filled with the yellow legal pad sermons that he saved and reused. When I felt the call to ordained ministry and attended seminary, I also served as a student local pastor in a small rural United Methodist Church in Kansas in a co-op arrangement that allowed me to practice what I learned in seminary while serving part-time as their pastor. I started classes in September of 1993 but took on my student pastorate in June of that year. I was thrown in the deep end quickly. So, I did what I saw my dad do all those years in preparation for literally preaching hundreds of sermons. I looked at commentaries in the church library, and I wrote out a manuscript on a yellow legal pad. Although I did not yet have a Cross pen, my process looked very similar to his. I practiced the sermon from the pulpit in an empty sanctuary thinking of ways my dad would speak a certain line in the sermon or what my dad might use as a central story or image. I filed these sermons away, thinking I might need them at a later point. One early sermon that I remember quite clearly was based on the lectionary text Matthew 6:25–26: Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? (NRSV) 25

The sermon was about the current situation and living as fully as possible. I found a story I liked in a book called 1000 Sermon Illustrations (Jones 1986) that went like this: a young woman had awoken late one morning. Her alarm clock had not gone off. She was in a state of panic. She quickly took a shower, did her hair, and grabbed her breakfast. As fast as she could, she ran down the street but had missed her bus. The only option was to take a ferry to the other side of the lake to her work. Running as fast as she could, with her briefcase flying back and forth in her hand, she saw the ferry a yard or so off the pier. Fearing she had missed it, she took a running start and leapt onto the deck of the ferry. As she sat up and realized she made it on time, she

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yelled in celebration. A deckhand looked at her and said, “If you had waited a few seconds, we would have docked.” She hurdled her life to a deck of a ferry, potentially putting her life in danger. My point was that we should not be so harried, obsessed, and busy that we don’t see the reality right in front of our eyes. I thought the sermon went well, I saw people reacting to the story, and I sensed a real connection between the text and the story. After the service, as I was greeting people in the vestibule, one of our Trustees and the head usher placed his hand on my shoulder, leaned in, and said quite clearly, “Pastor, we don’t know nothing about ferries here. One type of ferry ain’t nowhere near the middle of Kansas, and the other one better not show up here.” As a lesbian who was not out to the denomination or the church, I was stunned. Nevertheless, the part that got me was that I missed the context into which I was preaching. My “connected story” might have been okay in some places, but it was inappropriate for the rural Kansas church I was serving. I had failed at the basic level of preaching a sermon that the people could relate to. I had forgotten Hairy and Grabby and told the wrong story in the wrong place. I remembered the power of the story that I had experienced with my dad, but I had not yet understood the nuances or elements needed to connect to the specific people to whom I was preaching I chalked it up to my inexperience in the pulpit and the fact I had not even started seminary yet at that point, but the truth was, I just missed the mark. I knew from then on that I did not want a repeat of my conversation with the head usher. I knew that I had to be careful to watch my capacity to be authentically me in the preaching moment, even if my reference was unintended. But something amazing happened a few years later. I ran into a former youth from that church while dining out in the city where my seminary was. He saw me and came over to say hi. “Tommy” hugged my neck, and in the midst of our conversation, he told me that one sermon I had preached during my time in Leroy had changed his life. I asked if he remembered any details. “I sure do,” was his response, “You used a word in a sermon that I had never heard before in a positive way.” I was intrigued, so I asked him what the word was. Tommy told me with a smile on his face and a sparkle in his eye, “you talked about a ‘fairy’2 in your sermon, and several people around me said they couldn’t believe you used that word.” He went on to tell me that he suspected that I was gay, and the fact I used that word meant the world to him. He knew that when he was ready, he could come out to his family, and he knew some would hear his words positively, and some would not be able to even hear the word gay from his lips. I was stunned. When I preached that sermon, I was clueless about its potential impact. The sneaky Holy Spirit uses even our seemingly ineffective sermons to touch the hearts and lives of our listeners.

 Change of spelling intentional. “Fairy”  – an old-school antigay dig  – has been stripped of its power by the Radical Faerie movement and new-era queers. https://www.advocate.com/artsentertainment/2017/8/02/21-words-queer-community-has-reclaimed-and-some-wehavent#media-gallery-media-12 (Accessed September 17, 2021). For me the phrase is still problematic in many ways, but it was important to the overall story I am sharing. 2

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I learned a lesson on multiple levels that day that brought me back to the day of delivering that sermon and to this moment with “Tommy.” I understood the power of sermons more profoundly. My dad and my preaching professor, Dr. Gene Lowry, taught me that context was vitally important. I also learned that God can and does nudge people with even one word from the pulpit to see themselves and their lives more positively. Today, when I teach about preaching, I tell my students that the fundamental underlying premise of preaching is “context, context, context.” We must preach to a particular context, at a particular moment in time, and related to a particular text, just like my dad did, just like Jesus did. He preached contextually about planting fruit and trees in rural areas, talked of fishing and boats near the sea, and addressed the income equality and injustices he saw in the world around him. This is what preaching is intended to do. Speak the Word of the Lord to a moment and a place in time. Preach to the universality of God’s love and grace, which is available to all. Today, in a semi-post-pandemic world, we must do all of this with the mediums, modalities, and technology we have available. Reflecting over the 30 years from that sermon in Kansas to the realities of preaching in today’s complicated and chaotic world, in some ways, preaching has not changed much. The content tends to be consistent with theological, biblical, contextual, and cultural variations as needed. The way we craft sermons has shifted quite a bit. Although some still use paper, legal pads, and a pen to craft their sermon outlines or manuscripts, many use laptops, and tablets. Preachers often do their exegetical research online on aggregated resource lists,3 paid subscription sites, or participate in lectionary or pericope groups weekly or monthly. Preachers craft their message thinking about the people who sit in their pews and who will listen to their message. They also think through how  to deliver the sermon, and preachers find purpose in their messages to console, encourage, challenge, convict, and educate their listeners. The primary modality for almost all Christian preaching has been in-person. For generations and generations in multiple contexts, Christians have been gathering in homes and later in sanctuaries. Sitting in chairs or pews to hear the Word delivered has been the norm. That was then, and this is now. Mid-March of 2020, preaching “in a church” shifted significantly. Many church doors were closed to all in-person gatherings at that time. When we got the “stay at home orders” in Pennsylvania due to the spread of COVID, my Congregational Council and I chose to close the church to all in-person activities for a few weeks. That is how long we thought it would take to get back to normal. Little did we know then how long it would take to be fully open and to find our “new normal,” which I am not sure we’ve found yet. My congregation had been live streaming one of our worship services for four years, so we were already technologically set up. However, I saw clergy, lay church leaders, and friends posting on social media that they were trying to figure out what to do in this dramatically sudden shift of reality. Sharing the best and most affordable cameras and recording equipment became the new 3  One of the most popular aggregated sites is Text This Week. http://www.textweek.com. But other resources are also utilized. These sites curate exegetical resources around the web and place them in a central website with easy access.

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viral clergy post. Providing information about which streaming services were the most compatible with the needs of small and large churches was a new currency for clergy. Some already knew the technological elements and software that would be needed through their own experiences. They often shared their expertise to help churches get up to speed more quickly. Some pastors used nothing more than a phone camera and a tripod to reach their folx4 by recording and uploading their service and sermons videos to YouTube or Facebook or joining their members live on Zoom, which at times during the pandemic has felt more intrusive than helpful to pastors and their people. Many others were scrambling to chart a path forward. Workshops and webinars by denominational entities and seminaries were rapidly deployed to teach the basics to hundreds of clergy-persons on streaming or webinar platforms.5 Some churches already had a “wired sanctuary,” with both sound and video capabilities. Others were starting from scratch and soon discovered their congregants were not ready for the complexities of Zoom or live streaming. It was a lot to handle in a short time. Like my new context and seemingly “disconnected” sermon in Kansas, a new and very unfamiliar context emerged overnight. Preaching and worship had to change with it. The scramble early on was about answering technology questions – what do we need to buy/use to make worship happen for people sitting in their homes? Specifically, the questions were • What do we have that will work in this situation? • What do we need to stay connected to our people? • What services for internet, live stream, or Zoom meetings do we need to acquire? These questions were relatively simple for some churches and very problematic for others. Some churches did not have wi-fi capabilities, while others only had the bare minimum. The time between the Thursday we shut down to the following Sunday was short. Regardless, everyone scrambled to have their worship services virtual. The potential conflict between the immediacy of virtual worship and the careful planning to preach using multimedia in virtual space was challenging. The goal of this work is to discuss the realities and issues related to post-­pandemic preaching and how preaching has changed during the pandemic. For some communities that has been easier than for others. The possibilities seem endless, but the work must start somewhere.

 Utilizing non-binary phrases for persons is also an important part of my ministry. I also use a variety of terms for God to expand listeners image of the Divine. 5  I did three of these events in late March to the end of April for different organizations and denominations. There were so many church professionals on these events that it was overwhelming at times, but they proved very helpful to the participants. 4

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Strategies for Preaching (Digital Communities of the Church) Thomas Troeger’s Ten Strategies for Preaching in a Multimedia Culture makes the argument that “any preaching strategy worthy of the gospel will combine, then, two elements: an openness to the Spirit and the strenuous work of human thought and creation” (1996, 8). Some efforts in the early days of the pandemic were more about technology and less about how the Spirit would inspire worship moving forward. Some were holding their head above the rising water and not doing the strenuous work and creativity called for in the moment. The hard work of preaching in the moment and to the specific context requires: • • • •

addressing with the ecclesiology for a gathered community, evaluating sacramental theology for live or virtual sacraments, reviewing theological commitments, testing assumptions about the congregation’s ability to utilize virtual modalities, and • connecting all this work to a creative and vibrant community living out of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Part of the dilemma is the various comfort levels with the technology used to stay connected with their congregational community. Leonard Sweet (2012), in Viral, discusses digital natives and digital immigrants (see also Prensky 2001). Digital natives were born into the digital world. While some suggest this descriptive use of the ways people relate to digital medias is limited, I find it helpful for this work.

Digital Natives Digital natives had a Gameboy or a PlayStation controller in their hands from very early on. Many even had electronic “play” cellphones almost from birth. They have no difficulty navigating the multitude of skill sets needed to thrive in a digital environment for work, school, and personal use. Another facet of their digital comfort comes when we discover that they manage multiple screens open at any given moment. Some can manage three to five screens at once. They have their homework on their laptop with multiple images doing group projects on Zoom or Facetime while texting with others on their cellphone. The TV is sometimes on in the background, and they can keep up with the storyline as they juggle various devices simultaneously. However, not every digital native has significant ease with multiple devices, and some cannot translate their technology skills into other areas of life (e.g., one who can tweet regularly may not be able to navigate word processing software). It has been argued that multi-tasking can hinder performance, that the

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capacity to “keep up” with all of it at the same time is not possible.6 Digital spaces are the primary way digital natives interact with the world. “Even using conservative estimates, the typical young person spends nearly twenty times more hours per year using screen-driven media than taking in spiritual content. And for the typical young churchgoer, the ratio is still more than ten times as much cultural content as spiritual intake” (Kinnaman and Matlock 2019, 26). Digital natives are an untapped resource for the church and for preaching and will be discussed further in this chapter. Based on my experience, more Digital Natives than you would guess can and they do it all the time  on multiple devices. Digital spaces are the primary way Natives relate to the world. “Even using conservative estimates, the typical young person spends nearly twenty times more hours per year using screen-driven media than taking in spiritual content. And for the typical young churchgoer, the ratio is still more than ten times as much cultural content as spiritual intake” (Kinnaman and Matlock 2019, 26). This is an untapped opportunity for the church and for preaching, which we will discuss further in this chapter.

Digital Immigrants Digital immigrants are folx born when digital technology was emerging. They adapted to technology as a way of connecting globally. There was a time in the mid-­1970s when IBM computers took up an entire room and floors had to be reinforced to handle the machine’s weight; it would take 75–200 punch cards to do an easy mathematical problem. It was the cutting-edge technology of the time, and many students were preparing for a new and exciting future. Digital immigrants work hard to keep up with digital natives (many of whom are their kids and grandkids). They use technology to work from home and have cell phones for emergencies. Today many digital immigrants can navigate two to three screens simultaneously, but typically not as proficiently as their younger counterparts. Although digital immigrants did not grow up within a digital culture as part of their everyday lives, the national lockdown pushed many to adopt digital connections more intently. Working remotely, connecting with family through various social media, and connecting their faith through digital live streams have become second nature to many. Work and home life no longer have boundaries, and US Americans are busier than ever, but they go to church less. Digital immigrants are the swing group in creating relational-based polymodal worship as they have  Many studies have been done around the issues of multi-tasking and effectiveness. For the purposes of this essay I am using my experiences with my nieces, nephews, son, and others as they utilize multiple screens at once and continue to keep up with them all. A study of this topic can be very helpful, such as https://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbradberry/2014/10/08/multitasking-damages-your-brain-and-career-new-studies-suggest/?sh=408cecee56ee (Accessed September 17, 2021). 6

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experienced both types of connectional realities – in-person and virtually – in their personal and professional lives.

Digital Luddites Digital Luddites, lovingly called this by me, typically choose not to enter the digital, media, and technological world beyond a home phone and a TV. Luddites were an organization formed in England to protest textile machinery in fear that they would be replaced. Modern-day Luddites fear automation and technology will take over all jobs in the future (Toshav-Eichner and Bareket-Bojmel 2021). Silent Generations members, like my dad, are those born before 1945, are generally more resistant to technological advancements. During the pandemic, Digital Luddites have gone in two directions. They either found the transition overwhelming or felt disconnected from their families and their communities of faith. For example, some may prefer to use their Cross pens to write out notes, keep their budget spending on a yellow legal pad, and would rather keep their cell phones at home 98% of the time. Others found this time an opportunity to learn a new skill and a new way to stay connected to their family and their faith. The reality of the church as the pandemic roared was the presence of Digital Natives, Immigrants, and Luddites all in the same community. However, with governmental requirements or denominational requests shutting down public worship, many social service agencies were challenged to stay connected. Although the “Church was never closed” and was still functioning, the people who previously populated those pews were not there anymore. Many had deeply emotional, spiritual, personal, and physical connections to those pews for worship. The dilemma now is to explore strategies to bring people into the church in new ways and understand the communities’ differing needs.

Digitally Integrated Ministry According to the Mark Prensky, change has occurred in nearly every facet of our culture. He noted that this change came from the “singularity” of digital technology and the shifts he was seeing in education with the younger generations (2001, 1). Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

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That seismic shift has felt invigorating to some and overwhelming to others. In every field we encounter, this shift is present. That means it is true for the church as it worships and as preachers proclaim the Good News. Some of the challenges of worship through technology are accessibility and serving a diverse digital community (Natives, Immigrants, and Luddites) in order to curate a Digitally Integrated Ministry. This is defined as the set of practices that extend spiritual care, formation, prayer, evangelism, and other manifestations of grace into online spaces like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, where, more and more people gather to nurture, explore, and share their faith today. It can also refer to these practices in both online and off-line spaces as they are influenced by the networked, relational, and incarnational character of digital age culture in general (Anderson and Dresher 2018, 2).

Although it has become more of a reality today, this type of ministry was not an acceptable form of worship for many churches. Conversations about real presence, incarnational preaching, and sacramental efficacy became a critical dialogue on social platforms. The questions were often about the “things we could not do,” not what we might imagine and create together. However, during the long pandemic months, a more progressive congregation may be asking how to extend the walls of the church, exploring ways to utilize digital media, and examining strategies to broaden the arc that brings the community together. Inviting people to participate in the life of the church from afar can seem counterintuitive to the Christian faith. Christians are a people of community and connection. They typically gather in person for worship and spiritual growth. Preaching virtually to an empty room is a struggle for many at various levels. Some preachers who are extroverts thrive on the reactions and interactions of people around them. Seeing the people’s faces can be energizing. Interacting with people as they enter and leave with hugs and quick conversations with members is a huge part of pastoral care and presence; thus, digital ministry is an entirely different reality.

Preaching to an Empty Room In order to breakdown some of the emptiness I was experiencing preaching to an empty room during the pandemic, I spoke to the “camera” (Fig. 4.2 is my visual perspective) and thought of one couple sitting on the fifth row on the left, the five members of another family sitting on the right side seven rows back by the windows, and another couple who sit near the aisle about halfway between the stage area and the back of the sanctuary on the right. But it still felt very isolating and alone at times. I had one musician on the stage with me and two tech people in the tech booth at the back of an incredibly long sanctuary (Fig.  4.3 is their visual perspective).7

 Figure 4.2 and 4.3 are photos that illustrate the view from the chancel area to the back of the church and the view from the back to the front. 7

Fig. 4.2  Empty room. (Photograph by Karyn L Wiseman, August, 2021. Gloria Dei [Lutheran] Church in Huntingdon Valley, PA)

Fig. 4.3  Recording in an empty room. (Photograph by Karyn L. Wiseman, August, 2021. Gloria Dei [Lutheran] Church in Huntingdon Valley, PA)

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I could not even see their reactions since they were masked. The three mounted cameras in our sanctuary are in the back of the room, so I was not even able to look into the lens of a camera close up. It felt like a vast desert between myself, the cameras, and the only two other persons in the space. Many preachers and worship leaders found these situations disorienting and/or lonely. At times, I even walked across the empty parking lot from the parsonage, went into the sanctuary, and sat in different pews to connect myself physically to those who would normally be there. I had never done that before, but I remembered my Dad practicing in an empty sanctuary, so I tried it and it worked for me. I called and asked him what he was thinking when he practiced. He said, “Karyn, I was imagining the people sitting in their pews who I would be preaching to.” In many ways, he taught me so many lessons that have served me well. What I experienced was an awareness of the presence of the Spirit in that large and lonely space. The Spirit had always been there but at times during the pandemic virtual worship we held, I felt Her8 more than I ever had before in the same space. There was something about the intimacy of the preaching act that touched me more than usual. Alyce McKenzie, in her article “Preaching to an Empty Room,” reminds preachers that the room is never completely empty (2021, para 6): What appears to be solitary prayer is never just solitary prayer. The same can be said of preaching to a virtual audience. It’s not a game of solitaire. Every week we preach, even to a crowded sanctuary, there are additional invisible worshippers present: the communion of saints. I hold the whimsical hope that they gather more closely around us to encourage us when we preach to empty seats. The room has never been empty and never will be.

Knowing that the room cannot possibly be empty is great advice and an incredible theology of incarnational worship, however, it does not stop the preacher from feeling somewhat alone in the space. Preaching to a community is the norm because preaching is communal and dialogical in its very nature. It is a conversation between the preacher, the people, the text, and God. Preaching is intended to be conversational: with partners, during the preparation, and in the sermon’s delivery. Preaching continues even after the message is delivered. While it can feel very lonely preaching to an “empty room,” it is important to continue working hard and craft each sermon with specific people in mind, seeing church members in the places they were typically sitting and imagining their reactions. While preaching has always been communal and dialogical, new methods of that dialogue need to be explored for this new reality. Using technology and media, along with social media, can breach the vast chasm between space and people. According to McKenzie (2021), some helpful suggestions to enhance digital preaching are: • Utilizing opportunities for dialogue after the sermon. • Utilizing multiple services and preachers to all for deeper dialogue. • Live tweet during and/or after the sermon.

 I utilize the feminine for the Holy Spirit as an expansive way of looking at the Divine. Male language is more normative but the importance of either expansive gender language or non-gendered words is an important part of my ministry of inclusion and welcome. 8

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Not all of these are logistically possible in every context, and some pastors do not have the bandwidth, either the digital bandwidth in their sanctuary or church offices or the personal capacity, but these suggestions are a great starting point. Some preachers have tweeted and sent text messages during the sermon as a strategy to encourage listeners to answer verbal questions spoken during the sermon or raise questions. Other strategies include synchronous dialogue or encouraging comments on Facebook Live feeds. These interactions can be augmented with weekly or biweekly community conversations on Zoom. Topics of conversation can focus on the text, sermon, service, current events, and personal concerns. The opportunity to discuss the sermon was taken advantage of during these conversations on numerous occasions. Pre-pandemic, it was not uncommon to invite folx to hang around at the front of the sanctuary after the sermon to discuss any questions the congregants might have. In gatherings before and after worship, they often engaged the preacher with questions and comments. Not having this chance for in-person conversations meant finding other ways for them to gather. Most of these opportunities come through Zoom meetings and phone calls. These efforts continued to provide some level of dialogue. However, dialoguing with the text and the context can be more challenging, especially during the pandemic.

Reimagining Preaching One of the significant difficulties during the COVID pandemic was related to the multiple traumas people were experiencing. Some lost loved ones to the virus. Some tested positive and had milder symptoms than those who ended up in the hospital or became long-haul COVID patients. Many families lost their restaurants and businesses due to the shutdown. Some lost their identity along with their jobs. Some lost access to their loved ones in long-term care facilities. Many people experienced intense loneliness and isolation that tested their mental health. Some were separated from their kids and grandkids for well over a year. Too many people were denied the opportunity to be with their loved ones as the virus took their lives in hospital rooms with no access but a Facetime video to say goodbye. Most lost access to in-person worshiping communities and the sacraments that kept them grounded. All of this and more caused trauma on multiple levels. All of us, to some degree, experienced this reality. The trauma was manifested in anxiety, depression, overeating, excessive baking, headaches, loss of sleep, and more. Assurance and hope were needed more than ever, impacting both preaching and worship to provide a level of pastoral care amid chaos and isolation. Speaking to the world’s pain was modeled by Jesus, and preachers are called to preach to the challenges of their time, whether that is an embodied physical way or in a virtual space. Acknowledging the death tolls from COVID and recognizing the fear that resonated with many families was one of the driving calls of the preaching office. It was a lot for anyone living through the pandemic to handle, but there was an extra burden on preachers, churches, and faith communities.

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During the chaos of spring of 2020, there was yet another black man killed, George Floyd, by police officers in Minneapolis. One officer knelt on Mr. Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes as he ignored the pleas of Mr. Floyd to release him so that he could breathe. He cried out for his mother, and the officer continued to kneel on his neck. In an already turbulent time, the racial crisis erupting in Minneapolis and across the world as video footage circulated on both primary news media sites and every social media platform. Black Lives Matter marches took place around the globe. This event brought new contextual urgency to the preaching office. The multiple layers of trauma were exponentially increasing. Preaching had to change to the shifting context. Ignoring the reality of these multiple traumas would be detrimental to one of the principle tenets of preaching. The new context had to deal with a massive pandemic as the nature of gatherings changed. Preachers across the country had to keep their heads above water. The new context required our intentionality and ‘attentionality’, as Barbara Lundblad urges preachers to do in her book, Transforming the Stone (2001, 121). Preachers were tasked with being intentional about addressing the pain and loss in the world. Preachers were tasked with calling attention to the racist undercurrent that has spawned violence from our nation’s very birth. Preachers were tasked with naming the fear, the loneliness, and the inequity that was impacting the lives of our siblings of color and the people who once sat in our pews. This work cannot be ignored. The Church is called to preach the Good News to the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed, and those left out. These issues call on the preachers and the Church to take action.

Identifying the Needs What does post-pandemic preaching look like? What lessons have been learned? Some believe that preaching will look the same – preaching a text that has been prayed over, exegeted, researched, crafted, and practiced. It has been preached for a particular place, a particular moment, to a particular group of people, addressing the text’s theology. It is delivered to a gathered community on a particular date. However, now it must look different, hybrid – both in-person and online. As a result, congregations will look different moving forward. Some parishioners will welcome the return to the physical space of the church, some will have underlying health concerns and choose to worship online, and some are now accustomed to worship in their living rooms, rarely returning to the physical pews where they once sat. So how can preaching address these needs?

Quality Equipment First is asking the right questions about post-pandemic preaching. What is next in preaching? How can preaching be intentional to be rich, dynamic, and focused on the Gospel of Jesus Christ for a new day? In a digitally integrated ministry, what

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draws members to watch certain programs or see a movie? Polling some students, they said good storyline, excellent production, great performance, opportunity to escape and be inspired, or a story with twists and turns. When comparing the list of desired elements to virtual worship, it is evident that sermons need to be impactful and coherent. Production quality can help create an atmosphere that feels affirming and welcoming, especially for Digital Natives and Immigrants. Delving into the Divine story of faith and searching for inspiration to live more faithfully is important. Using that time and space to create a community of believers bound by the liberating Gospel of Jesus Christ is an amazing opportunity to impact others around the corner and the world. The performance nature of preaching and worship must be given appropriate attention and intention. The key questions to ask are, “Would I want to watch the service that I am putting out there? Would I watch my sermon online?” Keeping the viewer and listener in mind is more than seeing them back in their seats. It is about providing an experience that will draw folx back every Sunday–both in-person and virtually. It is not about the performance or the applause. It is about worship done well. Church members want to see authenticity from the preacher. Carey Nieuwhof (2021) addressed this topic in his article, 7 Signs Your Church Is Honestly…Mediocre: If you’re going to be online, audio and video quality matters. Again, you don’t need a six or seven-figure solution here to make it better. Making sure your online sound is captured through a good set of mics and mixer, a few well-placed lights and a decent camera will help immensely.

Create exceptional sermons and deliver them utilizing technology and multi-media tools. A hybrid model and full immersions worship will require high-quality equipment. Good microphones and lighting are instrumental to the overall quality. Take the time to do things well, use the resources available to procure quality equipment, and make the production quality a vital part of the church’s online and in-person worship.9 Proclaiming the Gospel through online preaching can be rich and dynamic, allowing the Spirit to use the message in the best way possible. Members of the Church will appreciate the effort and can connect all of the generations.

Contextually Relevant Next, preaching contextually relevant and brave sermons is a must. Speaking out about racism, inequity in health care access, institutional racism, homophobia, income inequality, and other issues confronting the people in the pews is critical. Creating a “safe space” for conversations about challenging topics may trigger past experiences or bring intense emotional reactions. However, creating a totally safe space may not be plausible. There will always be some adverse reactions to some

 Many Synods, Conferences, and denominational groups are giving grants to churches and communities of faith to purchase new equipment. You do not have to purchase high price items as the technology quality and accessibility has risen and prices have fallen. 9

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sermons but creating a “brave space” is empowering. Being brave to preach the challenging sermon, have that open conversation, and stay balanced when things shift is living fully into the calling as a preacher. The Gospel requires injustices to be called out, claim redemption, and transform the lives of those who are listening. Living into the tensions of the times from the pulpit has always been true, but even more so during the pandemic.

Polymodal Third, provide a polymodal10 way of reaching the congregants. In-person worship may continue to be the normative way of delivery, but the pandemic has left many persons in the position of not attending in person. Some due to long-term health concerns and others because they have become so accustomed to watching worship in their pajamas and sipping their coffee with their feet up at home that coming back is not in their plans for now. For whatever reason people choose to remain home, ending virtual worship options would result in the loss of their participation. Continued live streaming with an in-person contingency makes sense. Shifting from a “Zoom only” to a polymodal delivery can be problematic for the preacher and the congregants. The shift from individual Zooming from a more intimate screen-to-­ screen reality to adding in-person and Zoom at the same time in the sanctuary means a huge shift for the preacher and for the congregants. The technology is harder to maneuver around but is not totally prohibitive. Early on, a worshipper can sit in their home and see all the other participants on their screen while the pastor, also from home, lead the worship. Using this technology in a larger setting with person in the room and on Zoom is hard to do on multiple levels. Pre-pandemic church realities are gone. However, there is an opportunity to move forward and find new ways to engage both in-person and virtual worshippers.

Realities of the Digital Community Fourth, acknowledge the realities of the Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, and Digital Luddites. The need to provide Digital Natives spiritual content to counter the cultural content they consume is the way to move forward. Confirmation classes creating their statements of faith with emojis or youth group members interacting through Instagram or TikTok to share their faith questions or post responses to sermons preached are possibilities. Creating chances for Natives to ask questions is  This phrase has been used by my colleague at United Lutheran Seminary, Dr. Kyle SchiefelbeinGuerrero. It involves using multiple modes of delivery at the same time. Virtual and in-person at the same time is the modality of the now and into the near future. See his chapter at the beginning of this book. 10

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important. Some youths have expressed that “The Church is answering questions that I’m not asking.” This is revealing. Not listening to this generation is damaging the future of the church. Pandemic preaching has stretched preachers, and there are many lessons to learn and opportunities to engage the next generations. Having multi-generational events with Natives helping Immigrants or Luddites use technology more effectively can bridge a technological gap and create relationships across generations. The interactions can be in-person or virtually. The most important part is meeting people where they are understanding their skillsets and utilizing best practices to build a community of faith in a positive direction.

Utilize Creativity Fifth, is utilizing creativity in everything. In I Refuse to Preach a Boring Sermon: Engaging the 21st Century Listener, I make central the importance of creativity in preaching (Wiseman 2013). The preacher must take the text for their sermon, the context into which they will preach, the times they are living in, and craft an imaginative and creative sermon that sparks the interest and enthusiasm of the listeners. Using media, images, and a story to bring the theological text to life is the task of the post-pandemic preacher. Many listeners, especially Digital Natives and Immigrants, have a buffet of media and technology to choose from. Denying that or not leaning into that reality would be counterproductive. Tap into the creative juices. Play with Play-doh to visualize ideas, draw the story with crayons, paint an image from the text, or write freestyle while contemplating the sermon. Allow folx to engage in the creative process. Use social media to engage the listeners with creative questions, polls, or sermon input. Addressing the creative processes to be used in developing the sermon, means  the better the sermon will be preached and received. This provides an additional level of quality, authenticity and accessibility.

Flexible Preparation Sixth, is being flexible and nimble in the preparation and the delivery. Upgrading presentational modalities is important. Preaching with an iPhone on a desk was okay in the beginning but moving forward congregations need to do more to increase the types and quality of the digital tech they use. As Ferris Bueller says, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it” (Hughes 1986, 4: 40). This is true in the world today. If preachers don’t stop and look around, they will more than likely miss things. Even churches that have done really well in creating and maintaining great digital worship will be faced with the need to shift quickly. For example, after a summer storm knocked out a church’s electricity, they had to work frantically to connect the live-streaming service. The

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source code had to be changed from their sanctuary set-up to an integrated Zoom service. They had a structured recording setup in their sanctuary, but they still had to adapt to the electricity outage. Another reason to be flexible and nimble is that the news on a Sunday morning can bring a radical change in events – whether a natural disaster or a racial incident – that must be addressed. From the pulpit, it is essential to address the news and the ways it impacts the community both locally and globally.

Preach the Gospel Lastly, as Dr. Timothy Wengert, says, “Preach the damn Gospel.”11 No matter what is going on in the world, no matter where the listeners are physically, and no matter how the sermons are presented, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a transformational message. It brings relief to those who are marginalized, to those who are physically isolated, to those who are weary, to those who have lost hope, and to those who are exhausted by the world in which they live. Preaching is a privilege. Preaching is life changing for both the preacher and for their listeners. The church and the world need good preaching. The church is often called irrelevant by non-church folx, and this may be because those they hear preaching that does not address the issues that are important to them. Some congregants say that they are not always welcomed or affirmed of who they are, whom they love, and how they live in the world. Preaching the Gospel reminds us all – both those physically present and those joining online – that living in a community of Jesus’ followers means changing the world. It also means engaging with the world in profound and personal ways.

Conclusion I have developed my own process of crafting sermons. I write out notes and develop a flow that will bring that sermon to life. I watch the news and do the hard work of exegeting the text and context to bring a Word from the Lord. I utilize the media and technology necessary to reach our people and ensure that the quality is top-notch. I create an atmosphere of welcome and inclusion and use language and images that are broad and clear. I work to bring creativity and imagination to my preaching to make the listeners more engaged. This is the challenge of post-pandemic preaching. And in many ways – with the technology that was available – so have preachers for generations. I still sometimes use a yellow legal pad and always carry my silver Cross pen. Some things change and some things stay the same. The Word of the Lord stays constant, but the needs of our times can shift really, really fast.  Dr. Wengert taught at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia for over 20 years. His use of this phrase to encourage students to proclaim the Gospel unafraid and boldly. The phrase has even resulted in t-shirts that have the phrase on them sold in the campus store. 11

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References Anderson, Keith, and Elizabeth Dresher. 2018. Click2Save Reboot: The Digital Ministry Bible. New York: Church Publishing. Hughes, John. 1986. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Paramount Pictures. Jones, G. Curtis. 1986. 1000 Illustrations for Preaching and Teaching. Nashville: B & H Books. Kinnaman, David, and Mark Matlock. 2019. Faith for Exiles: 5 Ways for a New Generation to Follow Jesus in Digital Babylon. Grand Rapids: Baker Books. Lundblad, Barbara. 2001. Transforming the Stone: Preaching Through Resistance to Change. Nashville: Abingdon Books. McKenzie, Alyce. 2021. Preaching to an Empty Room. https://blog.smu.edu/perkins/preaching-­to-­ empty-­room/. Accessed 14 June 2021. Nieuwhof, Carey. 2021. Seven Signs Your Church Is Honestly Mediocre. https://careynieuwhof. com/7-­signs-­your-­church-­is-­honestly-­mediocre/. Accessed 25 Aug 2021. Prensky, Marc. 2001. Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon 9(5), October (MCB University Press). https://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-­%20Digital%20 Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-­%20Part1.pdf. Accessed 1 July 2021. Sweet, Leonard. 2012. Viral: How Social Networking Is Poised to Ignite Renewal. Colorado Springs: Waterbrook Press. Toshav-Eichner, Nivit, and Liad Bareket-Bojmel. 2021. Yesterday’s Workers in Tomorrow’s World. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352381937_Yesterday%27s_workers_in_ Tomorrow%27s_world. Accessed 20 Sept 2021. Troeger, Thomas H. 1996. Ten Strategies for Preaching in a Multi Media Culture. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Wiseman, Karyn L. 2013. I Refuse to Preach a Boring Sermon!: Engaging the 21st Century Listener. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press. Karyn L.  Wiseman is the Stuempfle-Folkermer  Professor of Homiletics at United Lutheran Seminary and pastor at Gloria Dei Church in Huntingdon Valley, PA, a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. An ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, she has led numerous workshops and taught classes in several seminaries across the country regarding preaching, worship, the emerging/missional church, social media for ministry, pastoral administration, clergy self-­care, polymodal preaching and worship, and other important pastoral topics, especially preaching for a new day.  

Chapter 5

Church May Be Digital, But Is the Clergy’s Call? Lisa Cressman

Introduction Are the clergy1 who were thrust into a digital mission due to the COVID-19 pandemic called to minister digitally forever whether they like it or not? This chapter endeavors to help readers discern the answer to that question for themselves. When the pandemic forced the world into lockdown, clergy rose to the occasion. They did everything in their power to tend their flocks through the only means available at the time, the internet. It was exhilarating, exhausting, exciting, and draining as they met challenge after challenge with little warning, equipment, training, or help. Not knowing how long the pandemic would last, clergy continued to improve their skills, upgrade their equipment, make mistakes, and stretch to meet not only the spiritual needs of their local parishioners, but newcomers joining online as well. Since then, online ministry has inserted itself until it has become a routine part of parish life and an assumed part of the clergy’s duties. However, even though clergy have learned that they can run a digital ministry, that is not the same as asking whether they should. Is ministering online forever what God is asking of them? This question is particularly relevant for clergy who began ordained ministry before the pandemic and were trained/formed to minister incarnationally. They were taught and expected to connect with people through the touch of a  “Clergy” grammatically means the whole body of ordained people, and “clergies” means more than one clergyperson. However, the singulars “clergyman” “clergywoman” are uninclusively gender binary, and “clergyperson” does not make the meaning less awkward. Hence in this chapter, “clergy” will refer to both singular and plural ordained people, in the same way “they” is used to refer to the singular “he” or “she.” 1

L. Cressman (*) Backstory Preaching, Missouri City, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero (ed.), Church After the Corona Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23731-7_5

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flesh-to-flesh handshake, passing the peace, and pressing consecrated bread into hands in real time and space. With a digital ministry, clergy connect through the disembodied touch of plastic computer keys and streamed images of themselves for worshippers to watch anytime from anywhere. This digital form of ministry can feel incongruent with the embodied form with which clergy were trained. To appreciate the magnitude of this change that clergy did not ask for, let me offer a nonchurch story. My father was a children’s book author many times over. He started writing at a time when editors and authors crafted books based on a cultivated relationship and joint mission. My dad and his editors were united in their desire to promote children’s literacy. Growing up in the Depression with English-illiterate immigrant, factory-working parents, he knew that if a child could read, that gave the child a future. He and his editors proposed and nurtured book projects through mail and telephone; personal responses back-and-forth were the norm. The mailbox contained my dad’s daily hopes for a letter about the next stage. Even better was when the doorbell rang and the postal carrier handed off a box tied with string, containing a return of Dad’s manuscript with hand-written, red-inked editing, and always with a personal letter at the top. For 20 years, while Dad was busy with his job by day and parenting by night, his writing languished. When he retired, eager to resume his deep passion for writing, he reached out to the publishers he previously worked with through paper letters and mail. However, his snail-mail communication did not receive a response. Bewildered, his subsequent research revealed that most communication now happened digitally. Moreover, most books were no longer published to promote children’s literacy but rather to make money for shareholders. The relationship between an author and an editor was not fostered, nor was it built on a mission. Instead, it was based on a transactional process guided by timelines and budgets. The publishing industry had become almost unrecognizable to him, but my dad’s mission had not changed. The challenge of unlocking the puzzle of the correct sequence of words to enlighten a child was his daily quest. He knew no other grand purpose, so his disappointment with the changes in publishing was heart-­wrenching. He was not only disappointed with the changes in the industry, he was disheartened by the publisher’s mission of profit over a child’s potential. The problem was that he would not recognize himself if he were not writing and publishing, so he grumbled his way into playing by some of the changed rules, such as giving up on the editor-author relationship and communicating by email only. Other changes, however, were anathema to his values, like promoting himself to agents to hustle for their representation. Though he did publish a few more books and knew he probably would have published more if he had played the game, the cost to his integrity was too high. My dad settled for a reduced impact so he would not lose himself or his deep love of his craft. His mission had not changed, but the means required to meet it drained much of his joy. His uncomfortable tradeoff was to feel lost in their world rather than wait for them to move back into his.

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Some clergy find themselves as lost as my dad did in this new digital world, wondering whether they must also make an uncomfortable tradeoff. When the pandemic hit, clergy shifted from setting the altar with proper linens for worship, to setting computers to proper internet speeds; from being fueled by parishioners’ real-­ time sermon feedback with head nods, smiles, and tears, to receiving no feedback from the green light on the computer camera indicating the sermon recording was in progress; from counting average Sunday attendance, to counting online views. Clergy were tested and trained for ministry at brick-and-mortar churches in field education, by comforting and praying with patients during Clinical Pastoral Education, and sitting on the floor in a circle of the parish hall with children to teach them a Bible story. They were formed to share the gospel in a local context mission field—the parish—and not the global context of a digital mission-field. As a result, clergy have questioned their call with its digital focus because this is not what they signed up for. Church relationships they carefully built and nurtured through the slow, incarnational presence of bedside hospital visits, parish picnics, and ‘do you have a minute, Pastor?’ hallway conversations, were slipped out of view behind monitors and are subject to the whims of a stable internet connection. The doors of the Christian community were taken off their hinges as people could wander past to peek into any live-streamed service. For those denominations for whom the sacraments of real presence are essential, sacramental theology has become unclear and is again debated in ways it has not been for centuries. The clergy’s mission to serve Christ in the Church has not changed, but the means have. Digital ministry redefines boundaries, rules, training, theology, and relationships. In terms of proximity, a digital ministry does not require the most fundamental of human connection for worship, physical presence. In short, bringing the gospel in person to the people in a parish community is one means of mission. Bringing the gospel digitally to people with whom we may never personally interact is another. The means matters, and not all clergy feel comfortable in—or called—to both. In the same way that being a book author is a related yet different medium and skill set from being a playwright, digital ministry is a related but different medium and skill set from parish ministry. It  has such different requirements and expectations that it is causing many clergy to question whether this iteration of Church is still where they belong. Moreover, technology is not a set-it-and-forget-it component of ministry. It requires maintenance, continuing education, and must be embedded as a permanent budget line-item. Every new update, software, or latest unnerving behavior (such as “Zoom bombing”) will require a reconfiguring of one’s time and attention in addition to other competing ministry needs. Many pastors invest a disproportionate amount of effort, time, and stress in learning, operating, recruiting volunteers, teaching, hiring, and/or fundraising for new technology, while streaming into an unresponsive void. Even when faces are visible, strain from reading them, and the lack of feedback in a digital meeting room, are draining. Some report, for example, that they feel more like a game-show host than a worship leader. The pressures of digital ministry compete with the ordination vows that sustain clergy, including building relationships, offering pastoral care, and their tradition’s sacramental ministries. When the fruition of their digital labor is obscure the feeling

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of stress is more prominent, creating an incongruity between what drew them into ministry (the promises they made) and what they do day-to-day. Long-term incongruous experiences and the considerable stresses of ministry are an unsustainable stew for some, especially for solo pastors with scarce resources. I work exclusively with Anglican and mainline Protestant preachers in my online ministry Backstory Preaching. This chapter is the result of my direct work with them as they expanded their ministry online at the beginning of the pandemic, and are now reckoning with the personal impact of their calls as they serve in permanently hybrid ministries. This essay provides a process for clergy to discern whether God is calling them to continue in at least partially digital ministry, how that relates to the clergy’s original call, and discern whether a vocational change is needed to preserve joy in ministry. By the end of this chapter, readers will have a renewed sense of their calling, whether that means ministry continues in person and digitally—or may discover that God is guiding them to new ways of serving altogether.

Aspirations: Mission and Ministry Clergy enter ordained ministry aspirationally, and these aspirations are summarized by ordination vows, the mission statements of a congregation, and their job descriptions. Together, they paint a picture of how clergy will serve, which is then interpreted uniquely by every pastor. These aspirations laid the foundation for future expectations. When digital ministry arrived, it was compared against those expectations. When it was perceived as congruent or expansive, it was welcomed. When it was perceived as incongruent, online ministry became a “necessary evil” or even deemed intolerable. Hence, it is necessary to start at the beginning: What did clergy believe they were signing up for?

Promises Made: Ordination Vows By the grace of God and consent of the people, what did the clergy promise to undertake in their ordinations, and to their specific ministries in their letters of call? A review of the ordination vows of the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church, USA, the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Church, shows the clergy of these denominations hold most of their promises in common. Though it might be articulated slightly differently in each, clergy of these denominations promise to: • Preach • Teach • Study Scripture

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Pray Pastor Administer Word and sacraments Take part in the councils of their denomination Obey the doctrine and discipline of their denomination

They are all actions, and everyone who has made these vows has a different picture of what these will look like in real life. However, these vows do not define how or where these vows are carried out. That is, the vows do not specify whether these promises are to take place in a church nave or naval carrier, in a parish hall or the halls of justice, car-side for “Ashes to Go” on Ash Wednesday, or “bedside” to offer prayers when permitted only via mobile device. The disparity between expectation and reality is felt when clergy expect to minister in person but instead minister through a computer screen. Ministering online creates a physical barrier of computer glass. It is dependent on parishioners’ lighting and their microphones for clergy to read their faces and hear changes in tones of voice. It is disembodied by first receiving the other’s emotional signals via electronic ones and zeroes instead of directly through  ear drums and body language. It is not that effective ministry cannot happen online. We have experienced that it can; congregations in person and online are functioning and some are thriving. However, clergy trained and ordained prior to the pandemic did not consider digital ministry or  contemplate ministry without physical proximity. For instance, these clergy did not expect that they would be trained and authorized to bless and distribute bread and wine (which is often anticipated to be an unparalleled and humbling highlight of ordained ministry) but not actually be able to do so safely. The question for the clergy experiencing this disparity is if they had known, would they accept the call to ordination again? Those trained and ordained since the pandemic began might have a more accurate picture of what they were taking on. For them, the question is, how closely do their expectations and reality match? Is it enough? Does the reality of digital ministry feed them? -Or is it different and draining in ways they had not anticipated?

Promises Enacted: Job Descriptions Ordination vows, determined at the denomination-wide level, have not been revised to account for the Church’s digital reality by any of these denominations; the assumption is that few job descriptions have either. Clergy have expressed to me that their churches have not reviewed, revised, rewritten, or renegotiated their contracts or letters of agreement to account for the additional  digital responsibilities.

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Some readers will argue that the “kitchen sink clause” in many letters of agreement, formally written as “other duties as assigned,” means that any and all duties can be included as needed, including any and all aspects of digital ministry. Regardless of this logic, even if “any and all” duties can be assigned and expanded without boundaries, the clergy’s time and energy cannot. Based on experience and observation, other duties are often assigned without a commensurate reduction in other duties. As time is a limited resource, parish leaders and clergy must prioritize critical duties over less important ones, or risk the bounds of good stewardship, sound leadership, and time management. Even if the reader finds the “other duties as assigned” an acceptable catch-all, one must still choose the place to apply one’s minutes. In reaction to the pandemic, many clergy’s responsibilities expanded into digital ministry, which has now become part of “their job.” However, there was little reflection on whether each clergy had the inclination, gifts, or skills to succeed. Moreover, little consideration has been given to the impact on the clergy’s time. When clergy put their time into digital ministry, they are not putting it into other parish priorities. For example, spending time gathering and equipping parishioners to run the worship computer software means they are not spending it on gathering and equipping them to house the homeless. Spending time managing and communicating the impact of the latest security upgrades for online meetings means it is not being spent visiting parishioners. What is the return on the investment of the clergy’s time for the congregation’s life, mission, and vitality when they spend it on technology? Is that what parish leadership wants them to do? Does that focus fit within the parish’s mission? Does this bring the clergy joy and fuel them to serve?

Congregational Aspirations: Parish Mission Statements The great value in mission statements2 is that they define the highest values and aspirations of a congregation. Some clergy balk at mission statements believing they hold no value because they are never used. However, it is not because mission statements inherently have no value, but because clergy have not experienced their extraordinary power and utility to clarify, align, and focus a congregation’s aspirations with its actions, including digital ones. Mission statements are public expressions of faith, an erstwhile set of “vows” the congregation makes for its ministry. The mission statement expresses what they believe the Holy Spirit expects to build through them in that time and place. In the same way that Frank Gehry and Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings bear the unique signatures of their architects through their designs, a mission statement describes the unique signature of the congregation.  Instead of a mission statement, some parishes use a list of three or four words to describe their congregation’s character and aspirations. Because this list serves the same function as a mission statement, I will refer to all these congregational summaries as mission statements. 2

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Equally as important as what is included in a mission statement is what is not included. By naming some things in the statement, by default it excludes countless other worthy endeavors the congregation could be part of but is not—or at least, not directly. In short, a mission statement describes a congregation’s ministry lane. Mission statements offer freedom through their inherent God-given limitations, serving as the boundaries of a congregation’s ministry parameters. Clergy are encouraged to review their ministry’s mission statement. What does it say? What does it hope for? What does it aspire toward? What theology is expressed? What does the parish do to embody those aspirations? In addition, just as looking at one’s credit card statement reveals what one values most, noticing what the clergy and members of a parish do week after week reveals what they believe in and believe is most important. Where do they spend their time? What do they talk about? What topics are discouraged? Do their actions, including the digital ones, align with the intentions of the mission statement? If the congregation does not have a mission statement, draft one based on what the congregation does and does not to do. The following questions can be used as a guide: • What actions drive the value? –– –– –– ––

If actions foster digital worship, what is valued? If actions foster a community, what is valued? If actions intentionally welcome newcomers, what is valued? If actions promote an insular community (and do not welcome newcomers), what is valued?

• What mission is implied by those actions (or non-actions)?

 omparing Clergy and Congregation Aspirations: Do C They Align? What about the clergy’s own hopes and aspirations? Their own sense of mission? The more closely the clergy’s alignment between their vows, their job description, and the parish’s mission and actions, the more joy it brings clergy and the more energy they pour into their ministry. When setting ordination vows,  job descriptions, and mission statements  side by side, what does the reader notice? At first glance, what is aligned? What is not? The reader is invited to notice a gut reaction, and we will look at this in greater detail later in the chapter. Many clergy experience a revelation when they recognize their parish’s stated mission is misaligned with their actions. It provides clergy with the language to articulate what feels “off” in the parish and open ways forward to align intention and action. Another common indication of misalignment is when they and the congregational leaders are not a good fit. Clergy must pay attention and acknowledge

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when the vision of leadership is different from those in the congregation. These revelations are often experienced as a holy prompt to begin the search for a new call.

Promises Enacted: Can the Mission Be Accomplished Digitally? When a congregation’s mission statement says, for example, that they “welcome all” one would expect them to: • • • •

help people feel included invite them to take leadership roles (including long-held ones) hold uncomfortable conversations when not “all” have been welcomed in the past attend to practical details like directional building signs, easy-to-navigate website, worship bulletins, communications

How will these aspirations be accomplished digitally? Welcoming all means making it as easy as possible for people to know they belong. When successful, any member and newcomer  in-person and online would experience the efforts, and articulate that welcoming everyone is a primary value of the congregation. Parish leaders need to ask whether the aspirations of the mission statement can still be accomplished digitally by asking questions like, how do they already welcome people? Whom do they welcome? Digital ministry makes it harder to identify newcomers and help them feel at home. For example, when a newcomer walks in the door for worship, it is easy to identify that that one person is the one we are to greet. We have established norms for saying hello, handing them a service leaflet, introducing them to others so they do not feel alone, and pointing out the bathrooms. How do we welcome the online worship visitor when they make themself known only by “liking” the service, or identifying that they live four states away? How are they oriented to the service? How do they connect with other members, become integrated into the congregation’s life, and made to feel that they belong? As mentioned earlier, with these challenges new possibilities also arise by being able to reach people who live four states away! Becoming one body of Christ without geographic boundaries, without dependence on building maintenance and the price tag to match, opens new visions about theology, ecclesiology, and stewardship. Regardless, constructing and maintaining an online community requires different skills, attention to detail, and communications. Does this desire to “welcome all” still fit within the congregation’s and clergy’s missional aspirations? Can they be accomplished through a digital medium? If so, how? If not, does this mean the Spirit is suggesting a revised mission statement? Summarizing to this point, the reader will have examined their aspirations and expectations for ministry through their ordination vows and job descriptions. They were then encouraged to make a comparison with their parish’s aspirations through their mission statements. Finally, the reader was asked to examine whether it is possible to enact these aspirations through a digital medium. Next, we turn to the realities of creating, maintaining, and integrating digital ministry for the long haul, and its impact on the clergy’s call.

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Is the Clergy’s Call Congruent with Digital Ministry? Yes. No. Maybe? When clergy are faithful in their discernment and open to the answer the Spirit provides, any answer is the right answer. Some clergy embrace the addition of digital ministry to their portfolios. Those who do are not more or less faithful than those who find themselves at a loss. All that Jesus asks of us is to follow where he leads, whether deeper into digital ministry or away from it. Gifts are gifts, and Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 12, that we are to rejoice and be glad every way God sees fit to use them!

Quantifying Digital Tasks One of the first steps to determine whether clergy are called to embrace digital ministry is to check the congruence of their call (their vows and job descriptions) against routine digital tasks. Every task, however small or seemingly insignificant takes time, and if time is spent on digital ministry it is not spent on what might be more fulfilling aspects. In other words, it is necessary to see exactly how much time and effort is being put into digital tasks to determine the extent to which digital ministry aligns with one’s call, and therefore enlivens or drains one’s spirit. To get a snapshot of the effort required, make a spreadsheet, a list, or invest in time-tracking software to be exacting. Below is an example of a way to document your digital efforts. 1. Note everything that was added to your digital workload since the pandemic began and continues as part of your routine work. 2. Note the number of minutes spent on each over the course of 4 weeks. 3. Circle each one that is enjoyed; leave it alone if indifferent to it; and draw a square around it if it’s not enjoyed What does the reader notice? (Table 5.1). A snapshot is helpful but not exhaustive because technology is never “one and done.” Updating the hardware and software as well as training volunteers and staff,

Table 5.1  Template for documenting digital ministry tasks

Date

Digital Task

Time to complete

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are ongoing efforts to create a congregational digital life cycle (Taylor and Taylor 2012).3 These will be perpetual needs that require perpetual tending.

Preparing for the Ministry’s Digital Life Cycle A ministry’s digital life cycle articulates the process to consider, implement, and evaluate the technological needs of the ministry. It seeks to align people, processes, and missions to ensure long-term success, as illustrated in Fig. 5.1 Ministry Digital Life Cycle Framework. This framework provides guiding questions as churches find their place in a digital environment. Ministry Digital Life Cycle Framework illustrates there are multiple moving parts requiring a strategic plan to be successful. The following breaks down each part: • Notice: Notice a need. For example, congregations needed an online alternative to people gathering in person where infection could spread during the pandemic. • Research: What are the alternatives? Whom does the congregation wish to reach, and on what technology does that audience most rely? Which social media Fig. 5.1  Ministry digital life cycle

Notice

Initiate

Research

Practice

Budget

Select

 “Digital life cycle” is its own field of study.

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• •

•

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do they use already? Are they more likely to attend in real-time, watch a pre-­ recorded service, or listen to a podcast? Which technology will most likely reach these people, and how will this be reevaluated as audiences change? Budget What can the congregation afford? What impact does this expense have on the rest of the ministry’s budget? Will additional insurance or maintenance contracts be required? If funds are needed to be raised, how will this be accomplished? Select Deciding on a solution requires getting the buy-in from the primary decision-­makers and key supporters. What is the contingency if the solution is not viable? Practice Before the tech goes “live,” learning to use it and practicing are essential. Who needs to be involved, and how much training will be required for proficiency? Initiating any new solution will involve a learning curve that is directly related to an individual’s experience. Many learning resources include the local library and online courses such as Coursera, Skillshare, Udacity, LinkedIn Learning, and Udemy. Initiate As the solution is implemented, the next question is whether this is a sound, long-term solution? Is it enabling the mission of the congregation to flourish?

If so, Fig. 5.2, Long-Term Integration Cycle provides guiding questions to integrate the technology into the congregation as a long-term solution.

Fig. 5.2 Long-term integration cycle Line-item

Manage

Standardize

Protect

Train

Troubleshoot

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Long-Term Integration Long-term integration takes a comprehensive view of the solution, so it becomes part of the whole church. Figure 5.2 Long-term Integration Cycle provides guiding questions to support the digital transition and ensure the “right capabilities” for various tasks. The Long-term Integration Cycle guides the planning process to ensure that the digital efforts are aligned with various functions and systems of the congregation. Integration success requires a planned effort that prepares and involves all members of the congregation. The following section breaks down each critical consideration: • Line-item: Add the financing and time required for the solution. Is the expense in addition to, or in lieu of, other expenses? Who is responsible for the technology’s maintenance and offers recommendations for the expense of changes or upgrades? What process will the ministry’s governing body use to decide whether to accept those recommendations? If the clergy’s time is placed on digital ministry, is it in addition to, or in lieu of, other responsibilities? How and with whom is that decision made and reviewed? • Standardize: Create and standardize a routine. While the in-person pre-liturgy routine concluded in the vesting room before walking into the nave, it now might require an additional stop in the control room with sound and light checks. What do those in the control room need to learn and do to complete the tasks successfully? What workflows are needed to assist untrained individuals (if necessary)? • Train: Dedicated people will need to be trained to know the software, run the hardware, and schedule others for their duties. How will these teams work together? How will turnover and no-shows be addressed? • Troubleshoot: Stuff will happen. Where will the manual be housed (online or on location) for easy accessibility? Who will update it? • Protect: Each new technology has its own sets of threats, security, and legal concerns. Although churches have religious service exemptions under U.S. copyright laws (17 U.S. Code § 110(3)), it does not necessarily extend to livestreaming. It is incumbent upon the reader to understand the requirements. Here are two sites for more information: OneLicense: https://onelicense.net/how-­it-­works; and CCLI: https://us.ccli.com/about-­copyright/ • Manage: Back-ups, updates, and major upgrades will be ongoing. Who is responsible? How will decisions be made? Where will passwords and back-ups be kept, for how long, and who has access to them? Although not part of the framework, it is the most important: communication. The clergy and lay leaders need to be prepared to answer these questions before implementation for longer than they imagine will be necessary. Leaders will need to be versed to answer the following types of questions, and be empathetic when addressing parishioners’ fears that something beloved is about to change for the worse.

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• “Why?” Be able to describe in one sentence the problem and why this technology is the solution. • “How will this affect me?” The more directly the new technology impacts parishioners, the more time will be needed to prepare them. Communicate how the technology is in their best interest, the support to learn to use it, and how the mission and ministry will be enhanced. • “When will this start?” Be able to share the timeline. • “How much does this cost, and how is it being funded?” Transparency fosters trust. Parish leaders should be versed in its actual and future costs. • “What about [my ministry]?” Parishioners may feel concerned that funding or tending to the technology will harm an aspect of ministry they value. Leaders need to assuage those concerns, or be prepared to have a pastoral response when those fears are on point. To summarize this section, the reader was asked to consider the time, attention, focus, and finances that digital ministry requires, and how to communicate to all concerned. With this picture laid bare, what does it mean? Does digital ministry align with one’s call to the ministry?

Checking the Alignment: Does It Create Joy? This section asks the reader to engage with the alignment framework to test for resonance or dissonance with one’s call and ask the simple question, does it create joy? Marie Kondo, a Japanese organizing consultant and host of a Netflix show, Tidying Up, is known for her simple method of deciding whether to keep or part with an object by asking a simple question. Does it spark joy? If it sparks joy, keep it. If it doesn’t, part with it. There is intentionality to the question when applied to every item: every pencil, t-shirt, and photograph receives the same thoughtfulness. First, one pulls out all the objects and puts them in a single pile. For example, all the clothes from the closet are piled on the bed. Next, each item is picked up and held. If the owner feels joy sparked in their body, if there is a feeling of resonance, the item is set to one side to be put away. If joy is not sparked, or there is a feeling of dissonance with it, that is the sign that the item is to be given away or discarded. However, before placing it in that pile, the owner thanks it for the service the object rendered or memories it created. So far this chapter has metaphorically asked the reader to make piles of their ministry “belongings.” The reader was asked to make piles of their ordination vows, job descriptions, parish mission statements, and every one of their digital tasks, and place them in the context of its digital life cycle and integration frameworks. Now it’s time to pick up each digital task to notice whether it is congruent with one’s call. Does it spark joy? Does the task provoke spiritual resonance or dissonance?

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Resonance could be experienced in many ways. It might be tears of gratitude, a thrill behind the sternum, or a sharp intake of breath. Regardless, there should be a sense of peace, a “rightness” to it like trying on a shirt that fits, or might fit even better with a few alterations. These digital  tasks  are added to the “keep” pile. Conversely, a lack of joy could be experienced as dissonance through sadness, frustration, or indifference. It might be expressed in tears of sorrow, a heaviness in one’s stomach, or a sigh of exasperation. If it does not feel “right,” as if a shirt fit so poorly that it would require extensive alterations, that is the equivalent of needing to set the task on a delegate or discard pile.  The alignment of a clergy’s vows, job descriptions, the parish’s mission statement, and the digital tasks are critical to examine and determine if a clergy experiences resonance or dissonance. Figure  5.3 Alignment Framework provides an illustration of the components to consider. Each of these components has previously been discussed. Consider the example below using Fig. 5.3, Alignment Framework, to test the alignment between leading and preaching in digital worship for a solo pastor of an aging congregation without support staff. Two years after the pandemic began and as it has evolved, this pastor serves two distinct congregations. One is in person, consisting mostly of elderly parishioners who continue to age and die. If the trend continues, there will not be anyone left to worship in person in another five years. The second congregation is online. Some of these are long-time members who are not comfortable attending or can no longer physically attend worship in person; some are former parishioners who moved out of the area; most live in other states and are people the pastor has never met. As the pastor holds their ordination vow to preach, they feel joy well-up behind their eyes for the privilege of being called to offer God’s word. As they hold their

Fig. 5.3 Alignment framework Vows/ Aspirations

Digital Task

Resonance or Dissonance

Mission Statement

Job description

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job description, the resonance increases as they notice the alignment between their ordination promises and responsibilities. In addition, this pastor’s joy is compounded when they hold their congregation’s mission statement to “Accept. Nourish. Send,” because parishioners and leaders consider leading worship and preaching to be one of the most important aspects of feeding and sending the congregation forth with Good News to share. All in all, worship and preaching in and of themselves still spark resonance with this pastor. However, leading worship and preaching for a second digital congregation makes the alignment more complicated. The pastor examines if the task to “serve the digital congregation,” aligns with the pastor’s calling. • Vows/Aspirations: Leading worship and preaching is in keeping with ordination vows, but this pastor did not aspire to lead people online across several states. This pastor feels disconnected from these people and does not feel sufficiently knowledgeable about the challenges they face in their communities. The pastor feels more like digital supply clergy. The means required to serve feel dissonant; it drains joy and energy. • Job Description: Preaching and leading worship aligns with the pastor’s aspirations, and doing so online when necessary, feels congruent. However, shepherding a second congregation was unanticipated and does not align with the pastor’s aspirations and vows. It drains joy. • Mission Statement: The mission “to nourish” feels aligned, even exciting, to reach as many far-flung people as online worship does. Occasionally the pastor receives a message of thanks from an online worshipper which brings joy, but the pastor finds preaching to a disembodied camera with no feedback intensely draining. Moreover, a sermon that can be crafted specifically to the needs and challenges of the local congregation feels disconnected from the digital one, often resulting in the pastor crafting similar but distinct sermons, which also feels draining. Applying the vignette to the Long-Term Integration Lifecycle (refer to Fig. 5.2), the pastor sees: • Line-item: Financially, the annual cost of worship increased 30% to pay for the broadcast equipment and their attrition, software, insurance, higher internet speed, and online meeting platforms. The financial cost was offset by a decrease in outreach and building maintenance, which the pastor finds dissonant. It’s an uneasy choice to assist people three states away to worship when they have alternatives, while the local food bank around the corner struggles more because of the congregation’s cutback. In terms of time, the pastor works on average another 30% per week to create, produce, and edit the service, adjust the sermon for the second audience, and manage the long-term integration life cycle. The additional time required by the pastor has not been offset by a decrease in other responsibilities, which the pastor finds dissonant and increasingly draining.

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• Standardize: The workflow to create online worship is working well. The preparation for and editing process are running smoothly. This feels neutral. It neither feeds nor drains the pastor. • Train: There is only a small pool of congregants willing and able to learn the technology, and they are not reliable due to health conditions and travel. Moreover, social media algorithms change routinely and unexpectedly, requiring constant updates and additional training. This perpetual cycle drains joy. • Troubleshoot: Creating the manuals is an ongoing project, and the pastor is constantly running into their own curse of knowledge. The pastor assumed fundamental knowledge about the internet did not need further explanation; however, it was later determined that it was necessary. This is a constant source of stress for the pastor and drains joy. • Protect: This is one area the pastor can let go of with a retired copyright lawyer on the parish council who is also knowledgeable about insurance. This brings relief, and therefore, some joy. • Manage: Because the least expensive alternative for back-ups is an external hard drive, this has become one of the pastor’s routine monthly chores. Moreover, because the pastor has the most direct use for all the soft- and hardware, they manage upgrades, make necessary recommendations to the parish council, and generate the communications. Managing digital requirements also feels dissonant and drains joy. In this vignette, utilizing the Long-Term Integration Cycle raises further questions of sustainability, particularly since the pastor has little help. Is God suggesting that digital worship for this congregation is unsustainable and needs to be let go of? Or might God be suggesting the pastor seek a different parish call? Or if the pastor believes digital ministry will always be a significant part of ministry regardless of the congregation, is God nudging them to serve just as faithfully but outside of parish ministry altogether? The reader is encouraged to try this exercise. Choose a few  digital tasks and apply the Digital Life Cycle and Long-Term Integration Framework. “Hold” each in one hand, and with the other pick up the corresponding portions of the ordination vows, job description, and parish mission statement. What feels resonant? What feels dissonant? Place the tasks  in the keep, delegate, or discard piles.  With the tasks sorted, it is time to discern: Now What?

Now What? Now that the clergy have a complete picture of the process to test the alignment of the tasks of digital ministry with their ordination vows, job description, and parish mission statement, the question is what to do with this information. This final section will guide clergy into a discernment process regarding the future of their ministry to decide whether they feel called to a digital expression of it. The consequences

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a clergy may fear, including livelihoods, relationships, and identity, will be articulated, followed by a discernment process to live “as if.”

Be Not Afraid? Asking the question about changing one’s ministry may raise anxiety because the consequences are high. Anytime there is a change something dies, there is a transition period, followed by a new beginning. Though we often dread the process of change and the unknown ahead, we know and trust as Christians that there is always a new beginning. New life rises from every kind of death, and nothing, as Paul assures the Christians in Rome, can separate us from the love of Christ (Romans 8:38–39). Trusting that Christ will never leave or abandon us, let us explore the changes we may fear. As I  argued in The Gospel People Don’t Want to Hear: Preaching Challenging Messages (Cressman 2020), when a change means something that we value comes to an end, grief is part of the transition. The more we value that thing, the more grief we experience. It is not unfaithful to dread grief, but it is to believe that grief is the end of the story. There are three types of death explored in the book that will affect any change of call: the clergy’s livelihood, their relationships, and their identity. Articulating and, to an extent, calculating the cost of these losses will help the reader assess whether they are prepared to absorb these losses if they seek a new call. Livelihood When clergy make their living through their ministry, the impact of a change to their personal income, pension, and insurance must be weighed for themselves and those they support. Working with a financial planner and the ad judicatory’s pension officer is prudent, and may assuage—or affirm—concerns. For example, if clergy discover that leaving parish ministry for another job will cost them too much in income, retirement, and benefits, they may feel stuck. Though their joy for ministry may feel drained by the technology requirements, they may opt to stay in the position to maintain their pension and health insurance for themselves and their dependents. The situation is deeply spiritual for those who find themselves in this position. Is this the clergy’s own version of Paul’s chronic thorn in his side? It may require asking for the gift of Christ’s peace that passes all understanding, and accepting the grief for the ministry that was anticipated and unfulfilled, while living into the pain of digital ministry that is. The way forward (perhaps with the help of a spiritual director, therapist, or clergy coach) is to grieve this authentic death, letting go of nostalgia for the “good, old, pre-digital days,” and living with the hope that God brings new life from every kind of death.

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Relationships If the idea of leaving parish ministry behind is appealing as a solution to one’s disaffection with its digital requirements, it might be the right solution—but it will come at a cost to relationships with parishioners and colleagues. Those relationships might continue in some form, but they will be different. Here are two examples. The first example is a pastor who became disenchanted with their position. Rather than seek another parish, they opted for early retirement. In their desperation to leave work as fast as possible, it did not occur to them that in leaving behind the stress, they would also leave behind beloved relationships with colleagues. For a few months, the retiree attended long-established regular lunches out, but then the gap grew. The retiree did not realize the degree to which their common work had bound them, so experienced unanticipated grief to feel ties unravel as the retiree slowly became an outsider. Isolation after leaving a position can be exacerbated if clergy have relied heavily on colleagues for their social relationships and have not developed other friendships. The second example is a clergyperson who worked directly for a bishop to create an independent ministry. At the next judicatory’s governing convention, rather than be seated in their previous visible place of honor near the bishop, the new seat was invisible in the back of the hall as a clergy guest. This pastor had no regrets about their new ministry, but it was still a blow to the ego. Many of the colleagues with whom the pastor had interacted regularly did not know how to relate to them, and their formerly cordial relationships became distant. These two examples suggest that equal consideration be given to the impact on collegial relationships as to the impact on one’s finances and benefits. Are altered relationships another grief that clergy who leave behind digital ministry are willing to endure? Moreover, it is not only the clergy’s relationships with beloved parishioners and colleagues; they may also have to consider their family’s relationships with parishioners that they may be reluctant to disrupt. On the other hand, if the clergy’s stress is higher and expressed maladaptively because of their unhappiness with the online demands of ministry, they may already be negatively affecting parishioners and family members. A change in position may come as a relief to everyone. Identity Who do clergy see themselves to be? What about their hopes, dreams, and aspirations for ordained ministry that did not turn out as expected, or as they felt God had let them believe it would be? If they decide to serve God outside of parish ministry, who will they be? This question of changed identity, dreams, and unfulfilled aspirations might be the most disconcerting. Consider Bartimaeus, who, in his encounter with Jesus, also faced changes to his livelihood, relationships, and identity. When Bartimaeus cried out, “Jesus, Son of

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David, have mercy on me” (Mark 10:47), Jesus might have understood his cry as a declaration of consent to treat Bartimaeus’s blind eyes. Instead, Jesus asked, “What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus and Bartimaeus both knew that not being healed had consequences, but so did being healed. In Bartimaeus’s case, his healing would cause him to leave behind his livelihood—begging— because men who could work were expected to. What would his trade be? How would he eat? In addition, a healed Bartimaeus would leave behind his fellow beggars. He would have to start over to form a new community. Who would talk with him? Whom could he count on? Most importantly, who was he? Everyone knew him as “Blind Bartimaeus,” but who was “Sighted Bartimaeus?” How would restored sight, a great blessing, reconfigure his sense of self in the world if he had no family or friends, or the means to eat? Not knowing who that sighted person was or would become, would Bartimaeus really be better off with his vision restored? Only he could answer that for himself. Knowing there were risks and consequences not to change or to change, we don’t know what prompted Bartimaeus to accept the risks and ask to be healed. Clergy also faces risks and consequences to continue in digital ministry or seek change, which only the clergyperson can determine. One way to discern God’s call is to live “as if.”

To Live “As If4” One process to discern whether God is calling us to stay in a less-than-optimal digital ministry, versus seeking another call, versus leaving parish ministry altogether, is to live prayerfully “as if.” To live “as if” is a spiritual version of testing-the-waters. Through prayer and discussion with loved ones, a spiritual director, or a therapist, clergy can wade into the solution we believe God is suggesting. Figure 5.4 Living “As If” shows the steps of this process. • Pray for clarity: Ask Christ to illuminate the path ahead, grant courage as often as needed, and trust that in living faithfully, all shall be well. • Observe: Gather the data as suggested in this chapter and notice reactions of resonance and dissonance while engaged in digital- and non-digital ministry.

Pray

Observe

Plan

Test

Attend

Obey

Give thanks

Fig. 5.4  Living “as if”

 Refer to chapter 7 of Funk (2001), “Tools of Discernment,” for a more complete discussion of this practice.

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• Plan: Pray over the observations, sketch out potential plans, and with God’s help, select the one that feels most like the Spirit’s call. For example, regarding digital ministry, here are three possibilities: (1) continue ministry without change; (2) modify the job description; (3) seek a different ministry outside of a parish setting. • Test: Based on the selected plan, test it for a while by living the plan “as if” it were already put in motion. For example, if the first plan is selected (to make no change at all), for a month re-engage ministry wholeheartedly without allowing any thoughts of change to capture one’s attention. If the second plan is selected (to modify the job description), discuss with parish leaders and add this to the agenda of the next parish council meeting. Alternatively, if the third plan is chosen (to seek a different kind of ministry), let trusted confidants know one is open to new possibilities. • Attend: Hold the plan lightly and look for signs that confirm or deny the plan. As the testing phase unfolds, notice feelings of resonance or dissonance, joy or sadness, alignment and congruence, or misalignment and incongruence. When doors open or close, notice those. What is the Spirit suggesting? • Obey: As confirming or denying signs accumulate and the plan becomes ever clearer, obey God’s call. • Give Thanks: Thank God for the clarity gained, the ways one was enabled to serve thus far, and for the ways God will enable one to serve in the future.

Conclusion In this essay, the reader was asked to review their ordination vows, job description, and their parish’s mission statement, and the aspirations of all compared to their alignment. Next, the digital lifecycle and technology’s long-term integration were considered and the needs for extensive communication, and how these impact the clergy’s time. We looked at the potential costs to one’s livelihood, relationships, and identity associated with continuing in digital ministry as it is or seeking a change, and noticed how digital ministry gives rise to a sense of resonance or dissonance in one’s spirit. Finally, a discernment practice was offered to discern how to best serve God with faithfulness and joy. After reading this chapter, does the reader identify with my dad to exercise their aspirations as best as possible inside a digital world that they may never fully embrace or understand? Or perhaps the reader feels a new sense of energy and passion over the possibilities, and is excited (if maybe still a bit daunted) by the challenges? Or maybe the reader concludes that the place where their greatest gifts meet the world’s deepest needs will be found in a different, if perhaps still unknown, ministry?

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None of us knows where digital ministry will lead the Church or the clergy who promised to serve her. However, this we do know: For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace (Isaiah 55:10–12a)

Whatever is next, God called us to ministry, and nothing God does returns empty. Do not be afraid.

References Cressman, Lisa. 2020. The Gospel People Don’t Want to Hear: Preaching Challenging Messages. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Funk, Mary Margaret. 2001. Tools Matter for Practicing the Spiritual Life. New York: Continuum. Taylor, Margaret, and Andrew Taylor. 2012. The Technological Life Cycle: Conceptualization and Managerial Implications. International Journal of Production Economics 140 (1): 541–553. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpe.2012.07.006. Lisa Cressman is Founding Steward of Backstory Preaching, an online ministry offering the practical support preachers need to thrive in the craft, process, and spirituality of preaching. Ordained an Episcopal priest in 1993, she earned her M.Div. in 1992 from Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, CA, her D.Min. in Practical Theology from Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, in 1999, and served congregations in Indiana, Minnesota, and Texas. She is a preaching instructor, conference leader and keynote speaker, and author of Backstory Preaching: Integrating Life, Spirituality, and Craft (Liturgical Press, 2018), and The Gospel People Don’t Want to Hear: Preaching Challenging Messages (Fortress Press/Working Preacher Books, 2020). She can be found at www.backstorypreaching.com.  

Chapter 6

One Virus After Another: Composing the Weekly Intercessions Gail Ramshaw

Introduction Over the centuries and across church traditions, there has been a variety of ways that the Sunday assembly of worshipers prays for the needs of the world. In some churches, a single prescribed text, which may be impressive and thorough, is meant to serve this wide-ranging purpose. Such a text may have been composed many decades in the past. Some church traditions provide authorized options, sometimes with the expectation that only these texts should serve the community, sometimes with the sense that these models anchor local adaptation. Some denominational publishing houses provide texts for each Sunday and festival liturgy, intercessions that reflect the tone of the liturgical season and the content of the biblical readings, albeit that these prayers were composed many months before their designated use.1 Including ellipses suggests to the users that pertinent specifics should be added to the previously prepared text. Some Baptist churches use a rare and most interesting prayer pattern: all the worshipers, kneeling beside their pews, simultaneously speak aloud their own petitions, rendering a cacophony of prayer understood only by God. Recently the Christian world has seen an increase in those congregations that compose their own intercessions specific to that date and that community. Several handbooks are available that assist local persons as they compose texts during the prior week (Ramshaw 2016; 2017). While such local composition is a worthy goal, it is not surprising that such texts are of varying quality and, often, too short to  For example, the intercessions in Sundays and Seasons, which is for suggested use in congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, are written at least 16 months before they would be prayed. 1

G. Ramshaw (*) Retired Professor of Religion and Independent Scholar, Arlington, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero (ed.), Church After the Corona Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23731-7_6

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include the multitude of needs that call for our prayers. Some small assemblies rely on intercessions improvised during the liturgy by the participants. Depending on the assembly, these can be either profound or problematic. Composing weekly prayers has been recently complicated by the desire to include lament as part of the prayer, a practice relatively new to many Christian assemblies and minimally supported by the broader culture. The pattern of the prayer of my chosen assembly utilizes the one encouraged in the primary worship resource of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (Evangelical Lutheran Worship 2006). Made clear especially in those churches that provide hymnals in the pews so that all worshipers can follow along with the liturgy, the order for Holy Communion suggests the use of a litany form, each portion of the prayer calling forth an assembly response, and includes the following outline for the Prayers of Intercession: Prayers reflect the wideness of God’s mercy for the whole world – for the church universal, its ministry, and the mission of the gospel; for the well-being of creation; for peace and justice in the world, the nations and those in authority, the community; for the poor, oppressed, sick, bereaved, lonely; for all who suffer in body, mind or spirit; for the congregation, and for special concerns. Additional prayers may come from the assembly. Prayers of thanksgiving for the faithful departed may include those who recently have died and those commemorated on the church’s calendar.

I join with those who designed this worship book, hoping that, week after week, year after year, no matter how the petitions are composed, the use of this outline will form worshipers into a fuller discipline of prayer. Such intercessions mean widening our sphere of concern, from personal petitions to prayers for all people according to their needs. In contrast to the notion that we attend worship primarily for ourselves, years of such comprehensive intercessory prayer may call us into our connections with the whole body of Christ and our responsibilities for all people in need. This Lutheran worship resource asked worshipers each week to remember also the created earth itself, its threatened habitats, its endangered animals, the melting ice and rising coastlines, and the suffering brought about by surprising temperatures in a region wholly unprepared for any climate change. During the pandemic, many assemblies posted a simplified form of Sunday worship online so that congregational members could conduct home worship. This practice meant that the text of the intercessory prayers could be finalized within a few days of their use, thus allowing petitions to be up-to-date. Some assemblies based their weekly prayers on models provided by their national church, while others composed their own formats. As congregations utilized the digital environment beginning in March 2020, it was difficult to evaluate the quality of these texts, how comprehensive they were, or whether the texts were regularly used in members’ homes. Some of these prayers did come to include laments concerning the dire

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situation in which we found ourselves, even though there had been little recent use of lament during Sunday worship.2 Because I was involved in composing weekly intercessions during the recent pandemic, which were placed on the national church’s website for worship in the home, I have given much thought to their optimal content and rhetoric, and I have been asked to share what I have learned. Communities of believers continue to gather in many ways: in-person, outside (weather-permitting), as family groups at home, online, or a combination of all these modalities. A central practice of these gatherings is prayer. As my title for this article clarifies, I join with many persons around the world in assuming that this is not our last pandemic. With all likelihood, humanity will experience one virus after another, one crisis after another. If the pandemic forced upon us more comprehensive, more current, and more heartfelt patterns of prayer, it is best if what we learned can continue to inform our practice even during those times of relative tranquility.

A Glimpse into the Past When in 1965 I was a university sophomore and complained to the chaplain about the prior Sunday’s intercessions, he asked me to compose a set for the following small Wednesday evening eucharist. Several weeks later, he notified me that he had arranged for my student aide job to be changed from working in the library to writing for the chapel. I have thus now some fifty-five years of attending to the Sunday intercessions, but only recently have I been struck by the content and tone of what was called the General Prayer, a presumably required American Lutheran weekly text first included in the 1888 Common Service (Common Service Book 1917). After the Reformation, this prayer continued the usual liturgical practice begun within Lutheran churches to stipulate a lengthy set of intercessions into each regular worship service. The text of the nineteenth-century General Prayer is phenomenal. Separate paragraphs pray for the church; the clergy and their efforts; all the institutions and ministries of the church; Christian homes and the rearing of children; the President, Governor, legislature, and judges of the United States; “all who are in trouble, want, sickness, anguish of labor, peril of death, or any other adversity”; deliverance from every calamity that you can think of; “success to all lawful occupations on land and sea and to all pure arts and useful knowledge” (Common Service Book 1917, 19–20). Here is part of the paragraph about calamities: “Preserve us from war and bloodshed, from plague and pestilence, from all calamity by fire and water, from hail and tempest, from failure of harvest and from famine, from anguish of heart and despair of thy mercy, and from an evil death” (Common Service Book 1917,  19). This

 The inclusion of resources for lament in All Creation Sings (2020, 61–63) may signal a recognition of lament’s role in Sunday worship. 2

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historic prayer makes clear that people assumed that the future did not promise rainbows but rather would most likely be fraught with every kind of human misery, with personal and communal suffering. I do not know of any contemporary weekly intercessions that approximate the General Prayer with its listing of disasters waiting in the wings to come on stage and knock us down. I wonder whether we would be more equipped to tell the truth in our prayers, to cite timely troubles, and to cultivate an intercessory tone if perhaps at least once a year we would use the General Prayer as our model. Some worship resources do include the historic Great Litany: do we ever pray it? What in many places replaces this monumental set of petitions are succinct intercessions that prefer circumlocutions to truth-telling, omit any specific reference to last week’s distressing news, and maintain a gentle tone expressive of the general well-being of the worshipers. An assembly may offer a prayer of thanksgiving that Susan bore her infant, but does the prayer join us to her family in its agony, given that the child was born with medical needs that are beyond most families? We might compare the wholesome storytelling in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books and the subsequent delightful television series with what historians are now telling us were the genuine sufferings of that itinerant family. The children’s books with their small world of relative sweetness and light, so charming to American audiences, did not represent the actual situation of the Wilder family, nor its disregard for the native population, and I fear that the intercessions in many churches are similarly far from the genuine life of many Christians. We arrive for worship on Sunday morning aware that there are many crises in our assembly, our community, and our nation, pandemic, random violence, governmental failure, civil disorder, individual loss of innocence, and dread of an unknown future. It is not that some Christians ought to include the pandemic in their intercessions for a few more months, or now and then. It is rather that with all likelihood, we humans will experience one virus after another, one nation after another in which despotism rules, one starving population after another fleeing ecological distress, one household after another hiding sexual abuse, one teenager after another seeking respite in drugs. Because of the continuing suffering of humankind, I advocate intercessions that are truthful, timely, and trenchant in tone. About truth: might our intercessions do a better job of telling the truth about life? Why ought we adopt a prayer stance and repeat a ritual that describes a world that does not exist or mentions only small matters that will not disturb our peace of mind? About timeliness: admittedly, attention to timeliness places a burden on whoever composes the prayers. Before the liturgy, one must check with the pastor about any new parish concerns and the morning’s international news about what is going on across the globe. I recall with gratitude the Sunday in 2004 that I learned during the intercessions that there had been a catastrophic tsunami on the coast of Sri Lanka, precisely where our own family was vacationing in a cabin next to the suddenly uncontrolled sea. Regarding tone: can the wording of our petitions be worthy of the topic? Is the tone of lament markedly different from the tone of thanksgiving? Here is another question about tone: can the person leading the intercessions not read the petitions but pray them? Reading, praying: there is a difference in one’s tone of voice.

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Composing the Weekly Intercessions Based on decades of intercessory prayer, the following list may be helpful to others in composing their weekly intercessions. First, the writers enter the liturgical year’s season and immerse themselves in the day’s lectionary readings. During the liturgy, the worshipers will have the biblical readings in mind, and perhaps one of the readings offers a topic for prayer. A tone appropriate to Advent is different from one meant for Lent. Check the psalm for the day: perhaps the psalm includes a short phrase that can serve as the assembly’s refrain throughout the prayer. The writers are also to access reputable local, national, and international news sources to know the world we are describing to God in prayer. Which are the needs of the congregation that call for our prayer, given that the intercessions are not meant to functions as parish bulletin boards? Second, how is God invoked? When calling on God, what adjectives that describe God are appropriate for that Sunday or festival? Ought we this week call God almighty, or merciful, or compassionate, or unseen? Might we liken God to a Mighty Fortress, the Everlasting Arms, or the Rainbow of Promise? Is God governing all things, weeping along with us, or both? Often it is the case that the lectionary readings, the psalm of the day, or one of the appointed hymns suggest language with which to invoke God in prayer. Which imagery for God is helpful in that it anchors us in tradition, and which imagery for God accompanies us in an ongoing search for the Divine?

Truth-Telling If we follow a standard outline, the intercession’s first unit addresses the needs of the church. By this is meant not only one’s congregation, for example, with hopes for success for the new Sunday school curriculum, but also the worldwide church, which includes places of oppression, even martyrdoms, struggling underfunded minority communities, and churches with worship practices and theologies very different from our own. For the petition that addresses the needs of the earth, perhaps assign a member of the assembly who is ecologically knowledgeable to provide a specific need for the week. Are polar bears dying for a scarcity of ice? Are killer bees threatening the process of pollination on which our food sources rely? Is the local river newly polluted? It is best if this petition does not focus solely on a plea for forgiveness for our disregard for creation. In the intercessions, let us pray for the earth itself. It will be challenging to keep the petition concerning the nations of the world to a reasonable length, given the endless list of issues that might be appropriate each week: peace in war zones, integrity for elected leaders, wisdom for legislators, honesty for judges, equality for oppressed minorities, security in the face of violence, health in the face of an epidemic. The recommendation is for these petitions to get

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more specific. In a particular country this week, about a specific leader this week, about a stated population in trouble: our baptism connects us to all these. Verbalizing the truth about justice is perhaps the most challenging part of our weekly intercessions. Nevertheless, how do we monitor the sense that what we judge to be justice might not be the same as what God desires for humanity? When is a local or national situation such that we must lament and petition? What do we do with accusations that the prayers have become political? What advice would Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran theologian who was executed by Nazis in 1945, give us about how German Christians ought to have prayed during the rise of Nazism? Our churches find it relatively easy to name specific persons who are sick or suffering. However, this pattern of prayer calls for reflection. What is the purpose of the names? Is it mainly undertaken to inform congregation members about persons who are sick? Does the prayer include the person’s full name? Why or why not? Does the individual request our prayers? Who decides whether a name is added to the list and for how long? If the list becomes too lengthy, what are the worshipers supposed to be thinking about as the names peel by? It is a commonplace for assemblies to include a lengthy list of individuals who are sick, yet without ever making specific reference to an area population in peril, a city experiencing violence, a location of severe drought. Is our prayer comprehensive enough? The intercessions should always conclude with our remembrance of the faithful departed. Use truthful vocabulary: the verb to use is “died.” The church’s calendar of commemorations will enhance the list. Our naming of Hildegard of Bingen or Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, Toyohiko Kagawa or Harriet Tubman expands our horizon of faith: these persons lived through difficult times, and they represent all Christians who have died, to whom we are bound, whether we know it or not.

Timeliness Although the text of the General Prayer is impressive, composed many decades before its use, the goal of specificity of the petitions implies timeliness. The prayers must be checked on Sunday morning before their use. What climate disaster occurred over the weekend? Since the prayers were composed, which member of the congregation or a globally beloved Christian has died? Some parts of worship come to us from the past, from Hebrew devotion and Christianity’s origins. Nevertheless, the prayers of intercession are a place where today is featured, this day, this location. Introducing specific names of persons or locations requires that the prayer leader of prayer be adept at pronouncing unfamiliar words. There are Christians who advocate that every member of the assembly be welcomed into the ministry of composing the prayers. On the other hand, just as with the parish musician, an assembly may decide that only some members are capable of the unique task of praying aloud for us all in a complex and diverse world.

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Tone In some assemblies, the rhetorical tone of the individual author of the prayer is valued. My preference is rather that the goal is to reach an assembly voice. Here the tone gathers up each worshiper into the communal speech, to which each person can say an Amen. The tone will be appropriate to the time of the liturgical year, the readings, or the crisis on everyone’s mind. Extra words can obscure the tone. Give silence its due, remembering that an assembly includes small children who will not keep quiet for long.

Crafting Prayers of Lament Whether as part of the weekly intercessions or stand-alone rituals, crafting petitions of lament is extremely difficult. Is the prayer genuinely a communal lament addressed to God, or is the prayer a speech directed at the assembly or some outside group? Consider the desire to compose a familiar lament about racism. To what degree is the focus on “race” appropriate? What is “race”? How else can societal divisions be understood? Who has all suffered from this age-old human malady of discrimination? Who has been primarily responsible for it? What are the skin colors of the assembly who will be asked to join in lament? How do the many biracial Christians fit into contemporary categories of identity? How can our prayer lead us more fully into a shared identity as one human race beloved by God? It is likely that members of a congregation will not agree about whether our prayer should beg God to bring us into a time when oppression based on ancestral origin is over and done with. The petitions for the church, the earth, and the world, beginning with a lament sentence, is one way to include it in the assembly prayer. Here are some examples: “Around us are the sick; there is starvation, the virus continues, many persons receive no medical attention, our neighbors and dear ones are ill. That you will bless all ministries of care and will relieve the suffering of those who are ill in body, mind, and spirit, we pray to you, merciful God: Hear our laments, and receive our prayers.” Here is a different format: “We lament the decades of ethnic injustice and societal prejudice that have brought such suffering to many residents of our country, and we pray that you bless the indigenous peoples, descendants of Africans, and all immigrants to this land and that you form us into a nation in which all are honored in equal measure. O God, Liberator of the oppressed, hear our cries. In mercy, receive our prayers.” Those assigned to craft the intercessions can schedule specific topics to address different issues over several months. Sundays during the pandemic, the intercessions may include a full petition about the pandemic: mourn the dead and pray for the millions who had contracted the virus, those in quarantine, the aged experiencing the virus after-effects, all who have lost employment, those living in fear,

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children who cannot attend school, parents with needs for child care, physicians, nurses, and home health aides, hospitals and clinics, medical researchers, the World Health Organization, societal policies for stemming the contagion, and a fair distribution of the vaccine. Perhaps there is more to be added to this list. A standard format for communal lament is recommended. Whether facing disease, social injustice, ecological damage, depression, or fear of death, the exchange between the leader and the assembly always begins with a biblical example. Followed by singing the Kyrie (a lament hymn) or the Trisagion, and concludes with an appropriate trinitarian blessing, such as “God the Father holds the universe in arms of mercy, God the Son brought healing to the sick and suffering; God the Spirit grant us peace within our pain.” A lament that addresses social injustice might begin with the story of the Israelite slaves. A lament that deals with diseases could reference the story of the bleeding woman. An example of a well-crafted opening litany used the following format: “Mercy, gracious One, on all afflicted and killed by the coronavirus, and forgiveness, Redeemer, where our actions or inactions have caused its spread.” Mercy, gracious One, short phrase, and forgiveness, Redeemer, short phrase. The litany contained not a single extraneous word.

The Model of Polycarp In the year 156, Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, a city in present-day Turkey, was burned at the stake for being a Christian. The account of his martyrdom states that requesting the arresting soldiers to wait until he finished his prayers, “he was unable to stop for two hours, calling to mind all those who had ever come into contact with him, both important and insignificant, famous and obscure, and the entire catholic church scattered throughout the world” (Musurillo 1982, 9). I am not proposing that our Sunday intercessions last a full two hours, but I am urging that our petitions strive to gather the assembly into the needs of all the world marked by truth-telling, timeliness, and appropriate tone. These prayers will take some time, both to compose and to deliver. We are learning to care for all who suffer and to lament before God a suffering world. It may be that one of the few positive effects of the pandemic is a wake-up call to the churches to pray with greater intent for a broader world that is filled with more misery than we could readily imagine.

References All Creation Sings, pew edition. 2020. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress. Common Service Book of the Lutheran Church. 1917. Philadelphia: The Board of Publication of the United Lutheran Church in America. Evangelical Lutheran Worship, pew edition. 2006. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress.

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Musurillo, Herbert, ed. 1982. The Martyrdom of St. Polycarp. In The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, vol. 7. New York: Oxford. Ramshaw, Gail. 2016. Praying for the Whole World: A Handbook for Intercessors. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress. ———. 2017. Pray, Praise, and Give Thanks: A Collection of Litanies, Laments, and Thanksgivings at Font and Table. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress. Gail Ramshaw, a retired professor of religion, studies and crafts liturgical language from her home outside of Washington, DC. She is the author of Praying for the Whole World: A Handbook for Intercessors (Augsburg Fortress, 2016) and Pray, Praise, and Give Thanks: A Collection of Litanies, Laments, and Thanksgivings at Font and Table (Augsburg Fortress, 2017). She has composed intercessory prayer since 1965 and provided weekly intercessions posted online during the pandemic.  

Part III

Fed by the Meal

Chapter 7

Real Presence and Absent Bodies: Sacramental Practice Today Dirk G. Lange

Introduction The term ‘real presence’ evokes a multitude of images, at least for those with some religious background, upbringing, or curiosity. It conjures up other words: transubstantiation, consubstantiation, and memorial are three common ones. A philosophical shorthand captures one of the most persistent and haunting questions of human existence, the relationship between the body and the spirit. The question became doubly haunting during the COVID-19 pandemic when many communities have refrained from celebrating the sacrament, especially Holy Communion (or the sacrament of the altar), or have constructed new practices using existing modalities to ensure that people are not deprived or missing the sacrament. The question of presence, God’s presence, is not at stake but rather the safeguarding of sacramental action as God’s action. It is perhaps not so curious that a Christian or baptismal spirituality would begin its reflection on faith with the body and not with the spirit. This short reflection on the real presence in a time of pandemic will do the same, first turning to the body rather than to the spirit, turning not to the intangible nor moving beyond the limits of tangibility (the five senses) and time (a spiritual hindrance) but the incarnational. First, a consideration of the sacrament as the locus or epitome of real presence and the crucial role of the body is undertaken followed by a reflection on how the sacrament shapes a faith community. The communal experience constitutes one of the foremost characteristics of the sacrament, always pushing the individual believer

D. G. Lange (*) The Lutheran World Federation, Geneva, Switzerland Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero (ed.), Church After the Corona Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23731-7_7

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beyond the private to an encounter with the neighbor. The final section will consider the celebration of the sacrament of the altar in particular. In what ways is the sacrament continually disruptive of our communities? Martin Luther’s sacramental theology will be a guide in this exploration. The sacramental theology developed is rooted in the Lutheran confessional writings. Today, communities are challenged with the embodied practice since the body has become particularly vulnerable to a virus, and yet the mitigation of the COVID pandemic does not mean these questions immediately disappear. In this context, faith and the experience of presence are challenged to define a liturgical discipline that gives shape not only to worship but to a community’s relationship to the world around it.

The Body and Presence Sacrament is an odd word. It is known and unknown. Some might call it a “churchy” word, certainly not used in daily life (and sometimes not even a lot at church). Participants in worship on a Sunday morning may ask something about the sermon or comment on it, but very few ask each other: how was the sacrament today? A pastor may hear many thanks for a good sermon at the end of worship, but very few have heard ‘‘that was a good sacrament, Pastor!’’ And yet, sacraments point to a particular dynamic in both worship and faith. The argument could be made that when Luther sought to reform the church, he began with reforming liturgical practices. The Reformation is, perhaps first and foremost, a reform of practice – penance, confession, the sacraments, and prayer. In the many reforms accomplished, the one characteristic of the liturgy that Luther maintained and strengthened was the relationship between Word and sacrament. The “and” is critical; there is not one without the other. The celebration of the “mass” was not to be solely focused on the celebration of the sacrament with people only watching, nor was it to be the opposite extreme, which started emerging with the Reformation, that is, worship centered around preaching where the sacrament was subsumed to the sermon, if not eliminated. To underscore the centrality of both Word and sacrament, Luther and the early reformers defined the church as a gathering or assembly of people where the Word ‘and’ sacrament are properly celebrated; that is, where they communicate the gospel, distribute the gospel, and proclaim the gospel. Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession notes that “It is also taught that at all times there must be and remain one holy, Christian church. It is the assembly of all believers among whom the gospel is purely preached, and the holy sacraments are administered according to the gospel” (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 42). The word “sacrament” itself and its history in translation is extraordinarily complex (Mohrmann 1954). It is employed with a variety of meanings. In North Africa, Tertullian used sacramentum to translate the Greek word musterion. One particular

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instance is found in Mark 4:11. In that passage, Jesus tells his disciples that “to you has been given the musterion of the kingdom of God.” Given the variety of meanings, what is the word “sacrament” indicating in this particular passage? Over the past few decades, there has been renewed debate concerning the referent for musterion. A shift has expanded the possible interpretations beyond the all-encompassing Markan “Messianic Secret” motif. Long before the establishment of the motif in twentieth-century exegesis, the choice of the word sacramentum, knowingly or unknowingly, proposed a unique approach. The mystery or secret of the Kingdom is revealed in Jesus as the one living or practicing the Kingdom here and now. Sacramentum or musterion refers then not to something that can be understood as such (secret teaching) but to the recognition of God’s way in the world (Haacker 1972). Sacramentum is a trace of God’s way, a way which is incarnational. The mystery or secret to which Jesus refers in Mark 4:11 is his praxis, that is, his embodied presence, his own corporal presence acting in the world. The body, the human body of Jesus, reveals the presence of God. In Jesus, this presence or way has been given to the disciples and invites them into that sacramentum, into that mystery, into discipleship. The body of Jesus is the musterion. In other words, God has disclosed God’s self. God practices God through “means” of the created order. As a liturgical act, the sacraments are therefore deeply incarnational. God comes to human beings in what can be seen, touched, heard, tasted, and sensed. God reveals Godself through the body, through a praxis, in-the-flesh (incarnation). The sacraments bear witness to the incarnation. They proclaim without words but in practice that God has come down to earth. God has come in Jesus, in human form, bodily form, earthy form, lived and suffered with us. Ate and wept with us. Washed and taught with us. The liturgy embodies this witness when it understands “God” as present in the washing at the font, in the reading and preaching, healing, praying, and the meal-sharing. Holding Word and sacrament together underlines the created reality. Human beings are not simply minds or cognitive entities. They know, think, imagine, decide, judge using their five senses. Article 5 of the Augsburg Confession builds on this fact. “So that we may obtain this faith, the ministry of teaching the gospel and administering the sacraments was instituted. For through the Word and the sacrament as through instruments [means] the Holy Spirit is given, who effects faith where and when it pleases God” (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 41). Proclamation is not only aural – it is not just about hearing the Word – but it also receives the Word in the body. Proclamation of the Gospel (justification/liberation) is defined as both the gospel preached (spoken and heard) and the gospel distributed (sacraments). Here is one of the major premises of the Reformation and one to which Luther constantly refers. Gospel is not only the Word spoken, but it is also the Word distributed – touched, tasted, seen, etc. It is perhaps most succinctly defined in the Apology to the Augsburg Confession, Article 13:

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God moves our hearts through the word and the rite at the same time so that they believe and receive faith just as Paul says [Rom. 10:17], “So faith comes from what is heard.” For just as the Word enters through the ear in order to strike the heart, so also the rite enters through the eye in order to move the heart. The word and the rite have the same effect. (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 219)

As word and rite, as a full enactment in the midst of a collective body, the liturgy points to this musterion – the one person of Christ, human and divine. In the bread and wine and promise, the community encounters not the historical Jesus nor an imaginary Christ but God who calls a community into an exchange. This dynamic of the sacrament is perhaps most vividly portrayed in the Gospel of Luke and the Resurrection story of the Emmaus disciples. The disciples were walking along the road, discouraged, dismayed, hopeless. The one whom they had hoped would redeem Israel was crucified. He was taken away and destroyed. Suddenly, there is another one walking with them and explaining the Scripture to them. They did not recognize Jesus. Their eyes were closed perhaps by their imagination, by what they thought had happened or whom they had hoped Jesus to be. Their eyes were closed by their own expectations. However, as Jesus walked and explained, preached, and prayed with them, their hearts were burning inside of them. “Where two or three are gathered…” Jesus is present. Nevertheless, even his presence is transitory. As the story unfolds, Jesus prepares to walk on his way. The Emmaus disciples stop and beg him to stay. Inside their dwelling, they share a meal. Jesus, as a guest, took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Their eyes were opened, but then he vanished. Just as he tells Mary Magdalene, ‘‘do not hold on to me,’’ Jesus moves on. The disciples cannot hold on to him. They cannot enshrine him. He passes over them and thereby invites them into a continual exodus (Certeau 1957). Jesus’ presence is known not as a body on a cross but as a body given, poured out in praxis, with others, in a communal action that always points beyond itself. His presence is known in the act of sharing a meal, bread, and wine. The notion of real presence  – that communion which constitutes Christ’s own being, human and divine – is not an object to be adored or contained (whether in a tabernacle or in a small group of friends) but a praxis that is called to seek always new beginnings, new possibilities.

Sacramental Approaches Real presence pulls the believer ever deeper into God’s way, into the praxis of new beginnings. However, the Christian community too often prefers to protect itself from the risks of such a practice.  Luther’s situation encountered in the early Reformation period thrust him into the debates of real presence and sacramental theology and practice, exemplifying the various ways communities attempt to control, capture, or even restrict God’s presence.

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Luther was confronted with two extreme approaches to sacramental practice. On the one hand, a mystical approach envelops the sacrament, communicating grace by the mere (and correct priestly) performance of the rite (ex opera operato); on the other, the sacrament becomes merely a sign, a memorial, recalling a moment in history, nothing more. The vestiges of the former continue to exist in children’s games: hocus pocus – Hoc est corpus meum – so deep was the popular perception of the “magical” moment in people’s minds. The latter example turns into a play, a piece of theatre or film, reenacting an event. Both extremes ignore the body, the created or earthly element in the sacrament. The “bread” becomes a little white wafer (that resembles neither bread nor Jesus’ body) and is either adored or, very rationally, just stored away for next time or even thrown out. Today, Christian communities encounter a similar situation. In the case of many Protestant communities, the sacraments are side-lined; they are not celebrated regularly or fully. In some cases, as with the baptismal font, it is stored in a closet until there is a baptism. The primary sacrament is hidden away. The connection between the sacraments and daily life, between meal-sharing and feeding the neighbor, is lost. In the other case, the sacrament is adored, reserved but the reality of Jesus’ body – the suffering one crying in the street – is often not heard. Today, a third extreme manifests itself. In response to the COVID pandemic, at least in many Protestant churches, the sacrament is celebrated online, sometimes under the rationale of renewing the “house church” concept. Once again, the sacrament is brought under the restrictions of a community (family or a group of friends). Perhaps, the sacrament is not locked up and reserved in a tabernacle. Nonetheless, it is meant to serve the “needs” of a particular group of people gathered around bread and wine. It is even, in some cases, claimed as a right or privilege of every believer to celebrate it and thereby “own” it. These various and sometimes contradictory practices of the sacrament are not surprising. The reasons are simple. For most people, perhaps especially in Protestant communities, the sacraments are obtuse, and real presence is difficult to grasp. Many churchgoers engage the ritual action but remain confused about the sacramental meaning. When a ritual practice is not easily understood, typical reactions are to either invent a rational and straightforward meaning, dismiss outright that which is not understood (in this case, the sacrament), or construct a self-serving misrepresentation. Yet, the sacraments, in a Lutheran approach, are meant to resist all such reaction. The sacraments are never something that the believer possesses. They stand as a sign of human vulnerability, of human need. In fact, they witness the inability of human beings to hold them. The sacraments cannot be understood or rationalized, and they are meant to oppose our reason. In the preface to the Small Catechism, Luther admonishes pastors to preach in such a way that people come demanding the sacrament (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 350). What does he mean? Luther understands the sacrament not as an empty memorial or as a quasi-magical ritual. The sacrament is not something that the believer or the community watches or only half-heartedly engages. Rather, the

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sacrament is a place of encounter where a community recognizes its deep inability and its deep need but also a place where the community knows certainly that God continually returns and calls. The sacraments invite conversion and active participation. The sacraments break open the faith community. They broaden and re-orient it. They confront and disrupt the community, continually pointing to another, to someone, not present. Real presence continually points to an absence, the absence within each person to hold on to God, the absence within each community, and the absence of the other, the neighbor, without whom the community is never complete.

Community and Presence The focus up to this point has been on the necessary “sign”, that is, the body as part of the sacrament. Whether it is full immersion or a full meal with bread and wine, the sacrament is constituted of and engages the body. The historic extremes tended to ignore the body, either relegating the rite to the word or the word to the rite. The third approach, which has arisen today in response to COVID, also risks dismissing the body as a communal body. In 1520, Martin Luther added an addendum to his treatise, The Holy and Blessed Sacrament of the Body of Christ, entitled “The Brotherhoods.” This addendum perhaps comes as no surprise considering Luther’s multifaceted struggle against what he understood to be the captivity of the sacraments and the sacrament of the altar in particular. The “brotherhoods” exemplify a form of captivity: they required a certain number of prayers and masses said at appointed times, but their devotion only served themselves. Such brotherhoods benefit only themselves. In them, people “learn to seek their own good, to love themselves, to be faithful only to one another, to despise others, to think themselves better than others, and to presume to stand higher before God than others. And so perishes the communion of saints, Christian love, and the true [fellowship] which is established in the holy sacrament, while selfish love grows in them” (LW 35:69). In the main body of this treatise, Luther explains the “true significance” of the sacrament not as the “forgiveness of sins” but as a true fellowship bounded to the forgiveness of sins. Luther places emphasis on communion. Forgiveness is broadened beyond the individual experience and reality, beyond the personal relationship with God (though never denying that relationship) to the communal. At the table, believers are drawn into God’s reconciling activity. Luther writes, “The significance or effect of this sacrament is fellowship of all the saints. This fellowship consists in this, that all the spiritual possessions of Christ and his saints are shared with and become the common property of him who receives this sacrament. Again, all sufferings and sins also become common property and this love engenders love in return and [love] unites” (LW 35:50–51).

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In the sacrament, something happens. Christ comes with the whole company of believers. The community participates in the “happy exchange”: all spiritual possessions of Christ – God’s immeasurable goodness – is shared with all, and in exchange, Christ and the community take up all sufferings and sins. Misery and tribulations are laid upon Christ and upon the community of saints (LW 35:54). A praxis of burden-bearing is established. It is clear that the holy sacrament is nothing else than a divine sign, in which are pledged, granted, and imparted Christ and all saints together with all their works, sufferings, merits, mercies, and possessions, for the comfort and strengthening of all who are in anxiety and sorrow, persecuted by the devil, sins, the world, the flesh, and every evil. And to receive the sacrament is nothing else than to desire all this and firmly to believe that it is done (LW 35:60). The sacrament of the eucharist imparts Christ and all saints together. Luther will almost never mention “Christ” without adding “and all the saints.” Christ becomes Christ in the saints and the believer is once again directed to that other mode of existence, that dissemination of Christ, the dissemination of Christ’s presence in the other. Incarnation and community are inseparable. The neighbor and the believer are both caught up in the gift of God’s continual dissemination through liturgical repetition, through the celebration of Word and sacraments. Through the participation in the eucharist, believers are made one with Christ and all the saints in their works, sufferings and merit (LW 35:60). Union with Christ is not the inception of individualistic piety (Jesus and me) or a new spirituality. When believers are “conformed” to this disseminated Christ, they are conformed to the neighbor in suffering and need. “Again, through the same love, we are to be changed and to make the infirmities of all other Christians our own; we are to take upon ourselves their form and their necessity” (LW 35:58). The keyword here is not “take upon ourselves” but “through the same love.” This love first took upon itself all need; this love revealed itself through death; through dissemination, this love draws the faithful to take upon themselves the sufferings of others. What the believer receives in the celebration of the Eucharist is Christ with all his saints, that is, what continually returns in the movement of the liturgy, is Christ, human and divine, Christ and the neighbor in need and in blessing (Lange 2009, chap. 6). Christ’s presence – real presence – in the sacrament confronts and disrupts the ideas believers may make of God. When the bread and the cup are shared, in that quiet, cozy moment of reception, the individual may imagine a special communion with Jesus, but the real presence disrupts that imagination. Not a white sparkling Jesus returns to commune, not a Jesus of our own invention, but the neighbor greets us in all shapes, sizes, and conditions. The real body of Christ draws us into a unique communion.

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Sacrament as an Entire Action This rather lengthy introduction into real presence was necessary in order to consider the possibilities and responsibilities of celebrating the sacrament in a time of the pandemic. The guiding question applies to every situation: What is Gospel today? How does the liturgy translate the Gospel for this moment in this context? What are some of the core choices that need to be made in light of the reflection on real presence? The importance of the body has been established. Proclamation occurs not just to listening ears and understanding minds but to the whole body, through earthly means, and created order. Faith is attached to an object because human beings are not just spirit but bodies. It must be external so that it can be perceived and grasped by the senses and thus brought into the heart, just as the entire gospel is an external, oral proclamation (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 460). Body and soul are one. Just as the ear hears the words, so the heart (body) also receives it. The word and the rite (bodily enactment/sacrament) have the same effect, as noted in Article 13 of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 219ff). Therefore, in baptism, water is essential, immersion is important, and bodies are important. In terms of the sacrament of Holy Communion, a fully participatory meal is important. Real bread and wine and people eating and drinking together. A community is formed around this proclamation of God’s immeasurable goodness, and this formation, even within a small faith community, can in turn shape society. “The body is the locus: how we treat needy bodies gives the clue to how a society is organized” (McFague 2001, 174). The needy body is everybody. The faith community, with its careful and deeply respectful attention to the body (and especially the body of the most vulnerable), can help society re-envision its relationship to the body. In the case of a pandemic, decrease the spread of the virus, encourage vaccinations, promote healing. The second argument focuses on the faith community. It is to be a continually open, porous community. Whenever it wants to close off its borders, Christ returns in the guise of a beggar. Therefore, for the early reformers, the entire action of the sacrament involved the entire community together. The description of the action of the sacrament is found in the Solid Declaration in the Formula of Concord, Article 7, the Holy Supper: But this “blessing” or the recitation of the Words of Institution of Christ by itself does not make a valid sacrament if the entire action of the Supper, as Christ administered it, is not observed (…). On the contrary, Christ’s command, “Do this,” must be observed without division or confusion. For it includes the entire action or administration of this sacrament: that in a Christian assembly bread and wine are taken, consecrated, distributed, received, eaten, and drunk, and that thereby the Lord’s death is proclaimed, as St. Paul presents the entire action of the breaking of the bread or its distribution and reception in 1 Corinthians 10[:16]. (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 607)

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The aptly named “entire action rule” emphasizes the complete liturgical celebration of the Holy Communion or Eucharist. The paragraph’s opening sentence is striking, especially in light of many practices in Lutheran parishes through the ages and still today. The “Words of Institution of Christ by itself does not make a valid sacrament.” The Words of Institution are not magical words, and they do not point to a special moment when “something” happens. Rather, the whole liturgical celebration culminates in this great thanksgiving in the Holy Spirit that evokes God’s radical, self-giving gift, God’s gift of God’s self, Jesus Christ, Mercy, in our midst and engages the people gathered in communal action. Such an insistence on the entire action with an ordained pastor and an entire community does not lead to clericalism. The paragraph from the Solid Declaration is, in its own way, anti-clerical. It suggests that the sacrament of Holy Communion is the action of the entire people, standing, praying, singing, thanking, eating, and drinking together. It is not solely the action of a pastor. In fact, when Holy Communion online takes the form of a pastor celebrating the sacrament in one space, perhaps with one or two others, and this performance is transmitted online into many other spaces, that action may reinforce clericalism, centering everything on the pastor’s action. On the contrary, following the Solid Declaration, the people (the faithful) can say to the pastor: “No, we can wait. This is something we should all do together.” If worship is conducted online, the celebration of the sacrament of Holy Communion can wait. There is no shame in waiting. It has been the reality of many faithful persons through the generations and today, who cannot regularly attend a worship service. A communion is formed, the dimensions of which surprise us by their depth. A challenge and discipline are encountered to invite people into different obedience of faith that explore what desert might mean in the midst of abundance. Reframing from the celebration of the sacrament is not grounded in an idea that community (or prayer) online is defective or impossible. Worship can happen online; community can be formed online. Online or virtual worship “renders tangible a connectivity that faith and prayer have already established. Praying online, whether live-streamed or pre-recorded, heightens an awareness of a depth of communion that constitutes human reality. It does not create that communion” (Lange 2021, 186). There are many ways a faith community can gather for worship online.1 There are many options that parishes are considering as the pandemic enters a new phase. Hybrid – both in-person and online – is seriously considered. However, a question that must be asked, is in what ways is a community shaped long term by the decisions it is now taking? Though worship online can be enriching and even participatory, the sacrament of Holy Communion requires a different discipline in its celebration. The sacrament is not celebrated to sustain an inner circle rejoicing in good and holy feelings of

 Although he comes to a different conclusion about the possibility of online sacramental practice, Schiefelbein-Guerrero (2020) notes that an online Service of the Word is preferable. 1

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togetherness, nor is it celebrated so that people do not feel deprived. The sacrament of the table invites into a radical community with its center continually opened up toward the neighbor who is not present. Real presence disrupts the community. As Luther already argued in the 1520s, the significance of the sacrament can quickly be diminished if not lost if it becomes the privilege or even “right” of a small group that identifies “real presence” with its community.

Real Presence Luther sometimes described the neighbor, the one outside the faith community, as the “beggar.” Today, the neighbor is known in many ways, people known and unknown, persons from a minority group, marginalized and excluded groups, and still as beggars and homeless persons. The sacrament of Holy Communion will always direct the community gathered to the community not present. The sacrament as the bearer of the real presence of Christ will challenge our understanding of community; it will disrupt liturgies and gatherings as Jesus steps into a community’s midst as a beggar. Yes, the beggar for Luther is also God. God will always stand outside closed and privileged circles and knock at the door (LW 22:519–520). The sacrament is a witness to Christ’s real presence in the midst of a faith community. The body – the material elements – with the Word added to them, with the promise added to them, pushes the believer out of a comfortable spirituality or self-­ focused spirituality. The sacraments practice disruption upon the community, exercising it in the work of the Holy Spirit, engaging it in praxis that itself is deeply embedded in God’s act of reclaiming, reconciling the world to God’s self. “For in [Christ], the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him…” (Colossians 2:9). Christ’s real presence is the fullness of deity dwelling bodily, given to the community in the sacrament. God and human in a unique communion that opens up towards a fullness, towards a unique communion that is deeper than any community, where all are so “united that a closer relationship cannot be conceived” (LW 35:70). From a Lutheran perspective, the challenge or the call of the sacrament is not to be diminished, serving only individual or communal spiritual needs; nor is the radical nature of the entire action by the entire community to be lost by new forms of online celebrations. Present, at the heart of this communion, is the one Christ, not a Christ of glory but Christ on the cross, Christ who is one with the world in suffering. Real presence, Christ’s presence, is continually directing the community to absent bodies. During the pandemic and the slowly emerging landscape, with new and different parameters for gathering the body of Christ, perhaps this time offers an opportunity to reconsider how faith communities have ritualized if not domesticated the sacrament. This present time invites faith communities to reimagine sacramental celebrations that would open up towards the neighbor. The time can also be one of waiting, vigilance, and hope for the day when the sacrament can be celebrated anew, amid the gathered assembly, and perhaps also in new ways that include all those not currently at the table.

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References de Certeau, Michel. 1957. Les pélérins d’Emmaus. Christus 4: 56–63. Haacker, Klaus. 1972. Erwägungen zu Mc 4:11. Novum Testamentum 14 (3): 219–225. Kolb, Robert, and Timothy J. Wengert, eds. 2000. The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Lange, Dirk G. 2009. Trauma Recalled: Liturgy, Disruption, and Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 2021. Today Everything Is Different: An Adventure in Prayer and Action. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Luther, Martin. 1960–. Luther’s Works. American Edition. 75 Volumes. Edited by Jaroslav Pelikan (Volumes 1–30), Helmut T.  Lehmann (Volumes 31–55), and Christopher Boyd Brown and Benjamin T.G. Mayes (Volumes 56–75). Philadelphia: Fortress; St. Louis: Concordia. LW: See Luther, Luther’s Works. McFague, Sallie. 2001. Life Abundant. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Mohrmann, Christine. 1954. Sacramentum dans les plus anciens textes chrétiens. Harvard Theological Review 47 (3): 141–152. Schiefelbein-Guerrero, Kyle K. 2020. Whether One May Flee from Digital Worship: Reflections on Sacramental Ministry in a Public Health Crisis. Dialog 59 (2): 49–55. Wengert, Timothy J., ed. 2015. The Annotated Luther, Volume 1: The Roots of Reform. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Dirk G. Lange  is Assistant General Secretary for Ecumenical Relations at the Lutheran World Federation and the  Fredrik A.  Schiotz Chair of Christian Mission and Professor of Worship at Luther Seminary (USA). He graduated from Emory University with a PhD in theological studies. He has written extensively on topics in liturgical theology and ecumenism. His book Trauma Recalled is on Luther’s sacramental theology. His second book focuses on Luther’s theology of prayer: Today, Everything is Different: An Adventure in Prayer and Action. He is primary author of The Common Prayer for the Joint Catholic-Lutheran Commemoration of the 500 Years of Reformation and was the Project Officer for this commemorative liturgy celebrated on October 31, 2016 with Pope Francis and leaders of the Lutheran World Federation. Lange is an ordained Lutheran pastor.

Chapter 8

Toward a More Accessible Body of Christ Deanna A. Thompson

Introduction I used to be a digital skeptic, dubious that virtual connectedness could foster any meaningful relationship-building among us. However, getting diagnosed with incurable cancer provided all sorts of opportunities to reconsider my assumptions about how the world works, including my certainty that virtual connectivity is incapable of enriching our lives. In 2008, cancer broke my back, and treatment landed me in the hospital, sidelining me from in-person interaction except with doctors and nurses, immediate family, and a few close friends. And my life as a university professor, involved parent, active churchgoer, and participation in community events all came to a halt. But amid so much loss, I was introduced to the life-giving possibilities of virtual connectedness. Relatives and friends got in touch through a website focused on caring for those who are sick. Friends created a virtual calendar of food and cleaning needs. As news of my cancer spread virtually, others living with incurable cancer got in touch to offer resources and support. These virtual connections were not simply poor substitutes for real interaction; they nurtured my broken body and filled my soul at a time of despair. I wouldn’t have survived my cancer quarantine without them. As a theologian, I had never given the church universal much thought in life before cancer. But when cancer prevented me from being physically present at church, I was introduced to how the body of Christ exists virtually in profound, healing ways.

D. A. Thompson (*) Lutheran Center for Faith, Values, and Community, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero (ed.), Church After the Corona Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23731-7_8

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Not long after I moved into my first remission, I came across Pastor Jason Byassee’s insight that the body of Christ has always been a virtual body (2011). Byassee observes that the Apostle Paul was seldom physically present with most fellow members of the body of Christ. While Paul was physically distant from the early churches in Corinth, Thessalonica, and Galatia, he was virtually present through his letters that were read aloud to the gathered community. Inspired by this insight that the body of Christ has always been virtual, I set to exploring ways the virtual body of Christ has always contributed to ministering to those who suffer and how we might employ our digital tools to enhance our ability to live out this calling in the world today (Thompson 2016). Pre-pandemic, many church leaders I engaged with around digital technology acknowledged the growing need for the church to have a virtual presence. Well-­ functioning websites, online registrations, perhaps a Facebook group that enabled people associated with the congregation to connect virtually were often priorities. At the same time, it was also evident that for many churches, digital engagement with members and the wider community was tangential or even inconsequential to the heart of their ministry and mission. But now, over two years into a global pandemic, incredible numbers of churches have gone virtual. Christian congregations across the globe have pivoted to offer online worship, virtual youth groups, Bible studies, and coffee hours; even weddings and funerals have moved online. With the mass migration to virtual spaces, churches have been forced into reimagining what it means to be the body of Christ in the digital age. Mainline U.S. denominations have debated the issue of offering Holy Communion via online worship. Disagreements and debates about aspects of being a church that should go virtual have been at the forefront of this discussion. This essay will utilize current debates around virtual communion and propose that congregational use of digital tools throughout the pandemic made visible new ways the church can be more accessible as the body of Christ, as well as embody Paul’s vision of the body of Christ that centers and honors the weakest members of the body in the living out of Christian vocation in the world today.

 rivileging the Weakest Members Within the (Virtual) Body P of Christ One of the most enduring images of what it means to be church comes from Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth (1 Cor 12:27). Members of the body of Christ are called upon to attend especially to those who are broken and hurting. “[T]he parts of the body that people think are the weakest are the most necessary. The parts of the body that we think are less honorable are the ones we honor the most. If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it” (I Cor 12:22a-23a, 26a CEB 2011).

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Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth presents a vision of being a body that required significant resocialization for the Corinthians. In this group, gender, class, education, familial status, or status as a slave were factors that determined a person’s standing and worth within the community. Paul writes that within the body of Christ, “none of you will become arrogant by supporting one of us against the other” (1 Cor 4:6b ESV).1 This call no doubt required a revision of how they understood their social relationships with one another. Seeing those who are hurting as the most significant members of the body “is a fundamental and paradoxical principle that goes to the heart of the gospel and the nature of eschatological existence” (Lee 2006, 148). For Paul, being part of the body of Christ links members of the body to the cross of Christ. Paul’s understanding of the church as the body of Christ is aligned with the view of God’s solidarity through the cross with those whose lives are undone by suffering. New Testament scholar Michael Gorman refers to Paul’s vision of a “cruciform hierarchy” (2017, 272), which privileges the weakest within the community. This privileging of the weakest instead of those with power and privilege prioritizes the values Jesus embodied in his walk to the cross. The church as the body of Christ patterns life together after the life of Jesus. For God’s promised vision of a city where there is no more crying, no more dying (Rev 21) to be glimpsed in the here and now, God in Christ—and those who become members of the body of Christ thereafter—focus on the weakest members of the body. Paul insists that it is God’s arrangement of the body (1 Cor 12:24) that promotes care by the entire church of members who need it most, foreshadowing what life looks like in life beyond this one (Lee 2006, 142). Paul offers a revisioning of what it means to be human in light of one’s membership in the body of Christ. After he paints a picture of how various parts of the body work together in 1 Cor 12:12–26, Paul moves on to identify the Corinthian Christians explicitly as Christ’s body: “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor 12:27), a transition that narrows the focus to the particular shape of the church as located at the congregation in Corinth. This is significant, biblical scholar James Thompson argues, for it is here we see Paul’s vision for the care of the weakest taking root at the local level. “The local congregation is the place for care of the most vulnerable in society,” Thompson writes. “The local congregation is small enough to recognize the special needs of its members” (2014, 197). In his explanation of the variety of spiritual gifts in 1 Cor 12:4–11, Paul insists that the diversity of gifts of the Spirit are given by God “for the common good” (1 Cor 12:7). That the listing of the charismata (gifts of the Spirit) occurs just before the passage on the diversity and mutual reliance of each body part on one another makes visible what theologian Guillermo Hansen calls the “vulnerable interdependence” among members of the body (2012, 36).

 It is important to note that Paul’s letter does not consistently endorse an egalitarian vision. See for example, 1 Cor. 11:2–16. See also commentary about this tension in Chap. 2 of Thompson (2016). 1

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Biblical scholar Rolf Jacobson echoes this theme of interdependence in Paul’s vision of the unity of spiritual gifts. Jacobson (2017) writes that “Paul emphasized that everyone in the congregation had all of the spiritual gifts only if they all belonged together. Those who speak in tongues need interpreters of tongues or they are merely clanging cymbals. Those who have prophetic powers but lack love are nothing. We only have all the gifts if we persist in the body together.” Jacobson then applies this insight to the status of the “weakest” members of the body: One thing this means for the virtual body of Christ is that those who are isolated and suffering are not merely in need of the care and gifts of the strong and healthy, the strong and healthy also need the spiritual gifts of the isolated and weak. Grace and spiritual gifts flow both ways. In addition, we must remember what Paul taught about the spiritual gifts. Each of us has our own unique set of the lesser spiritual gifts, but everyone can seek the greater spiritual gifts: faith, hope, and the greatest of all, love. (2017)

In other words, Paul’s vision of the body of Christ should not be understood as a unidirectional framing of the relationship of the weakest members to those who are not today undone by suffering. Those viewed as the “weakest members” also play a critical role in the body’s function. Furthermore, vulnerable interdependence within the body of Christ calls all members to be ready to receive gifts from others within the body.

Virtual Body of Christ in the Digital Age While the local congregation was vitally important to Paul, it is often overlooked that he was a part of these local communities primarily in a virtual way rather than a physical one. Even as Paul ministered to and with these local churches, he was only physically present with them on very occasional visits. It is on this point that Byassee’s claim that the church has always been a virtual body comes into play. Paul describes his siblings in Corinth as members with him in the body of Christ, but his presence with them is primarily a virtual one. Byassee interprets Paul’s connectedness this way (2011): Paul so often longs to be with the congregations from whom he is absent in the body. But notice what he doesn’t do: he doesn’t wait to offer them his words until he can be with them. He sends them letters. Letters meant to be read corporately, perhaps even to lead worship or be part of it. Such letters allow him to engage personally without being present personally. They are a poor substitute in some ways. In others they are superior.

Paul’s connections with other members of the body of Christ are nurtured and maintained largely through a virtual form of communication. We can see that in terms of the Corinthian church eating and drinking during the Lord’s Supper while others go hungry (cf. 1 Cor. 11:17–22), Paul’s virtual presence is likely a poor substitute to an in-person presence in helping the community navigate this issue. In other ways, however, being present virtually, through letters, opens up avenues for developing and maintaining important connections with members of the

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community. While it is clear that Paul’s leadership and guidance through his letters shaped how these fledgling churches attempted to live into being the body of Christ, his primarily virtual approach to leadership empowered lay leaders as they put into practice this vision of community and ministry. It is also important to acknowledge that Paul imagined the church not only in local terms but also as extending beyond individual local communities (note that Paul addresses his letter to the Corinthians “to God’s church that is in Corinth” 1 Cor 1:2). Paul’s virtual presence through letters differs from our digitally mediated virtual experiences of today. The term “virtual” is used in this chapter to refer to digitally mediated connections. Because virtual reality (VR) or virtual life (VL) is often contrasted with “actual” reality or real life (RL), it encourages a bifurcated view that being online or connected digitally is utterly distinct from real or embodied reality. However, thinking of virtual reality as diametrically opposed to embodied reality belies how our engagement with virtual reality is always done by those of us with bodies, living in a material world. Digital scholar T.V. Reid writes (2014, 21): It is important to take that illusion of virtuality [of the virtual world] seriously; it is to some degree a new kind of experience. But it is also not wholly new (whenever we read a novel we also enter a virtual world, just not a digitally delivered one). Part of studying virtual worlds should be to remind users that they are never just in a virtual world, but always in a real one too.

Whether or not virtual experiences are “real” experiences have been prominent in debates across mainline Christian churches about the permissibility of Holy Communion as part of online worship. Those who oppose the practice have stated that “the gathering of people is not possible” during the time of COVID.2 Such phrasing suggests that all of us gathering around our devices for online worship are not really gathering with one another. Using the language of “virtual worship,” for many, reinforces that such experiences are mere facsimiles of the real thing. Religion scholars and theologians need to become more nuanced in our discussions of virtual reality. Yale theologian and liturgist Teresa Berger, author of @ Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds, encourages us to resist falsely dichotomizing between what is “virtual” and what is “real.” Berger notes that our daily living is “digitally infused,” and time spent online versus with others in person does not occur in entirely different worlds (2017, 16–21). Just as it is possible to be in close physical proximity with others while simultaneously being absent mentally or spiritually, it is also possible to be virtually present to one another in profound, meaningful, and real ways, even when we are physically distant. Real, embodied reality and virtual reality are always inextricably intertwined. Amid our digitally infused lives, Christians across the globe are experiencing worship in digitally mediated ways. Lutheran theology emphasizes that when we gather for worship, “we are all ministers, assembled to pray, sing, praise, celebrate

 See, for example, Lange (2020): “When the gathering of people is not possible, as is the case today, and therefore a Eucharistic celebration is not possible, God does not condemn the community for that impossibility.” 2

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communion and be sent forth in mission” (ELCA 2013a, b). Ekklesia, the word used in the New Testament for church, literally means “called out.” In worship, Christians are “called in” so that we can be “called out” to serve the neighbor in need (Aelabouni 2019, quoted in Strickland 2019). During the pandemic, members of the body of Christ have been “called in” to worship via Zoom and other platforms. The ministry of all assembled virtually has been sent forth in mission in material and digital spaces. There have been many testimonies of others’ embodied responses to being part of an online worship experience throughout the pandemic. Some have reported falling to their knees in their living rooms during the prayers of the people. Others have marched around their houses waving their palms during Palm Sunday services. Still others have found themselves crying during the hymns and special music church members recorded or live-streamed for worship during the pandemic. For many of us, gathering with others in a digitally mediated worship service has been a real experience of gathering, connection, and worship. There is no doubt that worshiping remotely during a pandemic has been an unsettled space to occupy for all of us who long to be together in person as a church. At the same time, the reality of churches across the globe being compelled to offer worship digitally provides us with an incredible opportunity to deepen and nuance our theological understanding of our embodied dimensions of virtual connectedness. Theologian Kathryn Reklis insists that our theology must move beyond “seeing the real versus virtual divide in terms of embodied versus disembodied” and think creatively about “the new permutations of digital and virtual technology informing our lives as particular ways we are embodied” (2012, 2). Luther’s theology of the cross can be used as a framework to think about how the virtual might also bear the presence of God in real ways. Luther insisted that theologians start their theologizing at the foot of the cross, and there they discover that God is present precisely where we least expect God to be. Luther called on Christians to pay attention to God’s hidden presence in the pain and suffering of the cross, witnessing to how God is at work in unexpected places to bring redemption and healing (Thompson 2004).3 Rolf Jacobson continues this line of thinking about Luther’s cross-centered approach and its applicability to digital spaces. Building on Luther’s assertion that only that person “deserves to be a called a theologian . . . who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross,” Jacobson proposes that “a theologian of the cross must be able to name—in the midst of suffering—the present manifestation of the crucified-and-risen Christ.” Jacobson (2017) insists that “[d]igital means of doing ministry are not just about the church caring for its weakest members, digital means of doing ministry are ways in which the Risen Christ himself can be present with the suffering, just as Christ has promised to be.” Thinking along with Luther and his cross-centered framework,

 For a fuller explanation of insights from Luther’s theology of the cross, see Thompson (2004).

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what insights have emerged about being the body of Christ through debates over virtual communion?

Virtual Communion Debate and the Virtual Body of Christ For many years church bodies have had guidelines in place for how those who cannot physically participate in the gathered assembly for worship might still have access to communion. The denominational guidelines from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) for communion for those who are ill, homebound, or in prison demonstrate how the church has thought about the issue of communion in exceptional circumstances (ECLA 2013a, b). They recommend either: a pastor administers communion separately to those prevented from worshiping corporately, or laypersons bring bread and wine that have been blessed and shared as part of congregational worship as faithful ways to include those physically separated from congregational gathering for Word and sacrament. However, when governmental authorities prohibited physical gatherings of the assembly across the globe, several Protestant denominations encouraged their congregations to refrain from offering communion via online worship. The presiding bishop of the ELCA encouraged congregations to “fast from communion.” Bishop Eaton wrote that temporarily fasting from communion allows Christians to focus with renewed energy on how the Word of God comes to us (ELCA 2020). Her line of thinking aligns with Martin Luther’s insistence that faith is not in jeopardy when Christians do not have access to the sacramental elements. Luther stressed the sufficiency of the Word for the nourishing of faith, just as the presiding bishop was suggesting. In my blog posted on March 26, 2020, titled “Christ is Really Present Virtually: A Proposal for Virtual Communion” (Thompson 2020), I propose that even when we are physically apart, communing together during online worship affirms the incarnational nature of Christian faith at a time of profound social isolation. It allows us to experience the Word coming to us in tangible ways through the gifts of creation and nourishing, comforting, and sustaining us as we face another day at home, deprived of physical contact with those we care about. “The last thing we need right now—in a time of food shortages, lockdown, isolation, and separation,” theologian Diana Butler Bass wrote in April 2020, “is the church shutting the people out of the banquet, unable to recognize that we live in the virtual reign of Christ. Virtuality isn’t just technology; it is theology” (Bass 2020, para 11). Pastor Bradley Schmeling agrees with Dr. Butler Bass’s perspective. “Every time we gather to partake in the eucharistic feast, it’s always a foretaste of the feast to come. It’s never the full expression of the resurrection banquet God has promised.”4 Indeed. Perhaps our attempts at church during the pandemic can serve to remind us

 Personal conversation with Rev. Bradley Schmeling over Google Meets, 20 April 2020.

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that all our worship practices are at best partial reflections of God’s promised future of the banquet where Christ abides, and no one goes away hungry. Until then, we gather with members of the body of Christ, virtually or in person, to catch glimpses of that unending feast.

Access and the Virtual Body of Christ “The world found itself disabled” during the pandemic, noted Scott Artley, accessibility program director for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council in the Twin Cities (Ross 2021). Amid the many serious challenges of the pandemic, it is also the case that arts organizations, schools, churches, and other institutions have been waking up to how technology can help them better live out their mission, especially with those whose access may have been limited in the past. The issue of access to worship is critical, and the onset of the global pandemic heightened the church’s awareness of the issue. Especially as access to computers and the internet often breaks down along class, race, age, and geographic lines, we are called to find ways to connect with our siblings in Christ who have not been able to be virtually connected during the pandemic. One avenue for access could be to do something similar to the guidance offered for providing the sacrament to those who are ill, confined to home, or imprisoned. Pastors or lay volunteers could contact members by phone and guide them in preparation for communion, and just as we are called to do with those who are ill, we could provide them with access to the sacrament when we are prohibited from gathering together physically. While this issue of access to technology must be addressed, what has become more apparent during the pandemic is that access to the eucharistic banquet, worship, and the body of Christ has always been an issue for the church. Even though church bodies offer guidance for how to include those who are sick in the banquet, many who are ill are rarely or never offered the sacrament when they miss worship. During the worst months of my illness, I was not physically able to get to church and was never offered to have the sacrament brought to me at home. Sharing this story elicited responses from many others that they too have not been brought the eucharist at home or in the hospital when they were sick. If we expand the lens beyond just those who are ill to those who care for their ailing parents, spouse, child, or friend, the challenges of access to communion, worship, and the church community are often paramount in these cases as well. Furthermore, there are those who long to be a part of worship but work during church services. Medical staff in our local hospitals, gas station attendants, grocery store clerks, restaurants cooks, the list goes on. It could be that robust conversations have been occurring throughout the church about access to worship and the sacrament raised on behalf of all those whose work lives make it impossible to be physically present for worship. But if the church is really serious about taking on issues of access to the eucharistic feast, there are a host of issues far beyond internet access

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that require our attention, especially when it comes to gathering again in person for worship. Here it is helpful to return to Byassee’s point that virtual presence can sometimes be superior to in-person interactions. Since the pandemic began, people have been attending virtual worship services for churches across the country from where they live. Many churches have witnessed during COVID ways in which people new to the church found an opening in virtual offerings. In a zoom coffee hour session, a woman who had joined our Minnesota church for virtual worship on Easter said it was the most meaningful worship service she had ever experienced and it helped mitigate the sense of isolation she was experiencing due to the pandemic. It was especially impactful to witness people joining churches during the pandemic without ever having set foot inside the physical church building of the community they were joining. One twenty-something new member of our church shared her story of initially connecting with the church through a Zoom session for young adults offered early in the pandemic. “It is much less intimidating to click on a zoom link than it is to enter a church building when you’re young and single,” this new member stated. Our pastor attending the young adult meeting sent her a message in the chat and asked if she could set up a Zoom coffee date. They met, and then the young woman began attending virtual worship services. She so appreciated the welcome and the worship that she decided to join our church before ever setting foot in the church building. She stated, “Now that I am part of the community, I jumped at the opportunity to get to meet other people from church in person,” she told our small group one Monday evening as we gathered in our backyard to talk together about the stories of Genesis. The hope is that churches are being attentive to the stories like this one. How might congregations continue offering virtual opportunities that attract young adults and others and welcome them into our communities of faith? For this new member, it is clear that church on zoom became more accessible to her than an in-person church in an actual building. Her experience also illustrates how interconnected and often mutually enhancing our virtual and in-person interactions are: her early virtual experiences of the church led her to seek out in-person interactions, to deepen her relationships with other members of the body of Christ.

Toward a More Accessible Body of Christ Many of us who attend church have been able to return to in-person worship in summer 2021. The toll of physical separation has been significant. To worship again in the sanctuary with others who are dear to us has been a gift. Congregations have been implementing new practices that limit the number of physical contact people have with one another while they are physically gathered together for worship out of concern for exposing attendees to COVID. This increased concern for and sensitivity to how ingrained church practices might negatively affect people’s health, and wellbeing provides an opening to

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consider additional ways in which the body of Christ might become more accessible. Take the ways the passing of the peace is performed in many churches and their challenges for neurodiverse persons. Linnea Peterson, who is autistic, insists that “it’s important to remember that touch is a sense and being touched can cause autistic people sensory distress.” Peterson suggests “reshap[ing] the passing of the peace. Set[ting] norms around hugs and other physical expressions of affection, and adjust[ing] games played in Sunday school and youth group” (Peterson 2021). Beyond these important concrete suggestions offered by Peterson about how churches might become more accessible to autistic and other neurodiverse persons, Peterson also offers valuable insights into how to think about the so-called “weakest members” of the body of Christ (such as autistic and other neurodiverse persons) not just in terms of the deficit but also in terms of what gifts they bring to the church. “I love being autistic,” Peterson writes. “Having a special interest brings me deep happiness. Properly calibrating my sensory input feels amazing.” In their mid-20s, Peterson is now a member of the council at their church and is finding ways to bring perspectives on being autistic and neurodiverse and how worship experiences might be more sensory-friendly. As churches have moved back to worshiping in person, however, it is also the case that the most vulnerable among us are staying away from those in-person gatherings. This means that the issues of access will likely be with us in prominent ways for a good long while. Even though it is tempting to return to exclusively in-person worship, especially for churches that really struggle to adapt to online worship, if congregations want to provide access to all their members, some form of online worship will be a vital aspect of ministry for the foreseeable future. Rather than viewing worshiping via digital technology as a stopgap measure during a global pandemic, the church is called to reimagine what it means to affirm our incarnational identity and commitments as the virtual body of Christ in life post-­ pandemic. The church has an unprecedented opportunity to consider ways in which the pandemic has heightened our collective awareness of how virtual experiences and redesigned in-person experiences can help us become a more accessible body of Christ.

References Aelabouni, Meghan J. 2019, June 7. Worship 101: The The ‘Whats, Hows and Whys’ of Lutheran Worship. Living Lutheran. https://www.livinglutheran.org/2019/06/worship-­101/ Berger, Teresa. 2017. @Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds. Taylor & Francis. Bass, Diana Butler. 2020. On Hoarding Eucharist in a Hungry World. Church Anew Blog. https:// churchanew.org/blog/posts/2020/05/01/butlerbass1 Byassee, Jason. 2011, March 2. For Virtual Theological Education. In Faith and Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and Their Institutions from Leadership Education, Duke Divinity. https://faithandleadership.com/jason-­byassee-­virtual-­theological-­education ELCA: See Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

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Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. 2013a, January. Worship Formation and Liturgical Resources: Frequently Asked Questions: How can lay people participate in worship leadership? Revised, https://download.elca.org/ELCA%20Resource%20Repository/How_can_lay_ people_participate_in_worship_leadership.pdf?_ga=2.131955853.34180956.1591889796­806380546.1564597909&_gac=1.6548230.1590501302.EAIaIQobChMI7NmdwNbR6QI VkvvjBx35RwNAEAAYASAAEgIUAPD_BwE ———. 2013b, January. Worship Formation and Liturgical Resources: Frequently Asked Questions: How Can We Provide for Communion of the Ill, Homebound, and Imprisoned?” Revised, https://download.elca.org/ELCA%20Resource%20Repository/How_can_we_provide_for_communion_of_the_ill_homebound_and_imprisoned.pdf. ———. 2020, March 20. Worship in Times of Public Health Concerns: Covid-19/Coronavirus. ELCA Guidelines from the Presiding Bishop, https://download.elca.org/ELCA%20 Resource%20Repository/Worship_in_Times_of_Public_Health_Concerns.pdf?_ ga=2.39930401.222194046.1588182953-­8 06380546.1564597909&_gac=1.204811940. 1586982291.EAIaIQobChMIzvm9vaHr6AIVgZ6fCh1zNQlXEAAYASAAEgIbLPD_BwE. Gorman, Michael J. 2017. Apostle of the Crucified Lord: A Theological Introduction to Paul and his Letters. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. Hansen, Guillermo. 2012. The Networking of Differences that Makes a Difference: Theology and the Unity of the Church. Dialog 51 (1): 31–42. Jacobson, Rolf. 2017, May 8. Then and Now: Cancer and the Body of Christ Before and After the Digital Revolution. A Syndicate Symposium on Deanna A.  Thompson’s The Virtual Body of Christ in a Suffering World, https://syndicate.network/symposia/theology/ the-­virtual-­body-­of-­christ-­in-­a-­suffering-­world/. Lange, Dirk G. 2020, March 24. Digital Worship and Sacramental Life in a Time of Pandemic. Lutheran Federation Blog, https://www.lutheranworld.org/blog/ digital-­worship-­and-­sacramental-­life-­time-­pandemic Lee, Michelle V. 2006. Paul, the Stoics, and the Body of Christ. Vol. 137. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peterson, Linnea. 2021, April 14. The Power of an Autism Diagnosis. Living Lutheran, https:// www.livinglutheran.org/2021/04/the-­power-­of-­an-­autism-­diagnosis/ Reed, Thomas Vernon. 2014. Digitized Lives: Culture, Power and Social Change in the Internet Era. 1st ed. New York: Routledge. Reklis, Kathryn. 2012, May. X-Reality and the Incarnation. New Media Project. Indiana: Christian Theological Seminary, no. 1011, https://research.library.fordham.edu/theology_facultypubs/12/ Ross, Jenna. 2021, August 22. The Art of Accessibility. Minneapolis Star Tribune. Strickland, Kevin. (2019). Worship 101: The ‘Hows’ and ‘Whys’ of Lutheran Worship. Living Lutheran, https://www.livinglutheran.org/2019/06/worship-­101/. The Common English Bible. 2011. The Common English Bible Study Bible. Nashville: The Common English Bible. D. A. Thompson Thompson, Deanna A. 2004. Crossing the Divide: Luther, Feminism, and the Cross. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. 2016. The Virtual Body of Christ in a Suffering World. Nashville: Abingdon Press. ———. 2020, March 26. Christ is Really Present Virtually: A Proposal for Virtual Communion. St. Olaf College: Lutheran Center for Faith, Values, and Community. https://wp.stolaf.edu/ lutherancenter/2020/03/christ-­is-­really-­present-­virtually-­a-­proposal-­for-­virtual-­communion/ Thompson, James W. 2014. The Church According to Paul: Rediscovering the Community Conformed to Christ. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic.

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Deanna A. Thompson is an author, speaker, and Director of the Lutheran Center for Faith, Values, and Community and the Martin E. Marty Regents Chair of Religion and the Academy at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Thompson’s writing and speaking covers topics ranging from Martin Luther and feminism, Scriptural interpretation (Deuteronomy in particular), cancer and faith, and being the church in the digital age. She is author of The Virtual Body of Christ in a Suffering World (Abingdon Press, 2016) and Glimpsing Resurrection: Cancer, Trauma, and Ministry (Westminster John Knox, 2018).  

Chapter 9

Holy Communion Under Quarantine Timothy J. Wengert

While we can stream our worship services online, the Lord’s Supper poses a particular problem for Lutherans, who in the last 50 years or so have gone from quarterly to monthly and even to weekly communion in our congregations.1 Unless someone is over 100 years old, none of us has lived through a severe, worldwide pandemic.

Adiaphora Beyond following the guidance of medical professionals, there is no one “right answer” to this problem, and we must be cautious not to project our anxieties upon others who may explore other solutions. The frequency of the Lord’s Supper is not fixed in the New Testament and is not part of the Ten Commandments, so we must not assume that what we decide to do is the only right way. It is an adiaphoron, a word that does not mean unimportant but rather designates a practice where one cannot clearly tell whether it is right or wrong, good or evil. Thus, a conversation An earlier version of this chapter was first written on 16 March 2020 in response to a request from my bishop, Traci Bartholomew. It was subsequently expanded with a quotation from Gordon Lathrop and distributed widely throughout the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and then expanded again for publication to include a broader discussion of the Lord’s Supper in Lutheran thought.  Roman Catholic liturgical scholar Teresa Berger has also observed that “sacramental practices in digital mediation” has been the most difficult issue to resolve with respect to online worship (2018, 75). 1 

T. J. Wengert (*) United Lutheran Seminary, Philadelphia, PA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero (ed.), Church After the Corona Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23731-7_9

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about practices must begin with a suspension of judgment upon another congregation’s way of doing things. In the Formula of Concord’s article on adiaphora (art. 10), the Concordists remind us: We also believe, teach, and confess that no church should condemn another because the one has fewer or more external ceremonies not commanded by God than the other has, when otherwise there is unity with the other in teaching and all the articles of faith and in the proper use of the holy sacraments, according to the well known saying, “Dissonantia ieiunii non dissolvit consonantiam fidei,” “Dissimilarity in fasting is not to disrupt unity in faith.” (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 516)2

In this case, it is dissimilarity in practices surrounding the Lord’s Supper. However, if such practices are adiaphora, it means that one must then ask not “Which is the (only) right practice?” but rather “What may be the best we can do in this situation?”

Be Subject to the Governing Authorities (Romans 13:1) One thing is certain. Despite the fuming of certain reactionary brands of Christianity, which tie their form of worship practices to the first amendment of the U. S. Constitution rather than to Jesus’ command to love the neighbor as oneself, breaking the law or the advice of public health experts has no place in the Christian community. The notion, for example, that true Christian worship has to involve the exchange of copious amounts of human respiratory products by people intent on singing, shouting, and otherwise carrying on is simply false. Where in the Bible does it say that one should invoke some “right” of worship instead of first caring for the ox or donkey or neighbor who has fallen into a pit? If Lutherans (alongside others) ever wondered why they are not like some other flavors of Christianity, this demonstrates it.3 According to Martin Luther’s catechisms, the fourth commandment (“Honor your parents”) also applies to those functioning in loco parentis, including teachers, local government, and state and national authorities. Moreover, as Luther explains it, the first article of the Creed confesses God’s daily care in this life. So why would anyone knowingly defy the laws of creation (including the laws for the spread of viruses) for the sake of some other worship practice?

 The Latin citation is Irenaeus as quoted in Eusebius, Church History, V.24.13, and also  used in article 16 of The Augsburg Confession (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 80-81). For an in-depth discussion of the Formula of Concord, see Wengert (2006, 165–79). 3  That the Minnesota District of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod went to court over worship practices simply indicates how far some in that church have strayed from Lutheran theology, especially regarding what is often called the “Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms.” For one recent study of this teaching, see Wright (2010). 2

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Applying a Simple Rule Franklin Drews Fry, a long-time pastor in New Jersey, taught an important method for how Lutherans may approach such ethical matters, summed up in this terse statement: “Give it your ‘reverent, best guess!” It is reverent in that we must study Scripture, pray, and beg God for guidance. It is best in that we use our heads (including science and logic) to figure out the best thing to do. Moreover, it remains a guess because we are ignorant, sinful mortals; we are not God. In other words, once we make a decision, we should always be open to suggestions about what may be better (Wengert 2013).4 It is an adiaphoron, which means that one must always be looking for and open to the best practice. There is no magic number of times to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. The fact that Roman Catholic priests were required to celebrate the Mass daily in Luther’s day led the reformers to emphasize a comment from the ancient church, which described how the church in Alexandria, Egypt, did not do this (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 72–73). That many now celebrate the Eucharist weekly does not necessarily mean that this is the only acceptable practice. For example, not receiving the Lord’s Supper during Lent in a year of a pandemic would remind us that we are in solidarity with those preparing for Baptism in the ancient church, who would first receive the Supper after Baptism on Easter Day. Perhaps this virus is forcing on us a better, albeit longer, Lenten discipline to impress upon us once more just how precious the Meal is and how we are all in need of the waters of baptism. In 1523, followers of Jan Hus in Bohemia posed a question to Luther about the sacraments, given that many of them were bereft of pastors as a result of their struggle with the church of Rome. Giving it his “reverent best guess,” Luther responded with Concerning the Ministry (LW 45:5–44). There he reminded his correspondents that in each household, the head of that household could preach and, in an emergency situation, baptize. However, for Luther, the Lord’s Supper was somewhat different and was intended to take place in the Sunday gathering and not privately. He also had high respect for the public office of the ministry, so he did not think that the Lord’s Supper should be celebrated without a properly called and ordained minister. Given that the church in Bohemia could not receive such pastors, Luther advised them to do without the Supper in their emergency situation. He wrote: For it would be safer and more wholesome for the father of the household to read the gospel and, since the universal custom and use allows it to the laity, to baptize those born in his home, and so to govern himself and his [household] according to the doctrine of Christ, even if throughout life they did not dare or could not receive the Eucharist. For the Eucharist is not so necessary that salvation depends on it. The gospel and baptism are sufficient since faith alone justifies and love alone lives rightly. (LW 40:9)

Moreover, in the same letter, Luther points out that the Supper is itself a proclamation of the gospel, given that Christ commands it to be done “in remembrance of me,” and Paul states that “as often as we eat … and drink … we proclaim the Lord’s  For a longer discussion of this and other Lutheran ethical principles, see Wengert (2013, 69–91).

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death.” The Supper is not a required spiritual magic, but it is another form of the Word, what St. Augustine called a “visible word.” We must not confuse our desire to receive the Lord’s Supper with a ritual necessity that leads us away from faith and trust in God’s promises and toward a belief that worship is not really to worship without the “mere performance of the work” of the liturgy. What matters is faith in the Word of God, who comes down from heaven and in aural and visible Word whispers, “You are mine,” to which faith answers: “I’m yours.” Upon reading an earlier version of this reflection, Lutheran liturgical scholar Gordon Lathrop reminded me that … for Lutherans it is not only that the sacrament is a sort of Word—it is the Word itself that is sacramental: it is full of the presence of Christ, come “to do us good.” I think of that marvelous passage about what happens in the reading of the Gospel in Luther’s preface to his Church Postil. I want us to remember that Luther argued that when the Gospel-book is read and preached, we should know that Christ is here, coming to us or we being brought to him, present in the reading and preaching, doing to us now what the text says he did then: forgiving us, healing us, raising us from the dead: “If you pause here and let him do you good, that is, if you believe that he benefits and helps you, then you really have it. Then Christ is yours, presented to you as a gift. After that it is necessary that you turn this into an example and deal with your neighbor in the very same way, be given also to him as a gift and an example” (LW 35:121). I love also especially that final “happy exchange” turn! So, in this time we may just cling to the sacramental word. Then, in a healthier time, we can carefully rebuild that wonderful Sunday Eucharistic frequency that has been built up so lovingly among us. But not the sacrament as required, not the sacrament as fetish.5

Once we are freed of any spiritual necessity for celebrating the Supper, we are better prepared to discuss how best to behave in this situation. But here, rather than doing theology “by fiat” (“the Bible, Luther, the Bishop or I say it; you better believe it; that settles it”), we need to practice Christian conversation about these matters, remembering that line from Proverbs 25:11: “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.” Or, a famous quote of Philip Melanchthon, used at the 500th anniversary of his birth put it: “Wir sind zum wechselseitigen Gespräch geboren” (We are born for back-and-forth conversation).6 In part, this means admitting to the weaknesses in all of our practical solutions. So, what are our options?

Practical Reflections First, some congregations and their ministers may decide not to celebrate the Lord’s Supper until the threat of this virus is over. The danger here, of course, is that people suddenly get the idea that the Lord’s Supper is optional even on days when we are healthy—even pointing to Luther for support, when in fact he was speaking especially to the emergency in the Bohemian Church. But I sincerely doubt that that will

 Private correspondence via e-mail in March 2020; used with his permission.  For a discussion of this theme in relation to the religious colloquies of 1540–41, see Janssen (2014).

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happen but rather that people will be all the more joyful when they can finally come together and celebrate around the Lord’s Table. Second, one could (like St. Thomas Episcopal Church, the famous African American Episcopal Church in Philadelphia) find a way to distribute the Lord’s Supper as people drive up in their cars. Here we are in danger of turning the Sacrament into a bit of magic. Faith and proclamation would disappear as if the Sacrament were effective by the mere performance of the work. The church is not a drive-through restaurant, but a Christian assembly gathered around Word and Sacrament. One could also send out bread and wine (or have people use their own foodstuffs) that would be “live-streamed” consecrated by the pastor somewhere else. Here, too, the danger revolves around trying to create a virtual community and, again, turning the Supper into a bit of magic. For reasons of personal trauma or betrayal by a particular Christian community, some may argue that the virtual community is somehow as good as if not better than face-to-face interaction with actual people in real space and time. In my ministry as vice-pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in Mendham, NJ (2020–2021), I regularly reached out to some older folk who may be particularly isolated. Not only is it clear that some of them are not plugged into the digital forms of communication that mark life among affluent America, but also, when they have had the opportunity to communicate electronically with loved ones, they invariably tell me that, as much as they liked it, “It was not the same as a real hug and kiss.” The same can be said of the Christian assembly gathered around Word and Sacrament. Another possibility might be to consecrate the elements and leave them on the altar for people to commune themselves as they come in individually to pray during the week. Here, too, the very communal nature of Holy Communion is in danger of being lost, and the meal becomes a support for individual piety rather than what it is: “Given and shed for you” [always plural in the Greek New Testament text].

The Lord’s Supper in Lutheran Teaching and Practice Perhaps one of the ways to sort out our approaches is to ask, “Why do you” or “Why do I want to do this?” What’s the point? I regularly warned my students that the reformers saw two dangers when it came to sacramental practices. Either we make the sacrament into something effective by virtue of some work we do, a virtue we possess (“only if you’re a believer in the sacrament effective”), or we make the sacrament into something effective “by the mere performance of the rite,” the ex opere operato understanding about which Melanchthon warns readers in article 24 of the Augsburg Confession. Even in unprecedented times, such as a pandemic, some practices may threaten and undermine the true heart of the sacraments. The proclamation of the gospel, of God’s undeserved mercy and love, stands at the heart of the matter. Furthermore, faith, which the sacraments engender, can be strengthened by good sacramental practices.

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This opens up another line of questioning altogether. In order to determine what would be the best practice today, one needs to know what the Lord’s Supper is all about. Here, the Lutheran confessions stand particularly ready to help answer that question. The fact that the reformers concentrated on the Words of Institution in their discussions of and arguments over the Lord’s Supper may especially assist in navigating our questions today. Although in October 1529, during a debate with Ulrich Zwingli over the nature of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper, Luther wrote in chalk on a table “Hoc est corpus meum” (“This is my body”), the fuller version of those words (at least in Luke 22:19 and 1 Corinthians 11:24) states “This is my body, which is given for you.” Thus, there are two sides to Jesus’ promise in the Supper: “Here I am” and “for you,” where, as mentioned above, the “for you” is always plural. Over against Ulrich Zwingli and other hard-line sacramentarians (those who, in Luther’s view, did not acknowledge Christ’s true presence in the sacrament), Luther emphasized the first promise: “Here I am” (“Hoc est corpus meum”) (see Burnett 2019). When Jesus throws a party, he shows up (Wengert 2006)! In Luther’s opinion, the sacramentarians allowed their philosophical predilections to distort Jesus’ simple promise. Here we see how Luther’s theology of the cross plays a central role in his thinking. Whereas Zwingli insisted that there must be a consistent, understandable logic between what Christ said and what it meant. Luther assumed that Christ’s words attack and overcome human reason. For him, the foolishness of incarnation and cross matches the foolishness of Christ’s real presence in the bread and wine. At the heart of his theology of the cross was not, as some imagine, a theory about the cross and the atonement but the scandalous revelation of God in the last place one would reasonably look. Reason (in the person of Ulrich Zwingli at the colloquy with Luther in Marburg in 1529) always has to know how something can be true. How can Christ be in the bread and wine? Luther responded to this challenge with a rebuke: “Don’t ask geometrical questions!” Thus, when accused of teaching “Capernaitic” eating and drinking (a nickname derived from the exchange between the residence of Capernaum and Jesus in John 6:52, 60), Luther and his colleagues had no trouble dismissing a kind of localized presence akin to cannibalism without abandoning the real presence of Christ. To emphasize a real as opposed to mere spiritual presence, Luther often used the preposition, “in the bread” [in pane]; to point out how close the Lutheran position was to the Catholic teaching of transubstantiation, Luther used the preposition “under the bread” [sub pane], as in “under the forms or species of bread and wine.” In the Small Catechism, Luther combined the two (“in and under the bread”). Although occasionally used in the early debate, the phrase “with the bread” [cum pane] first came to the fore in the 1530s in discussions with the reformer of Strasbourg and former supporter of Zwingli, Martin Bucer. Its result, the Wittenberg Concord of 1536, became such a central expression of the Lutheran confession of Christ’s presence in the Supper that the authors of the Formula of Concord of 1576 cited it in the Solid Declaration. There we read

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We have heard how Martin Bucer has explained his own position and that of the other preachers who came with him from the [south German] cities regarding the holy sacrament of the body and blood of Christ: They confess, in the words of Irenaeus, that there are two things in this sacrament, one heavenly and one earthly. Therefore, they hold and teach that with the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ are truly and essentially present, distributed and received. Although they do not believe in a transubstantiation (that is, in an essential transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood) and they do not hold that the body and blood of Christ are localiter, that is, spatially enclosed in the bread or are permanently united in some other way apart from reception in the sacrament, they nevertheless admit that through the sacramental union the bread is the body of Christ, etc. For they do not hold that the body of Christ is present apart from reception—for example, when the bread is laid aside and kept in the tabernacle or carried about and put on display in the procession, as happens in the papacy. (Solid Delcaration VII.13-15, in Kolb and Wengert 2000, 595)

The concordists employed the phrase “with the bread” as the central one and interpreted the other phrases (“in the bread” or “under the bread”) in its light (Wengert 2006). They never combined the three into one phrase (“in, with, and under the bread”), a practice common among Lutheran catechesis in the previous generations. This much later abuse of the Formula of Concord impedes our understanding of their intentions. The phrase “with the bread” is far more biblical than “in the bread” or “under the bread” because of Paul’s comments in 1 Cor. 10:16, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?” “With” is the preposition of sharing. Although throughout the history of interpretation of this text, some have been tempted to equate Paul’s comments with the church as the body of Christ (in part because Paul shifts to a description of the church as Christ’s body in the next verse), nevertheless the first half of Paul’s statement makes this impossible, since, in the 2000-year history of the church, no one ever called the church the blood of Christ. Thus, koinonia or participation must have another meaning than simply being members of the church. More than that! This text became Philip Melanchthon’s favorite for understanding Christ’s presence in the Supper with the bread. Whereas Luther could assert the plain meaning of the text over against what he viewed as Zwingli’s Platonist leanings, Melanchthon used 1 Cor. 10:16 as the lens through which he viewed “This is my body.” The koinonia in the text undergirded and, thus, affirmed the cum pane so that the Wittenberg Concord, which Melanchthon drafted, was in fact, an interpretation of the Pauline text. However, for both Luther and Melanchthon, there was another side to Christ’s promise, namely, “for you.” One can see this distinction in Luther’s Small Catechism, where he moved from what the Lord’s Supper is to what its benefits are. Here, more than anywhere else, the two reformers and their collaborators and successors were united. The point of the Lord’s Supper was not simply its existence, not simply a rite that must be done regardless of the effect or benefit. For these reformers, such malpractice meant turning the supper into a ceremony effective by merely going through the motions or, as the medieval theologians put it, effective ex opere operato [literally by the work worked], by the mere performance of the rite. Some laypeople may

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still think of baptism this way today, so that pastors may be asked, especially by non-members, “Would you do my baby?” Given that baptism is a drowning and a rising, it might be appropriate to respond, “Do you want me to drown your baby?” Baptism is hardly a bit of magic thrown in God’s direction; it is the individual application of God’s promise to the baptizand. The same can happen to the Lord’s Supper. In Luther’s day the Lord’s Supper had become in the minds of many an unbloodied sacrifice offered up by the priest on behalf of the people present or on behalf of the person (living or dead) for whom the Supper had been purchased. Thus, in Wittenberg’s Castle Church in 1518, over 6000 masses were said for the souls of the dead electors and electresses entombed there. Contrariwise, Luther insisted the “given for you” and “shed for you” demands and evokes faith, that is, trust in the very promise offered in the Supper. In Matthew, Jesus appends to the promise “for you” the goal of the meal: “for the forgiveness of sin.” In his catechism, Luther realized that the Supper’s gifts are not limited to forgiveness but also include life and salvation. Alternatively, as Luther put it in his 1520 Babylonian Captivity of the Church, the supper is not a sacrifice offered by the priest to God, but rather Christ’s last will and new testament offered to us, to be received through faith alone. This means that the Lord’s Supper is not a work offered to God by the priest on behalf of the congregation, but rather God’s work offered freely by Christ to all who gather for the meal. The benefits of the Supper, then, are not earned by the celebrant or the communicants but are received in faith—trusting the very promise of Christ: “Here I am for you.” How does this relate to the pandemic? In 2020, an ecumenical group of liturgists, other theologians, and church leaders, including Lutherans, produced a helpful set of guidelines for celebrating the Lord’s Supper during the current pandemic.7 Unfortunately, the authors neglected to stress (or even mention) the one thing that marks every celebration of the Lord’s Supper: it is God’s work for us, not our work for God. The section labeled “Our Theological Foundations” included the helpful subcategories of “Love,” “Human Bodies and Fellowship,” “Sacramental Life,” “Inclusion,” “…While Avoiding Stigmatizing Others,” and “Beauty,” but made no mention of the only thing that is truly central to the Supper: that it is God’s gift to us not our work for God. These two central promises by Jesus in the Lord’s Supper (“Here I am, for you”) should shape everything that goes on there, especially when it comes to distinguishing the central things from adiaphora. These promises that comprise the Supper make up the visible Word. Luther champions this position, already found in Augustine, in the Large Catechism, when he writes: It is the Word, I say, that makes this a sacrament and distinguishes it from ordinary bread and wine, so that it is called and truly is Christ’s body and blood. For it is said, “Accedat verbum ad elementum et fit sacramentum,” that is, “When the Word is joined to the external element, it becomes a sacrament.” This saying of St. Augustine is so appropriate and well put that he could hardly have said anything better. The Word must make the element a sacra See the helpful resource from the ELCA at https://download.elca.org/ELCA%20Resource%20 Repository/Care-filled_Worship_and_Sacramental_Life_in_a_Lingering_Pandemic.pdf 7

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ment; otherwise, it remains an ordinary element. Now, this is not the word and ordinance of a prince or emperor, but of the divine Majesty at whose feet all creatures should kneel and confess that it is as he says, and they should accept it with all reverence, fear, and humility. (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 468)

This matches Gordon Lathrop’s concern, whose comments above remind us that this insight works both ways: the sacrament is God’s Word, and the spoken Word is sacramental. In this way, one never lacks the sacrament when one has the spoken Word—and vice versa. This is why, in comments in the Large Catechism on the fifth petition, Luther could claim that forgiving others is a kind of sacramental action that one carries around all the time and uses as an assurance of God forgiving us whenever and wherever one wants (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 453).

Concluding Remarks The purpose of this reflection is not to decree what pastors and congregations must do (a la: “Wengert said it; I believe it; that settles it”). Instead, the point is to get people thinking and discussing what is lost or gained by certain practices during these difficult times. There are also some points regarding pastoral and episcopal authority in the church barely touched upon here but nevertheless important (Wengert 2008, 91–94). We dare not become congregational or synodical popes (or, for that matter, professorial popes), decreeing what must be done. Interestingly, when it came to his famous Deutsche Messe (Luther’s German revision of the liturgy) or his German service of Baptism, even Luther encouraged others to do better in their contexts. At the same time, we must respect the authority of public health experts and the wisdom and authority of other pastors, bishops, and, yes, even professors. The fact that several leading professors of liturgy have strongly advised against “virtual communion” should warn pastors and others from rushing into such practice willy-nilly. Finally, the very fact that we are having this conversation marks a healthy development in practice among the congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America when compared to many of its forebears. My wife is currently pastor of Zion Lutheran Church in Long Valley, New Jersey, the second-oldest congregation in the New Jersey Synod, where they celebrate the Lord’s Supper every week. The congregation began in 1760 as a “preaching station” first served by Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, the “patriarch” of Lutheranism in America. From his diaries of the time, we know that this group of German-Lutheran farmers (until World War I, the area was called “German Valley”) waited months—sometimes longer—for a pastor to come and celebrate the Lord’s Supper with them. As Lutheranism took deeper roots in the nineteenth century, the surrounding, dominant Protestant churches often prevented Lutherans from even imagining the celebration of the Supper more than four times a year (the bare minimum mentioned by Luther in his preface to the Small Catechism). Slowly but surely, in part under the influence of Common Service of the nineteenth century and the professors at The Lutheran Theological Seminary

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at Philadelphia who championed it and in part under the influence of a broader liturgical renewal around the world, the frequency of Holy Communion increased: first to monthly (what I grew up with in the 1950s and 60s) and then weekly. Of course, the infrequency of Communion did not necessarily mean that it was not cherished as a central action of the worshiping community, but the current, increasing frequency is a great response to another line in the preface to Luther’s Small Catechism: “For Christ did not say, ‘Omit this,’ or ‘Despise this,’ but instead [1 Cor. 11:25], ‘Do this, as often as you drink it....’ He really wants it to be done and not completely omitted or despised. ‘Do this,’ he says”8 May God give us the wisdom to “Do this” well and to God’s glory!

References Berger, Teresa. 2018. @Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds. New York: Routledge. Burnett, Amy Nelson. 2019. Debating the Sacraments: Print and Authority in the Early Reformation. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janssen, Wibke. 2014. “Wir sind zum wechselseitigen Gespräch geboren”: Philipp Melanchthon und die Reichsreligionsgespräche von 1540/41. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Kolb, Robert, and Timothy J. Wengert, eds. 2000. The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Luther, Martin. 1960–. Luther’s Works. American Edition. 75 Volumes. Edited by Jaroslav Pelikan (Volumes 1–30), Helmut T. Lehmann (Volumes 31–55), and Christopher Boyd Brown and Benjamin T.G. Mayes (Volumes 56–75). Philadelphia: Fortress; St. Louis: Concordia. LW: See Luther, Luther’s Works. Wengert, Timothy J. 2006. A Formula for Parish Practice: Using the Formula of Concord in the Parish. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. ———. 2008. Priesthood, Pastors, Bishops: Public Ministry for the Reformation and Today. Minneapolis: Fortress. ———. 2013. Reading the Bible with Martin Luther: An Introductory Guide. Baker Academic. Wright, William J. 2010. Martin Luther’s Understanding of God’s Two Kingdoms: A Response to the Challenge of Skepticism. Grand Rapids: Baker. Timothy J. Wengert is the Ministerium of Pennsylvania Emeritus Professor of Church History at United Lutheran Seminary (formerly Lutheran Theological Seminary of Philadelphia). A prolific author about Reformation history and theology, he is co-editor of The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Fortress Press, 2000), and editor of The Pastoral Luther: Essays on Martin Luther’s Practical Theology (Eerdmans, 2009) and Harvesting Martin Luther’s Reflections on Theology, Ethics and Church (Eerdmans, 2004). His most recent book is The Augsburg Confession: Renewing Lutheran Faith and Practice (Fortress, 2020). After retiring from full-time teaching, he now lives in Hackettstown, NJ.  

  Reflecting on his own experience officially visiting parishes, Luther wrote the Small Catechism, (Kolb and Wengert 2000, 350). 8

Chapter 10

A Simple Way to Invoke: Seeing the Ubiquity of Christ Through a Mystagogical Look Behind the Veil of Covid-19 Chad Rimmer

Introduction The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have been apocalyptic, in the true sense of the word. I say “true sense” to differentiate the familiar use of apocalyptic from the technical definition. According to familiar usage, the COVID  escalated global shockwaves that were large enough to dislodge entrenched neo-liberal political and economic systems that drove injustices against people and the planet. Although early predictions were prophetic, it was over-scoped. Images of a cataclysmic event that would burn the stubble and leave a fallow field for a generation to build back with systems that were fair and equitable have simply not materialized. Nevertheless, what has happened is an apocalypse of the truest kind. Apocalypse means a revealing. The pandemic has pulled back the veil on various shadow pandemics that already existed and remained unseen: domestic, sexual, and gender-based violence; mental health; and alcohol or drug abuse. COVID  pulled back the veil of able-ism to reveal the epistemological privilege of those who suffer and the isolation that millions of homebound, hospitalized, or institutionalized people experienced daily. Furthermore, the physical, social and financial challenges of people living with disabilities or chronic health issues were overlooked. Within our parishes and communities pre-COVID, many typically healthy or able people rarely acknowledged this population. The initial reactions to this collective experience of isolation and loss of control were tinged with righteous indignation, particularly in regard to not being able to gather in worship or receive the sacraments. Claims of religious liberty were predicated on the idea that public health policies that restricted access to assemblies kept people from practicing their faith. What I found revealing C. Rimmer (*) Department of Theology, Mission and Justice, Lutheran World Federation, Geneva, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero (ed.), Church After the Corona Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23731-7_10

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was that many people equated the physical distance from religious practices to be a separation from God. For this conversation about the ubiquities of Christ, I suggest that this response to COVID restrictions revealed a fundamental theological reality. We Christians have become, collectively, a bunch of nominalists. I want to interrogate this problem as an attempt to re-center some fundamental Christian and Lutheran commitments about the hiddenness of God and the real presence of Christ. I think most people do not even see the connection, which demonstrates how nominalism has so fully colonized the north Atlantic cultural perspective on God’s relationship to the Earth community. So, to pull back the veil, I will first unpack the issue of the hiddenness of God that was revealed by the COVID crisis. Then, I will explore some mystagogical1 keys from Luther’s confession regarding Holy Communion to reframe this perspective. Finally, I will suggest a simple liturgical practice related to the invocation that may help Christians break the gravity of this philosophical problem that has real-life implications for the economic and political systems that drive climate change and so many associated injustices.

Online Communion and the Ubiquity of Christ Due to COVID restrictions, the controversy over the possibility of online communion immediately arose among churches and congregations worldwide that had the financial and technological capacity to move worship virtually. As placeholders for further discussion, first, the phenomenon of online communion in terms of digital mediation rather than virtual reality will be discussed. Although in full agreement with the concept of the ubiquitous presence of Christ’s body presented by Deanna Thompson (2016), the struggle is with the plain use of the term virtual. The familiar use of the word “virtual” connotes a distinction from that which is “real” (as is the case with “virtual reality”). The presence of the Holy Spirit across time and space is real. When I lead prayers in the church’s chancel and my wife joins a livestream of that prayer from her hospital room, we are not experiencing a virtual connection. The Spirit of God really exists in the actual space between us in the time (albeit relatively minuscule and decreasing with technological advancement) that it takes for the signal to travel to her location from mine. The words proclaim that reality is digitally mediated across time and space, but the connection is real. Incidentally, even Luther did not have a problem with this way of perceiving koinonia in prayer. In his letter A Simple Way to Pray, he comforted his barber with the following (2017a, b, 198):

 Editor’s Note: Mystagogy, both in its historical sense and in the modern baptismal rites, is understood as post-baptismal catechesis in which the newly baptized further reflect on the gospel and how it connects to their lives (Johnson 2007, xviii and 400–401). 1

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Never think that you are kneeling or standing alone, rather think that the whole of the Church…are standing there beside you and you are standing among them in a common, united petition which God cannot disdain. There we find God the Creator, God the Redeemer, God the Holy Spirit, that is, God who daily sanctifies us.

For most people, I dare to guess that the presence of God’s Spirit in prayer likely seems self-evident. However, when it came to the COVID-era controversies regarding the sacrament of Holy Communion online, the issue seemed to be more related to experiencing the real presence of Christ in elements.2 And this distinction between the presence of the Spirit and the presence of Christ reveals a peculiar theological confusion. In my interpretation of this debate, it seems that the issue at stake is really about the nature of the sacrament and its necessity. In terms of the nature of Holy Communion, a sacrament is an embodied means of grace. Therefore, it becomes a mere fetish if taken out of the context of a physical gathering of bodies. If the body is not assembled, it simply makes no sense to have communion because communion is precisely a sacrament of remembering the body. In terms of the necessity of that remembrance, the proclamation of the gift as a promise “for you”, which Luther identifies as the two most significant words in the entire liturgy, are simply not necessary if we are at a physical distance. During times of physical distancing—again, as experienced by millions of homebound and displaced Christians—the Word suffices as a means of grace “for you,” because it proclaims to you what is present, namely Luther states above, the Holy Trinity. Part of the confusion is due to the heresy that is a risk for most Protestant theology, which is a division of the work of the Trinity, assigning the work of creation to the Godhead, reconciliation to Jesus, and sanctification to the Spirit. A recent Lutheran World Federation (LWF) theological consultation on pneumatology made the strong case for Lutherans to speak of a “Christological pneumatology” or a “pneumatological Christology” (Rimmer and Peterson 2021). Luther himself used the phrases “the Spirit of Christ” and “the Holy Spirit” interchangeably for the very reason that there is no distinction between Christ present in faith and the presence of the Holy Spirit. In the traditional wisdom of the Colossians hymn, John’s prologue, and the Proverbs, the phrase “the ubiquity of Christ” will pivot to the ubiquity of the Trinity. Following that theological brush-clearing, the purpose of this essay will focus on the question of sacramental mediation that has captured most of the liturgical discussion during the time of COVID. In taking a broader view, it can be determined that most people, including Luther’s barber in 1535, are uncertain about the

 I want to acknowledge the pastoral questions at the heart of this debate. I do not intend to wade into this discussion, as I know many Bishops and pastors who decided on very divergent approaches to the same pastoral outcome. Some insist on a digitally mediated sacrament as a means of grace, and some insist on the ministry of the Word as the means of grace until the body can again assemble for the sacrament. Both aim for the same pastoral goal to provide a means of grace to comfort the faithful. 2

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ubiquitous presence of the Trinity in the point that physical distancing from the sacrament creates such pastoral crises.

Problem of Nominalism Our problem seems to be a sort of nominalism. “Sort” of nominalism because it is such a diverse field of thought. Nominalism is the spatial disruption between what we perceive with our senses and the instantiation of metaphysical forms. In other words, a soul or spirit of a being is not really present (instantiated) in the being. Things like redness, human being, or a spirit do not really exist. They exist in name only (nominally), as mere words that describe the similar color of apples (redness), the common nature of humans (human beings), or a soul (God’s Spirit). This debate goes back to Plato and Aristotle in western philosophy and even farther in the east. Today it manifests itself in what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the Earth. The idea that the Earth is a soul-less web of inert chemicals that evolved by proper cosmic conditions and function according to the mechanical laws of Newton’s physics is rooted in the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. This spatiotemporal reconceptualization of the physical universe was the seedbed for contemporary western cosmologies that consider our location in the cosmos as a mere space where we exist, rather than a place of meaningful and life-giving inter-relationships that shape our sense of being, belonging, and becoming. The genealogy of this demystification of the Earth runs back through Francis Bacon and the Protestant Reformation to the via moderna of early modern and late medieval nominalist philosophers such as William of Ockham. There is no doubt that Luther’s own education was squarely located within this transitional period of humanistic thinking. Luther refers to Ockham as his teacher and even describes himself at one point as a terminist (WA 38:160.3). It is clear that Luther exhibits many signs of transitioning from the via antiqua to the via moderna. It is also apparent that Luther aimed to overcome the magicalism of church doctrines of transubstantiation with a fideistic focus on the words of scripture (sola scriptura) as that which proclaims (names) the truth about God’s revelation in Christ (solus Christus). This has led many critics like John Milbank and Von Balthasar to label Luther as a nominalist, in the extreme fideistic sense that Ockham is normally interpreted. However, Luther rejected the nominalist tendencies of writers such as Gabriel Biel, who extended the logic of nominalism to suggest that human beings can uphold the covenantal demands of a distant God, who granted justification from afar by absolute will and power (Häggelund 1956). Luther rejected this nominalist notion on the basis that if we can fulfil laws and covenants by our own volition, there would never have been a need for grace, and therefore Christ. This is the same logic of justification by grace through faith that Luther deployed against the Pelagian idea that we could achieve salvation by virtue of our own nature. Here, Luther simply extends this same logic against nominalists like Biel. In reality, Luther rejected

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the entire nominalist project regarding the relationship between philosophy and theology altogether. He pivoted away from the nominalist discussion of nature and grace to the question of faith and work. He focused like a laser on the gospel as a gift and promise, revealed through Jesus in space and time. In this sense, Luther’s whole project dealt with a more fundamental question about the hiddenness of God versus the revelation of God. Luther knew and experienced the presence of God in the world.3 The question Luther was trying to clarify was how we could be sure that what we perceive in the gospel is a gracious revelation of God’s promise. The only place where we can be sure of a clear, unveiled revelation that comforts us and liberates us with the gospel is in Jesus Christ. Therefore, that which points to and proclaims the revelation of Christ (Word and sacrament) can be a source of the gospel promise. Everything else that we discern is through reason. By reason, we can discern how to engage in the social, political, economic, and ecological realms. While we can and must use our reason to discern the relative justice, goodness, and beauty that we perceive in the world, we cannot rely on our reason to discern a revelation of God’s heart. Revelation is always a gift and a promise for creation (coram deo), while reason is our faithful task towards our neighbor and all creation (coram mundo) (Grosshans 2009, 181). Reason will always be veiled because God will always be hidden behind those masks. However, that does not mean that God is not really there. It would be difficult to say that Luther was a nominalist in the sense that he proposed a spatial separation between God and creation.4 On one side, Luther was combatting the mix of scholasticism and magicalism operative in the Church of his age. He was attempting to safeguard the proper roles of faith and reason while liberating the promise of Christ from its captivity to a priesthood that claimed a special power to dispense this revelation. The Church had commodified a free gift (justification by grace through faith). However, on the other side, Luther was combatting the radical reformers such as Ulrich Zwingli, who claimed that Christ was not actually present in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. Zwingli’s position was that the Church was incorrect in commodifying the gift because communion was not actually a sacrament (or mysterium), rather a mere sign of Christ who was elsewhere in space and time. This radical position is truly a nominalist in that it proposes a physical distancing from the Spirit of Christ.5

 Luther was a mystical theologian. He embraced mysticism in the tradition of the Teutonic Mystics. Luther’s experience of God (sapientia experimentalis) was indebted to Eckhart’s work, probably received through Tauler. But Luther undeniably had mystical experiences of God, which led him to promote a spirituality of daily life, including a method of prayer (oratio/meditation/ten tatio) that recognized holiness in the vocation of all the baptized (see Hoffman 1955). 4  For a deep but succinct summary of this entire analysis, see Chap. 2 of Mattes (2017). 5  It should be noted that this nominalist separation of God from creation is a radical break, or deprivation, as opposed to the notion of God’s self-contraction as in the Kabbalistic concept of zimzum, which is a Divine self-contraction to give the space for the creative cosmogenesis (Moltmann 2003a, b). 3

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Real Presence and the Replete Presence of God In contrast to Zwingli’s nominalism, Luther professed faith in the real presence of Christ in, with, and under the signs of the bread and wine. In his 1535 treatise, The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ Against the Fanatics, Luther confesses that Christ is truly present where the Word is proclaimed, and the Sacraments are administered (1955). Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession  states that Word and Sacraments constitute the Church precisely because Christ is really present. In his 1528 Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, Luther describes three ways Christ is present. The first is circumscribed in a particular form, such as Jesus’s human body. The second is definitive, meaning taking up space but not circumscribed by it. For instance, the post-resurrection Christ who can pass through doors is present but not delimited by physical boundaries. But the third, replete presence describes God’s ubiquitous presence among all creation. Here Luther resonates with the vision of Nicolas of Cusa, who describes God as the center and circumference of the universe in which creation exists. Replete presence of the Spirit in, with, and under creation describes the subsistence of all creation in God. Firm in the logic of that confession of the real presence, Luther affirms that the Trinity is immanently present behind the “masks of God” (larvae Dei), including all of creation. Luther writes, “God is fully present in all creatures, and I might find God in stone, in fire, in water, or even in a rope, for God is there (WA 19:492.5; LW 36:342). We are reminded of the word given to Jeremiah (23:24), “Do I not fill the heaven and earth?” and the hymn of the Colossians (1:17) that affirms, “God is before all things, and in God all things hold together.” In this way, Luther would surely not disagree with Indigenous and other wisdom traditions that speak of the immanence of God’s Spirit in nature. To categorically disagree would be to deny the possibility of Christ’s presence in the sacraments (finitum capax infinitii). After grounding this profession of God’s replete presence in his confession about the Eucharist, Luther extends the logic by saying, “God may have and knows still other modes whereby Christ’s body can be in a given place” (LW 37:223). Of course, in discerning the presence of God in which we live and move and have our being, we must maintain theological rigor regarding the domains of revelation and reason. Niels Henrik Gregersen reminds us that we must maintain “the hiddenness of God is a necessary placeholder for an awareness of God’s majestic being, but the identification of the reality of God can only be offered via the doctrine of the Trinity” (2002, 268).

 Mystagogical Key to Guard us from the Despair A of Nominalism To help our parishioners and friends identify this replete presence or ubiquity of the Trinity, we can hold fast to mystagogical or liturgical traditions that help us discern between revelation (gospel) and the mysterium tremendum of sublime experience

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that may or may not be God. It is “mystagogical” in that the mysteries of the church are pedagogical tools. In other words, the sacraments and liturgies of our religious practice are a form of Christian education that teaches us about the very mysteries that they communicate. The notion of a mystery points to how reality is hidden from view but can be known through experience. In other words, this is truth and goodness that we struggle to teach or summarize with language (like I am trying to do now) precisely because it is the opposite of nominalism. The proper posture with respect to a mystery is to be verbally silent and bodily engaged. Through this full-bodied experience, we can come to know the beauty of the experience. When that experience is over, the peace of that experience stays. The comfort, for instance, of having received the sacrament and having heard the good news proclaimed that comforts the heart. In the context of the liturgy, that experience of Christ present in faith goes with us, becomes the lens through which we can practice perceiving that presence even when we are not in the worshiping community or on our own. Luther (2000, 461.41) describes baptism in this way, calling it an object of faith, or a treasure that signifies how we have received the whole presence of Christ, the Spirit with all its gifts. Each day, we can return to it to remind us that we are sealed by the Spirit in which our lives are held daily. Even when we are apart from the mystery or means of grace itself, we have this mystagogical key to open our eyes and hearts to (feel) what is hidden but has been there the whole time. In the words of the Nicene creed, the ecumenical church has always professed a belief in God, the maker of all that is seen and unseen. St. Maximus wrote about the ways that liturgy made this mystagogical connection, opening all of our spiritual senses to perceive the flux of God’s love, the Spirit that exists in the spaces between us, sustaining and renewing the face of the Earth (Armstrong 2019). We cannot properly call that spiritual sight a revelation per se. But when that awareness is the result of Christ’s presence in faith, is this not revelatory? Does this wisdom of the Trinity not guide our reason? Does our attentiveness to the Trinity all around us not keep us from the dangers of nominalism in relationship to our consciousness of the human soul? Does it guard us against the fear and desperation that comes from thinking that we are ever alone in the world, even in times of exile from religious practice or physical distancing? This admittedly panentheistic perspective is a rich entry point for deep dialogue with Indigenous and other wisdom traditions. Any serious dialogue with traditional religions reveals that many shamans do not claim access to special revelations. They tune their capacity to perceive the often unseen that the natural world communicates. It is less about magic, and more about the practice of deep attentiveness to ecologies of intersubjective relationships that exist around us all the time. So if one claims (with Nicolas of Cusa, and process ecotheologians) that the energy in which every creature subsists is God, then does the mode of prayer really effect the presence of God? With this notion of the ubiquity of God, we can affirm that we are in the presence of God whether we are in silent communion with more-than-human creatures in a forest, praying alone in a hospital room, or participating in the corporate liturgy in Church.

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According to the logic of Luther, one difference between these modes of prayer is a question of proclamation. He is convinced that we cannot be certain what we perceive in communion with creatures in a forest, or in solitary contemplation, communicates God’s presence as a promise. One of the gifts of the ministry of Word and sacraments is that we can trust that these means of grace communicate God’s presence as promise. (Though in our churches we are right to be equally suspicious as to whether preaching communicates the Verbum extra nos as gospel!) But I think Luther and all the saints would agree that another qualitative difference between these modes of prayer and worship is the question of who initiates this koinonia? The assembled, embodied communion around Word and sacrament is initiated by God in Christ Jesus through the Spirit. In the case of the spirituality of daily life it is significant to consider whose presence we perceive. Whose presence do we invoke?

A Simple Way to Invoke The beauty of Christian liturgy offers a trove of mystagogical richness. I conclude by calling us to consider a very simple part of the liturgy, in fact, the very first part, the invocation. Beginning prayer and worship in the name of the Trinity may reinforce the idea that God was not present. Nominalists can gather in “the name of” God who is otherwise still distant, similar to the way a governmental commission might gather in the name of a Sovereign who is not present but has delegated the power to convene. Likewise, inviting God to come and be present in our worship or prayer may reinforce the idea that God was somehow spatially separated until we took the initiative to invite God into the space between us. Something as simple as the invocation can help decolonize our minds of this nominalist cosmology, and reframe our perception of how our life and relationships exist within God. Consider the following. In the invocation, do we invite God to be present or gather in God’s name? Or do we acknowledge that we are gathered in the presence of the Triune God? The first step of the Ignatian examen is to place yourself in the presence of God or to become aware of the presence of God. There is a striking similarity to Sami and Native American prayers of gratitude that do not begin by inviting God to be present, but rather recognize God already immanently present no matter where the act of worship, prayer, or daily life occurs. The invocation could help us break out of the gravity of the presumption of a real nominalist rupture and offer a simple way to invite our parishioners to perceive the ubiquity of the Spirit of the Triune God in whom we live, move, and have our being across space and time. With our spiritual senses open to that kind of perception, we do not have to despair when we are distanced from our worshiping community for reasons of health or other social factors. This simple way of invocation can reinforce a cosmology that proclaims the good news to one of our most basic anxieties. God is with us, the Lord is near. The invocation can invite our parishioners into the joy of the psalmist who declares in wonder.

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References Armstrong, Jonathan J., trans. 2019. On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy—A Theological Vision of the Liturgy by St. Maximus the Confessor. Popular Patristics (Greek original and English translation). Yonkers: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Gregersen, Niels Henrik. 2002. Ten Theses on the Future of Lutheran Theology: Charisms, Contexts, and Challenges. Dialog 41 (4): 264–272. Grosshans, Hans-Peter. 2009. Luther on Faith and Reason: The Light of Reason at the Twilight of the World. In The Global Luther: A Theologian for Modern Times, ed. Christina Helmer, 173–186. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Häggelund, Bengt. 1956. Was Luther a Nominalist? Theology 59: 226–234. Hoffman, Bengt. 1955. Theology of the Heart: The Role of Mysticism in the Theology of Martin Luther. Translated by Fredrick C. Ahrens, 1526. Philadelphia: Fortress. Johnson, Maxwell E. 2007. The Rites of Christian Initiation: Their Evolution and Interpretation. Rev. ed. Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Luther, Martin. 1883–2009. D.  Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. 73 Volumes. Weimar: Herman Böhlaus Nachfolger. ———. 1955. Luther’s Works. American Edition. 75 Volumes. Edited by Jaroslav Pelikan (Volumes 1–30), Helmut T. Lehmann (Volumes 31–55), Christopher Boyd Brown (Volumes 56–75) and Benjamin T.G. Mayes (Volumes 56–75). Philadelphia: Fortress; St. Louis: Concordia ———. 2000. The Large Catechism. In The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, 377–480. Minneapolis: Fortress. ———. 2017a. The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ—Against the Fanatics. 1526. Translated by Matthew C. Harrison. Reprint, Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House. ———. 2017b. A Simple Way to Pray, 2nd ed. 1535. Translated by Matthew C. Harrison. Reprint, Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House. Mattes, Mark. 2017. Martin Luther’s Theology of Beauty: A Reappraisal. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Moltmann, Jürgen. 2003a. The Origin and Completion of Time in the Primordial and in the Eschatological Moment. In Science and Wisdom, Translated by Margret Kohl, 98–110. Minneapolis: Fortress. ———. 2003b. Science and Wisdom. Translated by Margret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress. Rimmer, Chad M., and Cheryl M.  Peterson. 2021. We Believe in the Holy Spirit: Global Perspectives on Lutheran Identities. In We Believe in the Holy Spirit: Global Perspectives on Lutheran Identities, ed. Chad M. Rimmer and Cheryl M. Peterson, 9–18. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlangsanstalt/ Lutheran World Federation. Thompson, Deanna. 2016. The Virtual Body of Christ in a Suffering World. Nashville: Abingdon. WA: See Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke. Chad Rimmer is a husband, father, theologian, teacher, naturalist, Lutheran pastor, and a poet. He was born in the US, and has been blessed to live and teach in Denmark, Scotland, France, and Senegal. He has worked with churches of the Lutheran World Federation in over 40 countries with all their cultural, linguistic, religious, artistic and natural beauty. Today Chad, his wife, two boys and their dog Lucy, live in Geneva, Switzerland, where he serves as a Program Executive for Theology in the Department for Theology, Mission and Justice, relating to questions of Lutheran identity, education and eco-theology.  

Part IV

Led Out into the World

Chapter 11

“In All Times and Places”: The Transcendence and Immanence of the Holy Spirit in a Diasporic Body of Christ Kayko Driedger Hesslein

Introduction: The Trauma of Dislocation and Diaspora The biggest trauma to occur at the beginning of the Christian faith was not the death of Jesus, but the destruction of the second Temple and the razing of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. The catastrophic loss of the dwelling place of the Shekhinah, the Spirit of God, impacted not only the people of Israel but also Gentile followers of the Israelite God in the Jewish diaspora. Jews, Jewish Christians, and Jewish-adjacent Christians together had to grapple with the irrevocable loss of their religious home and heart, forcing them to develop new religious identities that made meaning out of this loss and to craft a new way of being the people of God that now separate from that central place. Despite their trauma over losing the Temple, a central dwelling place of God and an identity-defining gathering place for the people, neither group sought to reclaim or rebuild the Temple in those early years. However, they developed simultaneously transcendent and immanent understandings of God’s presence among a diasporically defined people. For Jews, a new identity emerged that centered on the Shekhinah coming to be present with those engaged in the act of studying Torah, while for Jewish and Gentile Christians, a distinct identity developed out of a belief that the Spirit had come to dwell most intimately in Jesus Christ, and through him was present to and in his followers (Joslyn-Siemiatkoski 2018). The Christian connection between Christ’s church and the Holy Spirit emerges from Matthew 18:20, “for where two or This paper was written from Treaty 7 territory, which covers the lands of the Stoney-Nakoda, Kainai, Blackfoot, and Tsuut’ina peoples, and is Region 3 of the Métis Nation of Alberta. I honor their teachings of what it is to belong to a land and also to be dislocated from it. K. D. Hesslein (*) Lutheran Theological Seminary, Saskatoon, SK, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero (ed.), Church After the Corona Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23731-7_11

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three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (NRSV). Church historian and Episcopal priest Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski argues that this pneumatologically formed ecclesiology is a Christian response to the destruction of the Temple that predates the Jewish turn to Torah in Pirkei Avot. “Matthew, unlike Avot, [equates] Jesus with Shekhinah” (2018, 152). Post-ascension, Jesus’ presence was interpreted spiritually, centered around the Temple, as the transition from Luke to Acts demonstrates (Luke 24:53; Acts 1:8–9; Acts 2:1–4, where Pentecost is the Jewish festival of Shavuot, a pilgrimage festival to Jerusalem). Assuming an authorship date for Luke-Acts as post-Temple destruction, the connection between the Spirit and followers of Christ (both Jewish and Gentile) establishes a path out of trauma triggered not by Jesus’ death, but the events of 70 C.E. Subsequent interpretations locating the Spirit in the resurrected Christ and among the followers of Christ, as the missionary activities in Acts report, can be understood as trauma responses attempting to manage the pain of destruction and loss. The Spirit of God was relocated from the Temple to Christ, who was present in the diaspora community, thus affirming the continuity of God’s presence with the people of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The trauma of losing the Temple and the dwelling place of God was addressed and resolved through the theological development that the spirit of Christ comes to be present among the people, since it was no longer possible for the people to be present with the spirit at the Temple in Jerusalem. In both groups, the divine Spirit became foundational and formational for a new communal identity for those who had lost their central gathering place and now existed as bodies in diaspora. Indeed, one might argue that the very nature of the diaspora faith community prompted a pilgrimage reversal. Whereas Jews and Jewish Christians had previously traveled from their homes to Jerusalem to encounter God, an understanding was developed that God now travels to the pilgrims in their homes. The trauma of spiritual dislocation was addressed through the spiritual relocation not of the people, but of God. The emergence and continuance of SARS-CoV2 (COVID-19) is, for Christianity today, a similarly dislocating trauma. Since March 2020, gatherings for worship had been curtailed, restricted, cancelled or otherwise shut down either intermittently or continually throughout the world. On a global scale, Christians had been unable to travel to church (whether near or far) or gather for centralized worship to much the same effect as those early Jewish Christians. Although many  communities have fully returned to their worship places, some still live in that hope, a hope that was foreclosed to those early Christians and Jews, the intermediate loss has still been traumatic. This loss has likewise provoked an identity crisis––who or what is this body of Christ when physically gathering in central location(s) is not possible? Is Christ present when two or three are gathered in his name online? Many Christians are finding themselves in a digital diaspora, struggling to define an immanent identity in a transcendent digital world, while simultaneously discovering that digital

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transcendence facilitates connections that are sometimes prohibited in immanent forms.1 The dislocation of God from the Temple in Jerusalem is being repeated as a dislocation of God from physical worship spaces. History repeats itself, in variants. Now that God has been dislocated, even temporarily, from the sanctuary, can God be located in the digital realm? I would suggest that just as Jewish Christians came to accept a divine relocation of the Spirit following the loss of the Temple, Christians today can do so in the same way, by turning to the Spirit’s transcendence and immanence together. This chapter will recenter the issue of “digital church” in an ecclesiology that is both christologically and pneumatologically shaped, and ground our understanding of the diasporic and digital Christian community as a Spirit-filled extension of the material body of Christ and heal the wounds of our dislocation.

Spirit and Body Martin Luther explicitly laid out the connection between the Holy Spirit and the formation of the church in his explanation of the Third Article of the Apostles’ Creed in the Large Catechism, an instructional booklet designed for clergy. While focusing on belief in the Holy Spirit, his explanation also describes the role of the Spirit in forming the Christian community. “I believe that there is on earth a holy little flock and community of pure saints under one head, Christ. It is called together by the Holy Spirit in one faith, mind and understanding” (Luther 2015, 362). For Luther, the Spirit is active in gathering the individual bodies of Christians together into one as the body of Christ materialized in historical existence. As Cheryl Meese Peterson emphasizes, Luther‘s insight was that “far from taking us out of the world, the Spirit’s voice draws us more deeply into the world” (2010, 160). Paradoxically, the Spirit invigorates and enlivens that which is bodily, not to increase the separation between body and spirit but to reduce it. According to John’s midrash on Genesis (John 1:1), the Spirit, present with the Logos at Creation, moves the divine towards incarnation and embodiment, in the acts of Creation, Christ, and in the church.2 Further, Peterson highlights Luther’s emphasis that “the locus of the Spirit’s activity is not simply the individual but the community itself” (2010, 161). The Spirit works to bring individuals into the body of Christ and also forms the relationships between the various members of that body. Calling people into and nurturing the development of the church are two movements of the same Spirit. Ecclesiology and pneumatology, like Christology and pneumatology, overlap.  This is not simply a Christian struggle. Other religious traditions that center around congregating for worship are also experiencing this including, once again, the Jewish people. 2  For the connection between the opening verses of the Gospel of John as midrash (Jewish interpretation and commentary) of the first few verses of Genesis, see “Chapter 4: The Intertextual Birth of the Logos: The Prologue to John as Jewish Midrash,” in Boyarin (2004). 1

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This one community is, again paradoxically, multiply embodied and enlivened by the Spirit of life, just as the Christian diaspora community developed multiple centers in Antioch, Damascus, and Rome (and Jerusalem and Babylon for the Jewish community). Each particular group developed its own traditions (and problems), which contributed to the identity of the whole. The book of Revelation lists the unique particularities of seven churches in diaspora while simultaneously claiming them as the one kingdom of priests serving God (Rev 1:5–6). The transcendent Spirit manifests in the immanent body, itself a Pauline collection of many diverse parts. The work of the Spirit in the church is to transcend normative particularities that would homogenize the body while simultaneously uniting those particularities in one body. In the church, we see the glory of the divine presence as it makes one-­ with-­ difference, manifesting immanence through multiply embodied transcendence. Connecting Spirit and Body to shape the identity of the church is not limited to Protestant understanding. The church is “the Body of Christ” and “and also the Temple of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16–17)” (Chia 2020, 22). As Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas has argued, when it comes to the church, “Christ in-stitutes and the Spirit con-stitutes” the body (1985, 140). Zizioulas maintains that baptism, which is both an entrance into the family of Christ that we call the body and the giving of the Holy Spirit, demonstrates that Christ and the Spirit belong together. Upholding the church as Trinitarian, Zizioulas follows other Orthodox theologians in keeping together “the work of the Holy Spirit and that of Christ” (125). “Because the Spirit is so constitutive of the church which is the body of Christ, pneumatology is an ontological category in ecclesiology” (132). Identifying the presence of the Spirit in creating the church is necessary for discerning who or what is the body of Christ in a digital diaspora. Therefore, this transcendent Spirit finds its manifestation in the immanent church––in the community of physical bodies. In opposition to the idea that the spiritual was to be separate from the corporeal, Luther himself argued that “the Spirit cannot be with us except in bodily things such as the Word, water, Christ’s body and in his saints on earth” (Lowe 2019, 127, quoting Luther’s “That These Words of Christ ‘This is My Body’”). The Spirit relies on physicality and materiality to effect faith. We must be embodied to hear, see, feel, taste, or otherwise experience and receive the Word to which the Spirit calls us. And, as Peterson reminds us, it must be in community. These experiences are physical, but also relational and communal. However, as diasporic existence has demonstrated, the community that the Spirit calls together, and to which the Spirit is present, need not be physically-proximate to maintain its communal identity as embodied and material relationality. As the church’s development in the diaspora demonstrates, restricting the identity of the church to only those who are physically gathered in one spatially contained location is not only shallow but ahistorical. The act of the transcendent Holy Spirit in constituting the church across vast geographical distances through digital means is a contemporary manifestation of what was previously achieved by other means. We are not the first to be dislocated from physical proximity to one another or from the

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central worship space. The Spirit has transcended and unified the dispersed body of Christ from Jerusalem in 70 C.E. to today––the saints in all times and places.

The Transcendent Word In the beginning, the spirit of God moved over the waters. Transcendence is the starting point for the presence of the Spirit in the material world. And yet transcendence is not restricted to the Spirit alone, but extends to the Word, to the Logos, to the words of the Word. As Frances Gray notes in her work on the efficacy of the words of institution, “the words of Jesus are trans-temporalized” (2014, 117). They start from their origin in one specific time and place to one particular community of individuals but are repeated to multiple groups, in multiple places, multiple times. Despite their repeating (or possibly even because of it), they remain efficacious, as Paul recounts in 1 Cor 11:23–26, and as millions of presiders and billions of communicants have experienced over 2000 years. Even though the Temple still stood, and Jerusalem was still the center of the Jewish Christian diaspora, Paul never insisted that the words were only efficacious when uttered in the same space and time as the first utterance––in Jerusalem, on the night of Passover. This diasporic extension of the transcendence of the embodied Word continued and was reinforced following the fall of Jerusalem. The decades and then centuries that stretched between Jesus’ death and resurrection and the Christians who followed led to a temporal diaspora, in addition to a geographical one.3 However, this distance was not without precedent. The Jews continued in their identity as the children of Israel, despite the many years since God renamed Jacob and then gifted the people with Torah. Their identity as Israel has never fractured as their physical distance from the land and Temple or their temporal distance from Moses increased, even through two exiles. Likewise, or perhaps because of our spiritual intergenerational memory inherited from the people of Israel, Christians also have continued to assert and build our identity on the temporal continuity of the generations that constitute the church. This temporal transcendence is seen explicitly in the profession that the presence of Christ’s body and blood, in the bread and wine connected with the Word, crosses the boundaries of time and space in ways that humans physically cannot. The body receiving the Body in one generation is fundamentally connected from the generations that have come before (or are even yet to come). We worship “with the saints

 The language of “temporal” and “spatial” is informed by North American indigenous theologians, particularly Vine Deloria Jr. and George E. “Tink” Tinker. Deloria and Tinker describe the Eurocentric perspective that sees spaces as disconnected from one another and time as flowing chronologically in discrete units from beginning to end. In contrast, indigenous communities see time and space as intertwined and inseparable, with time functioning cyclically and space as relational. See especially “Chapter 4: Thinking in Time and Space” in Deloria Jr. (2003) and “Chapter 7: The Spatial Problem of History” and Tinker (2008). 3

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of every time and place” in an eschatologically-embraced community that, through the presence of the Word, simultaneously transcends and unites our temporal and spatial dispersions. The transcendent nature of the Word shares the transcendent nature of other holy words. Scripture itself is also trans-temporal and trans-spatial. The “people of the Book” have always included people at home by themselves, engaged in the study of Scripture on their own, not just those gathered in physical proximity for worship. Trans-temporal and trans-spatial communications are part of both the oral and written traditions contained within both Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. Jesus reflected his affiliation with the Pharisees in his expansion of holy words from the written law to the oral law, as did Paul.4 For them, the authority of God’s word was transtemporal, bringing the generations together, united under Torah. For Paul in diaspora, that unity was not compromised, and his experience of the presence of God not lessened, by his distance from Jerusalem. It was Paul who made material communication of the Word––the resurrected Christ––normative throughout the Jewish- and Gentile Christian diaspora. His ministry was predominantly letter-based, and as theologian Roland Chia emphasizes, “the apostle Paul used the media of his day––he was an avid letter-writer––to exhort, instruct, rebuke and encourage the churches in different cities while he was in prison. Paul knew that distance and separation could not threaten the deep koinonia he had with these churches” (2020, 25). Paul took advantage of the physicality of distributed letters to transcend the distances between the churches and to proclaim their unity-in-diaspora––a unity of many bodies, one in the Spirit (Romans 8:9).5 Chia’s use of “media” is particularly striking, given its resonances with digital media today and the belief of some that a line must be drawn with digital or video media. That our spoken and written words are digitally-mediated through electrons transmitted to satellites and back again is not significantly different from the words being mediated through the writing and reading of Paul’s words to the churches and transmitted by couriers across land and sea, nor does it differ substantively from words being mediated through microphones and speakers or the technology of hearing aids. Likewise, we do not object to sign language translators who mediate the spoken words through the “speech” of their hands. We are not bound to a literal spoken-and-heard succession of the words of institution from Jesus through the disciples to the churches to us, as exists in the oral tradition of many North American indigenous peoples, where only certain people are authorized to tell particular stories and to teach them to the next story-keeper. In church, anyone may read the words of Scripture out loud, copy them at home into an email to a friend, or even listen to a prerecorded version without the comfort or the kerygmatic proclamation and witness of the Gospel being lessened.

 For more on Pharisees as followers of Oral Law, see Schaper (1999). For Jesus’ affiliation with Pharisaism, see Heschel (2011). 5  “...you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.” The you in Greek is second person plural. 4

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Christians do not uphold an “official” language of Scripture, as do Muslims who traditionally require the recitation of Qu’ran to be in Arabic or Jews who recite Torah in the synagogue in Hebrew. Nor do we object to the mediation that translation brings. Christians have a long history of allowing for both the mediation and the translation of the Scriptures without their holiness being compromised. This is particularly relevant for the words of institution, which are recited in local languages without losing their sacramental efficacy. In Scripture and in Paul’s letters to the churches of his time, words are orally and textually mediated, a form of technology that predates video streaming. Letters, in particular, served as asynchronous communication, much as a prerecorded video does today. Mediation of the Word and words has occurred throughout time and space because of time and space and the faithfuls’ need to be united across them. The mediated Word––digitally or traditionally––heals through transcendent unity when dislocation wounds.

The Immanent Spirit The Holy Spirit is immanent, though not corporeal. The ruach that moved over the waters in Genesis was present, though not physically embodied. The pneuma hagia that rested on the disciples during Pentecost was attendant, though not material. An important distinction is made here between immanent/present/attendant and corporeal/embodied/material. Although immanent and embodied are often elided, such a conflation betrays an anthropological dualism of spirit and body. Although I have attempted to avoid speaking of the Trinity’s transcendence in the Holy Spirit and its immanence in Jesus Christ, my attempts betray that there is a binary, divisive or not, in our conceptual understanding of God and God’s creation. In Derridean fashion, what I take pains to avoid becomes what I underscore. In the case of the immanence of the second person of the Trinity, it is the assertion of incarnation, fleshly embodiment that distinguishes the Son from the Spirit––the foundational elision. In order to uphold the uniqueness of each person of the Trinity, Christians insist that Christ’s immanence stems from his materiality, establishing a distinctiveness, through separation, of body and Spirit.6 In doing so, we unintentionally deny the immanence of the Spirit, and create a split between the embodied (Christ) and the inspirited (Holy Spirit). The dualism of physical body and immaterial spirit is connected to a dualism of “real” and “digital,” which Charles Ess insightfully unpacks. While he examines discussions about online Communion, he writes, “The arguments surrounding the theology and ecclesiology of communion as offered virtually turn on questionable  Ironically, we then proceed to deny the fullness of his human nature, subsuming it to a divine spirit, while nevertheless using it as proof of his immanence. For more on the ways in which Jesus’ human nature has not been as fully integrated into our Christology as the Chalcedonian definition asserts, particularly vis-a-vis his corporeality, see Driedger Hesslein (2015). 6

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assumptions regarding ‘digital’ vs. ‘analogue’ and thereby especially suspect theological assumptions that too sharply divide the spiritual from the material” (2020, 42). In Ess’s analysis, churches that argue against digital, or digitally-mediated, Communion do so on the basis that the digitally transmitted and represented images and words are not “real.” By real, they mean physical, and in their insistence that only that which is in the physical presence of the worship leader or presider (and in the case of Communion, the elements) is valid, they prioritize the worshippers’ bodies over their spirits. Embodiedness and physicality are conflated with immanence and presence, describing and privileging it as ‘real.’ I would extend his analysis beyond Communion to church itself. In the discussions of online versus in-person church, this body-spirit dualism is particularly foregrounded, whereas “in-person” functions to describe the gathering of physically-proximate bodies. Used unreflectively, “in-person” betrays a bias towards physical proximity as the constitutive characteristic of human relationships and human interactions. Aside from reinforcing a problematic connection between physicality and intimacy (as the prohibitions against incest flag, for example), this bias runs counter to the Christian argument that the resurrected (and incorporeal) Christ is in a deep and intimate relationship with corporeal Christians today.7 The elevation and privilege described above subsequently lead to a division of body and spirit, elevating the former and reducing the latter. Even if the hierarchy were to be reversed, the discrepancy in status negates a true unity of body and spirit. This in turn risks a troubling hierarchy of the immanent and corporeal Christ over the immanent and incorporeal Spirit. As the church reflects the Trinitarian God in a unity-in-diversity of Christ and the Holy Spirit, so it upholds a unity of body and spirit in its members. Denying the unity of one denies the unity of the other. It is, then, the split between body and spirit, combined with the insistence on physical proximity as the only “real” unity of bodies, that provokes a rejection of digitally-­ mediated church and an insistence that physical/in-church Communion is the only “real” celebration of the Sacrament. The double movement of splitting the spirit from the body and then splitting the church from the world and its digital diaspora upholds a belief that we are only truly united in body and spirit in the church, not in the world. Unfortunately, this restrictive locating of divine immanence to a materially-defined (and restricted) space carries two wounding consequences. First, it locates and then contains the essence of church to the sanctuary’s physical boundaries. It attempts to constrict the activity of the Spirit in the world to physical proximity to the Body and Blood of Christ. This precise binding of the Spirit to a particular physical space led to the traumatic ripples after the second Temple was destroyed. The trauma of the loss of the Temple (for a second time, we might note) was the result of a forced dislocation of God’s presence from the physical Temple. The destruction of the Temple would not have been as wounding had it not been the  Asexual people in particular object to this connection, arguing that intimacy can be experienced as romantic, emotional, aesthetic, intellectual, social, and/or spiritual without requiring physical proximity. For more, see Decker (2015). The addition of spiritual attraction to this list is my own. 7

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dwelling place of the Shekhinah and the central location for physically-proximate corporate worship. Likewise, the dislocation from church buildings would not have been as traumatic had we not prioritized the physical worship space as the only place in which our bodies were considered to be in the presence of Christ, and the central place to which the Spirit called and gathered Christians. Second, the double movement above provides a rationale for the argument that physical proximity of individual members is a requirement for the continuity of fellowship within the community and corporate worship. (Perhaps it should not surprise us at this point to see in “corporate” the dual meaning of corporeal and communal.) Insisting on physical togetherness––“in-person worship”––as the only way in which to receive the body of Christ and the blessing of the Spirit is an insistence that we can only be sanctified with other humans present and not alone. This insistence wounds those who cannot be physically present to worship in the sanctuary, as “shut-ins” have long experienced, and as the rest of us have come to experience in the isolations of COVID.8 Theologically, it also denies that the Holy Spirit unites trans-temporally and trans-spatially. When worship and Communion are restricted to physically and temporally proximate gatherings (that is, in-person and real-time), we refuse the relocation of the Spirit into the Jewish- and Gentile-Christian diaspora in 70 C.E. and its continued presence with the church ever since. The recognition of digitally-mediated Communion as “real” is thus a rejection of the dualistic split of spirit and body and the idea that transcendence is the domain of the Spirit and immanence the incarnated Son’s. It is an affirmation of the immanence of the Spirit along with the immanence of the Word, whose immanent though immaterial presence brings healing through relationship with God and the ekklesia.

 Transcendent, Embodied Church: Newly A Inspirited Embodiments Ecclesiology matters.9 Ecclesiology is material. The church, inspired by the Spirit, is nevertheless composed of actual physical human beings, engaged in acts of Communion with Christ, who himself was fully human, with a physical fleshy body that occupied a particular set of relationships in time and space. His body, and thus the body(ies) of the church, is material and matters. Simultaneously, his body that we call the church is transcendent, crossing the boundaries of physical space and linear time. Its identity is not limited to one location or one time but rises above such

 In all of the theological reflections on physical vs. online churches, the voices of those who have experienced long-term physical separation from the church followed by digital reconnection are vital. See Thompson (2016), as well as Thompson’s work in this book. 9  With thanks to Butler (1993) for the inspiration for this sentence. 8

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particularities, uniting all its members in the one Christ, through the one Spirit. The church, as constituted by Christ and inspired by the Spirit, is both body and spirit. A digitally connected and mediated church does not, therefore, negate the materialism of those who are gathered. Bodies still exist on the other side of the screen–– fingers still type out letters, eyes still view the words or images, voices still dictate, ears still hear. In fact, we can become even more keenly aware of our bodies from sitting at a desk for hours than we have in the past. Carpal tunnel syndrome develops, eyes get dry, voices wear out, hearing loss can be increased. (Indeed, even as I sit at my computer pulling these words out of my brain and putting them “onto paper,” by which I mean pressing little buttons that are received via Bluetooth by my computer, which than translates the signals into characters that are displayed on my monitor and thus mediated back to me as words, sentences, and concepts, my attention is pulled away by the insistence of my legs, back, and shoulders that I move.) The digitality of our existence can actually exacerbate our physicality, rather than lessen it. Presenting one’s self in a little on-screen box or as a cartoon avatar does not reduce a person’s concrete existence but affirms it. There is a body “there,” wherever there is. Affirming the materiality of digital church entails what Ess proposes as “deep theological commitments to incarnation and embodiment as part of a larger emphasis on non-dualisms” (2020, 45). This commitment is not to the physical proximity of the members of the body of Christ, however, but to the incarnation of each in their own space. It is a proclamation of the Spirit’s immanence apart from corporeality. Or, rather, it is a relocation of the Spirit into our own corporealities. It is receiving healing from our dislocation into diaspora by proposing that the transcendence-and-­ immanence of digital mediation and digital community is also “instituted by Christ and constituted by the Spirit.” Digital church is also church. Digitally-mediated Communion provides a means for people to experience this nondualism of divine immanence and transcendence without falling into the dualism of materiality and immateriality. When communing from home, the relationship between one’s body and the elements is pure immanence––both physically proximate and intimate. The bread and wine are right there within reach, not up there on the altar. And yet transcendence is also experienced, as we see the presider in their own space, physically proximate and intimate to their elements (a sight to which we are accustomed), and present there just as we are present at home. The transcendence of the united body of believers across distances, made possible by the Spirit. and in which Christians have always believed, is made “real” to us by the digital transmission and mediation from the worship leader to the screen to us. They are immanently there, and we are immanently here, and we are transcendently one. Should the service include video of the other church members, this transcendence is further experienced when we see others at the same time, in their homes, multiply immanent. This transcendent immanence, or immanent transcendence, is importantly nonhierarchical. It is a multiple embodiment shaped by a radical equality we come to associate with the reign of God. There is the equality of “Zoom boxes,” where each tile is the same size, and their arrangement is determined by order of log-in (and can

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be moved around, under certain conditions), and where a full view is assured by a “speaker” view and not obstructed by the height of a taller person in front. Then there is the equality of communing from home, where each person can be the same distance from the elements in front of them as those in other houses. By contrast, when communing in a building there is always a spatial hierarchy of physical proximity and the communicant, regardless of the spatial configuration. Certain bodies occupy closer positions to the elements than others, facilitated either by their role in the liturgy or their physical placement (itself determined by unspoken rules like no wheelchairs in certain spaces or no children at the front). In a building, radical physical/embodied egalitarian proximity is impossible. Some must, by virtue of space, be closer to the elements than others. Others must be farther. Bodily egalitarianism can be more easily facilitated in the digital church space than in the physical one. In “in-person” church, the sacrality, remains in the building. While people carry the Body and Blood within them as they leave that building, unless they drive by the church daily, they are not reminded in the same way of the sanctification of their daily lives. Communing from home, the Spirit lingers in the daily lives of Christians. They are reminded every time they sit in front of that particular screen, eat at that table, or walk through that room, that the Body of Christ has been and perhaps will be there again. Further, the sacrality of the event spills from the screen, and table and body over the edges, to fill the room and the house––the ever-expanding immanent presence of the divine. The entire house becomes a site of sanctification. Rather than fracturing the church into individuality and disparate and disconnected bodies, the church in the digital diaspora continues to uphold the identity of church as community. Liturgical scholar Kyle Schiefelbein-Guerrero has noted that “a collection of individuals each sitting in their own context participating in their worship via YouTube does not negate ... the communal nature of worship” (2021). The collection of individuals in Paul’s time, each sitting in their own congregations but together sharing the words of and from Paul, did not negate their communal identity as the church. The difference between then and now is that now Christians can see that they are apart and sharing the same Spirit. The reality, however, has not changed. Christians are as distant from one another now as we were almost 2000  years ago. Our diasporic existence, and our diasporic connections, continue.

A Digital Diaspora: The Church in All Times and Places The church today is both embodied and transcendent, as it indeed has always has been, with a diversity of ways in which that embodiment materializes. This diversity is coming to be a hallmark of digital church, although it is not new. As Gray reminds us, “a community that comes together to celebrate the Eucharist is never homogeneous, as is clear from the accounts of the Early Church in the Christian testament and in secondary sources” (2014, 119). The goal of unity in Christ is not to make the

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body homogeneous but to unite us in our diversity. Christ’s gift, through the Spirit, is that such a thing has happened throughout the centuries and happens still today. Returning to Zizioulas, he develops from Hans Urs von Balthasar the understanding that the body of Christ, while united as one body, is nevertheless constituted of many bodies through the work of the Spirit. The transcendent Spirit facilitates a diversity of materialisms in the one immanent Body: This ‘corporate personality’ of Christ is impossible to conceive without Pneumatology. It is not insignificant that the Spirit has always, since the time of Paul, been associated with the notion of communion (koinonia). ... And it is because of this function of Pneumatology that it is possible to speak of Christ as having a ‘body,’ i.e., to speak of ecclesiology, of the Church as the Body of Christ. (1985, 130–131)

Unfortunately, the recognition of digital-diasporic church as such has been hindered by an unrecognized insistence on the homogeneity of physical proximity. Such an insistence inhibits the work of the church in affirming life, including the life of the body, in its diversity. Churches strive to embody God’s own hospitality, welcoming all people and every person, who together make up the body of Christ. Emphasizing a physically-proximate homogeneity––only physical church is real church–– excludes specific members of the body of Christ. I have mentioned above “shut-­ ins,” whose physical bodies impede their physical attendance in the sanctuary. This includes people who do not have the strength to leave their home, whose bodies cry in pain when sitting on church pews, who cannot navigate the physical building in a wheelchair or a walker, whose hearing impairments cannot be overcome through hearing aids, whose seeing impairments prevent them from reading the hymns, whose bodies require frequent and sudden attention in a private space, whose compromised immune systems renders them mercilessly vulnerable to the common germs of others, who are in hospital beds. However, there are also those whose bodies have been the recipients of gender-, race-, or sex-based violence, either physically or verbally through “Christian” rhetoric, for whom physical proximity with majority groups is deeply uncomfortable––the lesbian Black woman in a congregation of heterosexual white couples or the trans-femme tween in a congregation of cis-gendered seniors. For these bodies, “in-person” church has never been a safe option.10 And yet the body of Christ does include these members who have, until the arrival of online church, been excluded from Christian fellowship. Able to participate from the safety and convenience of their own homes, they are “with us” again, reminding us of their heretofore unseen (and one might suggest unremembered) material existence. I myself have, as a digitally-mediated presider, experienced the fullness of the church, and the tears of both the “regular” attendees and the “shut-­ ins,” as members’ faces, absent so long as to be almost forgotten, appeared in zoom boxes, participating from their homes and from hospital beds. I have seen a  I would also add to this list those whose neurodiversity makes physically-proximate worship uncomfortable and who have felt unwelcome, including “disruptive” toddlers or babies, individuals with Attention Deficit Disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorder, dementia, or other cognitive impairments, or those with anxiety disorders. 10

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worshiping community diversify as individuals join from other parts of the world, in different time zones, bringing their contextualized backgrounds into the group. Taking seriously Paul’s words that “the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable” (1 Cor 12:22), it would appear that the body, until now, has been lacking.11 Our previous in-person wholeness was an illusion, revealed only now by a Spirit-filled digital perspective. If we consider that the words of Scripture are trans-temporal and trans-spatial, along with written transcripts of sermons as the proclamation of the Word, we must also consider that previously recorded videos can facilitate the same connections of the community through time and space that live-streaming worship does. While I admit that my own experience of worship is that only live-streaming “does it” for me, the logic of my arguments above compel me to allow for prerecorded worship.12 Such an allowance thus provides the inclusion of people whose work requires their physical presence on Sunday morning who have likewise been unseen. The transcendence of the Spirit and the Word brings together the digitally-mediated asynchronous community as much as Paul’s texually-mediated ones. The community spans a few hours or days in the week as much as the generations from the first century C.E.

Conclusion: The Healing of Relocation in Diaspora As we are already experiencing, “moving online changes the identity of the church” (Campbell and Osteen 2020, 66). The issue the church currently faces is whether it can return to our previous non-digital identity and, assuming it can, whether it should. However, as Campbell and Osteen observe, “being forced to adapt due to environmental, political, or social circumstances is not new for the global church” (2020, 66). The destruction of the Temple and the razing of Jerusalem forced the first such identity reconfiguration, the split of Western and Eastern churches forced another, the Reformation and the introduction of the mass-produced Bible in the vernacular was yet another. We are at yet another pivotal moment in history, and the decision we make around digitally-mediated Communion will either facilitate increased access to Christ’s table or restrict it––it will determine whether we will more fully embrace the church in all times and all places or continue to limit it to physically- and chronologically-proximate embodiments.

 This is not meant to imply that differently-abled people, either physically or cognitively, are weaker or lesser in the body of Christ, only that diversity is indispensable. 12  Schiefelbein-Guerrero (2021)  might disagree, arguing that “the worship experience, both inperson and through digital means, creates an encounter of simultaneity, which is both interdependent and collective.” While asynchronously viewed worship may not exist in simultaneity of clock-time, I would argue that it exists simultaneously in Kairos-time, as the body of Christ exists transtemporally and simultaneously. 11

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The trauma of the dislocation of the Spirit from the Temple was healed only when the Spirit was relocated––for Christians––in the resurrected Christ and his followers. Healing came in the recognition that the Spirit continued to be “real” in other bodies, despite their physical and temporal distance from the Temple, and that the community continued apart from the physical proximity of other believers. Perhaps we may find our COVID dislocation trauma healed in an embrace, rather than rejection, of the Spirit’s presence in the digital diaspora, where we are gathered across the miles and across the years with the one Body in a kairotic now.

References Boyarin, Daniel. 2004. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter. London: Routledge. Campbell, Heidi A., and Sophia Osteen. 2020. Moving Towards a Digital Ecclesiology: Key Themes and Considerations. In Digital Ecclesiology: A Global Conversation, ed. Heidi A. Campbell, 65–71. Digital Religions Publications. Chia, Roland. 2020. Life Together Apart: An Ecclesiology for a Time of Pandemic. In Digital Ecclesiology: A Global Conversation, ed. Heidia A.  Campbell, 20–27. Digital Religions Publications. Deloria, Vine, Jr. 2003. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion 40th Anniversary Edition. New York: Putnam. Decker, Julie Sondra. 2015. The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality. New York: Skyhorse Publishing. Driedger Hesslein, Kayko. 2015. Dual Citizenship: Two-Natures Christologies and the Jewish Jesus. London: T & T Clark. Ess, Charles Melvin. 2020. ‘Beyond the Binary?’ How Digital Is ‘the Digital Church’ in the Corona Age? Analytical, Theological, and Philosophical Considerations. In Digital Ecclesiology: A Global Conversation, ed. Heidi A. Campbell, 40–47. Digital Religions Publications. Gray, Frances. 2014. Mystery Appropriated: Disembodied Eucharist and Meta-Theology. In Reinterpreting the Eucharist: Explorations in Feminist Theology and Ethics, ed. Carol Hogan, Kim Power, and Anne Elvey, 115–124. New York: Routledge. Heschel, Susannah. 2011. Jesus in Modern Jewish Thought. In The Jewish Annotated New Testament (NRSV), ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, 582–585. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, Daniel. 2018. The More Torah, the More Life: A Christian Commentary on Mishnah Avot. Leuven: Peeters. Lowe, Mary Elise. 2019. The Queer Body-Mind in Martin Luther’s Theology: From Subaltern Sodomite to Embodied Imago Dei. In The Alternative Luther: Lutheran Theology from the Subaltern, ed. Elise Marie Wiberg Pedersen, 118–136. London: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic. Luther, Martin. 2015. The Large Catechism of Dr. Martin Luther (1529). In The Annotated Luther, Volume 2: Word and Faith, ed. Kirsi Stjerna, 279–415. Minneapolis: Fortress. Peterson, Cheryl M. 2010. Spirit and Body: A Lutheran-Feminist Conversation. In Transformative Lutheran Theologies: Feminist, Womanist, and Mujerista Perspectives, ed. Mary J. Streufert, 153–164. Minneapolis: Fortress. Schaper, Joachin. 1999. The Pharisees. In The Cambridge History of Judaism, Vol 3: The Early Roman Period, ed. Horbury William, W.D.  Davis, and John Sturdy, 402–427. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Schiefelbein-Guerrero, Kyle. 2021. The Environs of the Digital Church: How Art and Space Form Community in Online Liturgical Events. Societas Liturgica Congress. Tinker, George E. “Tink”. 2008. American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty. Maryknoll: Orbis. Thompson, Deanna. 2016. The Virtual Body of Christ in a Suffering World. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Zizioulas, John D. 1985. Being as Communion. Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press. Kayko Driedger Hesslein teaches theology at the Lutheran Theological Seminary, Saskatoon and has been an active congregational pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada for many years, including during the first three months of the COVID shut-down. Her areas of research focus on intersectional and postcolonial feminist theologies, Christology, and Christian theologies of Judaism. She is the author of Dual Citizenship: Two-Natures Christologies and the Jewish Jesus and numerous theological and pastoral articles. She received her PhD from Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. She lives with the many peoples of Treaty 7 territory, which is also Region 3 for the Metis.  

Chapter 12

Seeing God in Christ, Being Seen as the Body of Christ, Seeing Others as GOD’S Beloved: A Lutheran Reflection on the Church Post-COVID-19 Vincent Evener

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic sent multiple, overlapping shock waves through societies across the globe and through global society: in addition to the suffering and death, and the grief and anxiety, directly caused by infections, COVID exposed and exacerbated divisions of race and class. Risk, access to care, and economic setback fell disproportionately on lower-income people and people of color in the United States and on poorer nations globally (Berkhout et al. 2021; CDC 2021; Horowitz et al. 2021; Oppel et al. 2020; UNICEF 2021; Walker 2021). Confidence in government and institutions was broadly eroded by understandable frustration, genuine failing, and outlandish conspiracy theories. None of these economic and social consequences will soon be behind us. The disease itself, ever springing new variants, remains a long-term global threat (Skegg et  al. 2021),1 and scientists  “The decisions of global agencies and governments, as well as the behaviours of citizens in every society, will greatly affect the journey ahead. There are many possible outcomes. At one extreme is the most optimistic scenario, in which new-generation COVID-19 vaccines are effective against all SARS-CoV-2 variants (including those that may yet emerge) and viral control is pursued effectively in every country in a coordinated effort to achieve global control. Even with international cooperation and adequate funding, this scenario would inevitably take a long time to achieve. … At the other extreme is a pessimistic scenario, in which SARS-CoV-2 variants emerge repeatedly with the ability to escape vaccine immunity, so that only high-income countries can respond by rapidly manufacturing adapted vaccines for multiple rounds of population reimmunisation in pursuit of national control while the rest of the world struggles with repeated waves and vaccines that are not sufficiently effective against newly circulating viral variants. In such a scenario, even in high-income countries, there would probably be repeated outbreaks and the path to ‘normality’ in society and business would be much longer. And there are many other intermediate or alternate scenarios.” 1

V. Evener (*) United Lutheran Seminary, Gettysburg and Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero (ed.), Church After the Corona Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23731-7_12

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warn that population growth, increased contact between human beings and wildlife, and climate change will increase the frequency of future pandemics (BBC News n.d.). It takes little imagination to conjure up apocalyptic visions; in the face of such visions, Christians can rely on a long chain of witnesses who have confronted seemingly apocalyptic situations and expectations with hope for God’s new world. Any notion of life post-COVID is a chimera: not only will we be living with the virus itself for some time, but even more, COVID, like World War II, will shape the course of history to the point of being a sine qua non of our lived reality. This chapter offers reflections on what the church as the body of Christ is called by God and moved by the Spirit to be amid the shock waves of the pandemic. These reflections are shaped by a Lutheran theological perspective according to which daring confidence in God’s love and care for us, despite experiences that seem to contradict this confidence, anchors our individual and communal lives and orients us to pursue reasoned and relentless action on behalf of others, thus extending God’s friendship into the world.2 I will discuss Martin Luther’s theology of the cross (Loewenich 1976; Featherstone 1988; Forde 1997; Thompson 2006; Solberg 2006; Altmann 2015, 31–35)—the teaching that God reveals God’s self under contraries as strength in weakness, as life in death—and the way that some early works of Lutheran passion piety taught Christians to discern God’s presence and work in themselves and history. It will be helpful to state the fruits of this theological reflection, which brings historical sources into dialogue with the present, at the outset. Envisioning what the church is called to be in this time, I offer the following four points: 1. The church is called to be the bearer of the radical hope and confidence that God is for us even when God seems to be against us and that the arc of history bends toward justice even when the way is long, winding, or seemingly lost entirely. 2. As the living body of a battered and killed outcast who rose triumphant through divine power, the church is called to be a counter-image to the brutality of the world (Evener 2021a), focused on the two-fold work of incorporation: first, incorporation of brothers and sisters into the familial body of Christ through the Word, sacraments, and mutual support; and second, incorporation as the body of Christ in a world whose brutal divisions have been exposed and exacerbated by COVID-19. Here, I rely especially on Luther’s teaching in The Freedom of a Christian that Christians are bound to Christ by faith and one another by love (AL

  For the language of extending friendship versus “being good servants,” see Thompson (2006, 87–90). 2

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1:474-538).3 The church—especially as a global body—cannot accept the uneven distribution of suffering and access to medical care that has defined the experience of this global pandemic. 3. The church is called to be present in unexpected places. The theology of the cross defines not only how God reveals God’s self in Christ crucified and resurrected but also how the church as Christ’s body challenges the world’s expectations about life and power. The unexpected places of the present moment include digitally mediated spaces of worship and community, or outdoors in the elements, or wherever COVID has sown suffering and need.4 For Luther, the theology of the cross was directed against the pride of theologians and monks. Luther argued that our mental and moral presumption to ascend to God must be leveled so that we see God and receive eternal life through Christ crucified. The most powerful false gods of the present day are power structures that promise temporary life through the suffering and annihilation of others. These structures govern how our society distributes risk, suffering, and access to healing in relation to the pandemic. 4. The church is called to teach and practice a spirituality of vocation—of being in the world for others—grounded in the pursuit of truth. Christians accept provisional knowledge about our social and natural world, including medical knowledge, as necessary and beneficial, but we are wary of “knowledge falsely so called” that justifies harm to others. Once Christ has met us on the cross, once Christ dwells in us through faith, we are turned to the needs of others, and in so doing, we ask only about their need, not about any human estimation of their worthiness for help (“Heidelberg Disputation,” AL 1:103–5; see also AL 1:525).5

 Luther uses the Christological concept of communicatio idiomatum [communication of attributes], as he interpreted it through terms of property and possession from Roman marriage law, to describe both unions. See “The Freedom of a Christian” (AL 1:499–502, 500n78, 522–23, 525, 530, 530n129). For Luther, in the incarnation, Christ’s divine nature remains divine, and Christ’s human nature remains human, but there is a full sharing, a mutual possession, of the properties of each nature. (The Council of Chalcedon in 451 affirmed that Christ is one person in two natures, which are without confusion or separation; the elaboration in terms of a mutual possession of properties was Luther’s, accepted later into the Formula of Concord.) So too in the faith union between Christ and souls, righteousness, life, and salvation remain the property of Christ alone, while sin, death, and hell remain the property of souls—but there is a shared possession, indeed a joyful exchange, so that Christ takes on and bears the sins, death, and hell of souls and Christians as individuals and church body receive the righteousness, life, and salvation of Christ. Finally, while in the church every believer brings the sin and struggle that is their property, all others share in the burden. See also Steiger (1996). 4  See Schiefelbein-Guerrero’s chapter in this book on the role of place in digitally-mediated worship. 5  “While Christ lives in us through faith, he now moves us to do good works through that living faith in his works. … The love of God, which dwells in human beings, loves sinners, evil persons, fools, and weaklings in order to make them righteous, good, wise, and strong. Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows out and bestows good. … This is the love of the cross, born of the cross, which turns in the direction where it does not find good, which it may enjoy, but where it may confer good upon the evil and needy person” (theses 27–28). 3

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 uther’s Theology of the Cross: Seeing God in Christ, Being L Seen as Christ’s Body, Seeing the Vulnerable in Our Vocations When Luther publicly challenged the practice of indulgences, he claimed that he did not reject authoritative tradition (whether patristic, papal, or conciliar) but only the opinion of some scholastics who had distorted the church’s tradition (“Sermon on Indulgences and Grace,” AL 1:61n16, 65). He immediately faced the objection, “Are you the first and the only one to have the right opinion,” and he was forced accordingly to address the foundations of theological truth. He did not appeal to “scripture alone” yet, but instead distinguished between theologians of glory and theologians of the cross (Evener 2021b, 98–103). As elaborated most famously in the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, Luther’s argument relied on an assertion about what it means to see God, and hence the truth about the way to salvation. Scholastic theologians, he charged, began with what they could see in nature—and in themselves as created in the image of God—and from this observation of the visible, they formed an image of God defined by God’s virtues, i.e., God’s powers. Accordingly, in a manner that satisfied and stoked human pride, they determined that salvation was a matter of ascending to God through the acquisition of like virtues, a pretension that reached its pinnacle in the claim that those who strived to love God above all things and love their neighbors as themselves ex puris naturalibus—through their natural powers unaided by grace—would receive the infusion of grace that allowed them to become truly worthy of salvation.6 Luther countered that one could not presume to envision God through the observation of nature or self; rather, one had to see God truly visible in Christ, especially Christ on the cross—suffering, dying, yet paradoxically also triumphant over sin, death, and hell for us. This was to see God’s “back parts,” as Moses had been granted.7 Luther in the Heidelberg Disputation was continuing his movement from a contrition-­centered view of salvation—the view that God saves those who are sorry for their sins—to the view that God saves those who, by faith given through the Word, trust radically in God’s action to save them through Christ (Evener 2021b, 84–114). For Luther, radical trust that God through Christ has defeated sin, death, and hell for us—if we receive the benefits of that victory through faith—grounded the Christian’s epistemological and spiritual disposition in the world (Altmann 2015, 52–66). Contrary to a rational assessment of sense perception, suffering Christians could cling to the cross as the revelation that God is present and powerful in suffering and weakness; they could be assured that God willed their true well-­ being, despite experiences and appearances to the contrary. Contrary to a rational assessment of sense perception, the student of history could assume that God was always on the side of the spiritually poor (the humble and the faithful), who were usually found among the materially poor and oppressed, rather than on the side of  Ironically, this attack on the theology of the so-called via moderna was made in alliance with the via moderna’s commitment to revealed theology. 7  See especially theses 19–22 for the points made here (AL 1:98–101).

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the spiritually proud and those who used riches and power to harm others (“The Magnificat Put into German and Explained,” AL 4:352f). Contrary to a rational assessment of sense perception, finally, Christians’ ethical conduct was to be guided by the assessment of others’ needs, not by the status of the other or the temporal advantage of the Christian actor. In the Heidelberg Disputation, Luther teaches that after the cross annihilates a person’s rational and moral pretension to ascend to God, that same person receives Christ in them through faith, thus becoming an instrument for God’s loving action in the world (“Heidelberg Disputation,” AL 1:103–05). Some observations about the meaning of the theology of the cross for the church today are in order here: first, it is necessary to remember that Luther’s contextual need and concern was to reject a particular form of theology that, in his view, was grounded in the presumption to ascend to God through thought and action. However, the message that annihilation of presumption is a prerequisite to receiving faith and God’s presence cannot be or lead to the Gospel for those who have suffered abuse and dehumanization; for such populations, denied the opportunity to realize the flourishing of individual and communal existence for which God has created humanity, the theology of the cross speaks rather of God’s presence to and empowerment of the afflicted (Thompson 2006, 81–90; Solberg 2006, 146–49; Altmann 2015, 42–46, 345–47; Featherstone 1988, 54; Ng’weshemi 2020, 17).8 Second, Luther’s dichotomy of two theologies can be a powerful epistemological principle to expose the interests that shape our accounts and understandings of truth.9 However, the concept needs to be expanded. In Luther’s view, the theologian of glory was driven primarily by an inherited disposition to pride. Today, we are more aware of how the powerful and privileged are blinded by “stories about reality” that buttress their position—for example, the story that equal effort in America will secure equal reward because there is equal opportunity for all. These first two points are well-established in efforts to read Luther from the perspective of the marginalized, with an eye toward liberation. The third point is that the manner of God’s self-revelation on the cross not only defines the church’s work of incorporation into the body of Christ—this happens through the proclamation of the Word that God has descended to us, and we need not ascend to God—but also the work of incorporation as the body of Christ. Here, a proper response to the COVID pandemic will be life-giving to the church. In the United States, the church is too often present in our communities and our world in ways that buttress the status quo and allow Christians in places of privilege to not see and to abuse by commission or omission the less privileged, some of whom are Christian and some of whom are not. The church building is often an image of venerable tradition and social respectability; we may wish to call it a “sanctuary,” but how can it be and be seen as such by those who need sanctuary? The church is present in places that buttress pride in “our holiness” versus “their unholiness.” Most immediately, the  In liberationist readings of the theology of the cross, the cross usually functions both to reveal God’s presence among and power for the afflicted and to unmask accounts of reality that serve and conceal privilege and power. 9  See preceding note. 8

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present moment summons the church—and many congregations have taken up the charge—to be present in the very real digitally mediated spaces. People look for real answers to deep questions and for deep connections to other people on the internet; shouldn’t the church be there, meeting them where they are and as they are—and not only with the insulting invitation to “join the rest of us in the real world”? And such moves are not limited to the in extremis situations precipitated by the pandemic but must be central to the mission of congregations – to go wherever (including digital spaces) the people are, just as God incarnate in Christ went where the people are and continues to be present. More broadly, the obstacles to in-person worship we have faced summon us to reconsider the obstacles we have long placed between the Word and those who want and need it: whether those obstacles are racist artwork in the sanctuary or worship times that do not work for the surrounding community (Evener 2020). A final point regarding the theology of glory versus the theology of the cross is a caution (well-known for Luther scholars and Lutheran theologians) that we not misunderstand Luther’s critique of reason. Luther critiques the attempt to define the God hidden above creation by our mind’s understanding of the natural order and ourselves. Reason must instead be ruled by God’s self-definition on the cross. But as we turn, with love flowing from faith, to our neighbors’ needs, we must exercise reason vigorously to discern what those needs are and how we may be for others. Indeed, we must first listen, thus realizing the true relational selves that we are created and redeemed to be. The theology of the cross culminates in Christ’s presence in the believer, in the faith union of Christ with all believers, who then extend God’s love into the world. Thus, we move from the foot of the cross into vocation. Luther rejected the medieval assumption that only the spiritual class (clergy, monks, and nuns) had a calling (a vocatio) to divine service. All Christians are called to care for their neighbors within God’s created order, including in government. Too often, however, the Lutheran tradition has appropriated superficially the care for others that is part of vocation; as for Luther in the Peasants’ War, care for others is reduced to support of existing structures (Altmann 2015, 18–23, 175–210; Echols 1988, 122–23). Returning to the theology of the cross as explicated in the Heidelberg Disputation, we recover the “for others” side of vocation, not only as the motive for working in the world, but as the epistemological basis. That is, reason must allow itself to be disciplined in assessing what is good and what is helpful by hearing the voices of those who are most vulnerable. Vocation must involve relentless truthseeking that accepts all human knowledge as provisional (Maimela 1988),10 as  Maimela’s discussion of the limits and legitimacy of “secular authority” in Luther’s view applies broadly to all temporal pursuits—government and science are given for human well-being; institutions of government and science must be free to achieve these ends but must not deify themselves. Maimela’s chapter was written in the context of apartheid. Scientific accounts of “nature” have often legitimized racism, sexism, homophobia, and the relentless exploitation of the natural world. Consequently, the church must be an agent of skepticism toward truths that demean God’s beloved creation, even as the church accepts the results of a properly exercised empiricism. 10

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potentially life-giving and potentially life-taking, and privileges the perspective of whoever is most likely to have their life taken. The Christianization of government, in Lutheran understanding, is impossible and ill-advised. Luther insisted that Christ’s “rule” is non-coercive—the Word does not twist arms but gives new life before God and others. Human government cannot make Christians, Luther warned, but makes only hypocrites if it attempts to do so (“On Secular Authority,” AL 5:95–96). Nevertheless, Christians in Luther’s view participate in government and social spheres more broadly as Christians, with regard for the needy and the vulnerable (“On Secular Authority,” AL 5:97f), and this brings with it the imperative to reject policies (which contain underlying accounts of supposed truth) that ignore the perspectives of the marginalized. Are Christians or the church today a strong voice addressing questions of vaccine distribution, both locally and globally, with concern for those who are most likely to have their life taken by unjust policies? Will Lutherans in North America object to Northern hoarding of the vaccine on behalf of their more numerous brothers and sisters in the majority world? What is the church’s view on who “deserves” a vaccine—is the prisoner worthy? (Matthew 35:36)—whether for COVID  or the next pandemic? Ultimately, we must ask about what is most rational for the well-being of society, but Christians exercise this reason as people in the world for others. Thus, this exercise of reason must be epistemologically chastened to listen attentively to those we have been trained to overlook. At a moment when scientific and political knowledge is intensely contested, Christians must understand truth-seeking as core to any meaningful modern account of vocation. We regard current knowledge as provisional and subject to revision, especially to heed the voices of the vulnerable. Even if vaccines eventually put the lid on COVID globally, the church will not be a credible witness to truth against all the forces that defy God if it does not attend to how we discern truth on the horizontal plane. This requires a spirituality of truth-seeking, for which Luther has given guidance in the principle that Christian works are focused on others’ needs. The theology of the cross teaches us to see God in Christ, but also to be seen by others as the body of Christ and to see others whom we are accustomed to overlooking.

Lutheran Passion Piety and the Discipline of Seeing My current research focuses on passion books of the Reformation era; specifically, I am studying how Lutheran authors used the passion to teach the discipline of perception, so that people evaluating their own experiences or the social-political world might distinguish between truth and falsehood. I propose that their focus on discernment of truth—and their conscious use of the bible to train and exercise discernment—can inform the church today as we strive to see God present and powerful for us in Christ, even amid the great suffering of the present moment; as we strive to be seen as Christ’s continuing, living body amid ever new contexts and challenges; and as we strive to see others in our vocational truth-seeking. If the sixteenth century

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Lutheran passion authors are to offer guidance, whether to Lutherans or others, it is that we not only need a life-giving scriptural hermeneutic but concrete training to see the world through it—to see God’s presence and to see others as God’s beloved. How we see, in turn, will shape how we are and appear, whether as a living body that makes Christ visible to a hurting world or a conglomeration of the haughty pleased to navigate the fractures of COVID through alliance with the “winners.” Few works shaped the Lutheran tradition of passion piety more than Johannes Bugenhagen’s The Suffering and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which featured harmonized text from the four Gospels along with relatively brief interspersed commentary. Bugenhagen, elected parish pastor in Wittenberg in 1523, served as Luther’s own pastor and was a key figure in the spread of the Reformation. Published initially in 1524 in Latin and in 1526 in German, Bugenhagen’s work ordered the biblical text for reading in church while offering annotations to guide preachers and possibly individual devotion. The book was printed nearly 70 times between the sixteenth and the early eighteenth century, with translations into Dutch, Danish, Icelandic, and Polish (Evener 2019, 405). While the passion occupied an important place in late medieval preaching and devotion—and hence in the religious literature of the period—Bugenhagen’s book was innovative as it sought to teach discernment between true and false Christians, teachings, and practices, in a moment of intra-­ Christian division. Medieval works like Bonaventure’s Tree of Life (Bonaventure 1882-1902, 8:68  f.; Bonaventure 1978) and the singularly popular pseudo-­ Bonaventuran Mediations on the Life of Christ (fourteenth century, possibly written originally by a Poor Clare) focused on fostering affective attachment to Christ and imitation of Christ’s virtue (McNamer 2018; Johannes 1997).11 For Bonaventure, the ground of virtue was humility (Bonaventure 1882-1902, 8:72[5]; Bonaventure 1978, 129), while pseudo-Bonaventure emphasized concrete poverty alongside humility (McNamer 2018).12 Neither author assumes that the content of virtue is difficult to discern13: the challenge is rather one of commitment to virtue’s obvious but rigorous demands. Bonaventure’s text stirs the reader with direct addresses to the soul and encouragement to place oneself contemplatively in the biblical scene (for an example, see Bonaventure 1882-1902, 8:72[4], 80[32]; Bonaventure 1978, 129, 158). Pseudo-Bonaventure developed this practice of “composition of  I cannot discuss the origins of this text here; for introductory discussions and the text itself, see McNamer (2018; short Italian text with parallel English translation); Johannes de Caulibus (1997; Latin critical edition); Johannes de Caulibus (2000; English translation of the Latin critical edition). I will cite from McNamer here. 12  Humility is still regarded as the “beginning and foundation of everything good” (McNamer 2018, 66–67), yet the focus on the concrete poverty of Christ and Mary is pervasive (see for example McNamer 2018, 16–19, 36–37, 70–71). We are told that Mary immediately gave away the gifts of the magi, because she was “zealous for poverty” and because she was taught inwardly by her son, and outwardly by his infant gestures, that he did not want the treasures. On the road during his ministry, the author supposes, Jesus begged for alms out of “love of poverty” (70–71). 13  Note that the content of virtue may be clear, even if one is deceived about one’s adherence to it; still, the problem of deceit does not feature prominently in the texts when compared to Lutheran works or for that matter to Ignatius of Loyola. 11

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place”—for which Ignatius of Loyola is famous (Ignatius 1991, 136)—providing intimate extra-biblical details to fill out the scene. The reader was to participate in the scene in order to be moved and transformed by it.14 Luther published a short lesson on passion preaching and devotion in 1519, upholding the cross as a divine message of condemnation and rescue, to be received with repentance and faith (see “A Meditation on Christ’s Passion,” LW 42:7–14).15 The goal was not to exercise human affect but to be moved to self-hatred and trust in Christ’s bearing of human sin—as Johann Anselm Steiger explains it, to recognize the affect of divine wrath in order to receive the affectus fidei (Steiger 2005). In a roughly contemporary treatise on the art of dying, Luther upheld the cross as a consoling image: the devil and the guilty conscience assailed the dying with images of their sin and of death and hell; but by placing the image of Christ’s cross before the eyes of their mind—and by seeing the eucharistic elements concretely before their eyes—Christians could see the pictures of sin, death, and hell doing their worst, only to be swallowed up in the counter-images of grace, life, and heaven (“A Sermon on Preparing to Die,” LW 14:99–115). In its final revised version (published in 1544), Bugenhagen’s Suffering and Resurrection begins with a dedicatory epistle that underlines the Law-Gospel dynamic, adding that desire and effort toward right living follow receipt of the Gospel (Bugenhagen 1544, Das Leiden, B1v-B2v).16 Throughout, Bugenhagen teaches Christians to read their social and ecclesial context—indeed history itself (1544, G1v-G2r)—through the lens of the scriptural narrative. Christians were taught to see themselves in Christ crucified (see especially Bugenhagen 1544, O2v, Q1v-Q2r, T3r-v),17 to respond to persecutors as Christ had

 Many pages could be cited (see for example McNamer 2018, 38–39, 50–51, 82–83, 90–91). One extra-scriptural scene depicts Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary trying to dissuade Christ from going to Jerusalem (86–91). The author writes, “The whole foundation for spiritual growth seems to me to come down to this: that always and everywhere you watch him with the eyes of your mind with devotion in everything that he does … And contemplate his face with special care, if you are able to contemplate it, for this seems to me more difficult than anything else” (82–83). 15  The centering of passion teaching and piety on the cross as revelation of law and Gospel was central for the Lutheran passion tradition (see Kolb 1996, 268–73, 277–83, 293). 16  “When I consider the ghastly (grewliche) bodily and spiritual suffering of Christ, I see how ghastly my sins are; with them I have earned hell and eternal death. Neither my works nor any creature in heaven or on earth could save me from this; instead, the eternal Son of God in our flesh must suffer, die, and descend to hell, to [face] death and all devils. I should not remain with such contemplation (betrachtung) and thoughts, however, but I should see further how Christ comes forth again in his resurrection; there I obtain the eternal consolation (trost) that Christ has done and suffered everything for my good and is resurrected to bring me to eternal life. Thus, we will no longer desire to sin against God or people, as the foolish world does that fears neither God nor people. Rather, through the grace of Christ we compose ourselves so that we rise purely—and also bodily—with Christ to another life, where God will be all in all. I do not think this is far off. These are Christians—the ones who wait for the coming (zukunfft) of our Lord Jesus Christ with a good conscience before God.” See also ibid., M4v, Z3v, a1r-v. 17  According to Bugenhagen, just as Christ’s enemies mocked him on the cross and demanded a sign of power—coming down from the cross—the “enemies of the Gospel (Widersacher des Evangelii) today” mock believers when they see their suffering and imagine God is not with them. 14

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done (refusing to deny truth) (Bugenhagen 1544, Q1v, R1r-R2r), not to flee as the apostles had done, and to identify their varied papal opponents with first-century analogs: the pope now played the role of Caiaphas, the bishops the role of high priests, temporal rulers who persecuted Christians on behalf of Rome were so many Pilates, scholastic theologians were scribes, monks were Pharisees, and so forth (Evener 2019). The approach troublingly employed anti-Jewish sentiment to reject the Christianness of fellow Christians, and of course, cultivated anti-Judaism itself, turning a long-standing hostility into potent polemic in a divided situation. In duly criticizing Bugenhagen, however, we must remember that the evangelical territories and cities of the Empire, and even more the evangelical Christians who lived in Catholic territories, were vulnerable. Today, Christians in Europe and North America who seek to imagine their place in the passion narrative, and to use such imagination as a basis for interpreting the world, would not be permitted to enter cozily into the role of the persecuted but might have to ask as Roman soldiers, high priests, or members of a too-easily-swayed mob about how to hear and be in solidarity with the persecuted. The shock waves of the COVID pandemic ought to attune us to the brutal hierarchies of people, class, gender, and so forth that divided Jesus’ world and that divide our own. In Bugenhagen’s work, the goal was not simply to identify good guys and bad guys, but to teach Christians to see presumption to earn one’s own salvation as the root of hostility to Gospel, to avoid such presumption through reliance on faith, grace, and Christ alone, and to deny themselves and rely on the Word alone, through which one could avoid deceit and stand firm in the face of all suffering and death but especially persecution (1544, C3r, L1v-L2r, L2v-L3r, O2r-v, P4v, b1r). Bugenhagen associated papists and Jews with a stubborn refusal to hear the Gospel due to presumption (Vermessenheit), and he warned the ­evangelical faithful to avoid the same—God might punish stubbornness with blindness (1544, F4v-G1v). Again, Bugenhagen taught Christians to distinguish between faith and hostility to the Gospel through the illustration of biblical characters while also asking readers and hearers to draw concrete parallels between biblical and sixteenth-century characters. Believers were to put themselves implicitly in a particular place (on the side of Christ and the apostles) while learning to identify, fear, and resist the enemy, whether the enemy dwelled in their own presumption or appeared in the person of others. The passion cycles in Luther’s House Postils (first included in the 1545 edition) richly continue this strategy but add the pervasive counsel to memorize and recall the passion narrative as a picture or painting so that it might be a lens for viewing self and world. The House Postils were widely distributed as a preaching aid and an aid to devotion, and they undoubtedly played a significant role in shaping preaching and devotion to the passion in the latter sixteenth century and beyond.18 The passion sermons, however, were not the work of Luther but of his colleague Veit Dietrich. In 1545 Dietrich published a collection of his Lenten sermons to serve

 According to Frymire (2017) 84 editions were printed between 1544 and 1609, amounting to over 100,000 copies. 18

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as a small devotional book (Dietrich 1545); he subsequently took those same sermons and inserted them into Luther’s House Postils without explaining or acknowledging his authorship—as if they were Luther’s own work. The matter was put to rest only recently (WA 60:319–21).19 The Dietrich sermons pursue a consistent strategy of asking Christians to use the passion story as a painting to interpret their world and their own experiences and struggles with faith and ethics; there is a strong emphasis on moral conduct, and Vermessenheit now becomes often a matter of frivolous consent to sins such as greed and sexual temptation20—not as in Bugenhagen a question of reliance on the self in matters of salvation and in the face of persecution. Unfortunately, Dietrich’s visual program—and its connection to ecumenical traditions found in Bonaventure, Pseudo-Bonaventure, and Ignatius of Loyola—is readily overlooked because the preface he wrote describing the approach was not reproduced in the House Postils. The preface—a dedicatory epistle to Sybilla (Dichtlin) Baumgartner rather than a preface per se—appeared exclusively in Bugenhagen’s devotional work, which saw only a few printings. The epistle shows the influence of Luther’s theology of the cross on Dietrich and alerts us to the role of the passion sermons in the Postils as a vehicle for the wide dissemination of that epistemological perspective, which evaluates suffering and persecution through the lens of God’s self-revelation in contradiction to human pride and presumption. Sybilla Baumgartner’s husband, Hieronymous, had been taken captive by a rival lord in 1544—ultimately suffering 14 months imprisonment before a ransom was paid (Puchner 1953). Dietrich’s epistle to her opens by delineating consolations that Christ spoke to his disciples in his sermon at the Last Supper (meaning John 14–16). The discussion relies on a rich interplay between the visible and the invisible. Dietrich describes first the assurance that Christians have through the Word of eternal life with Christ; this is the chief consolation of Christians amid suffering and trials. Dietrich cites 2 Corinthians 4:17–18, “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.” Dietrich proceeds, however, to explain that the devil sometimes “removes this consolation from our sight (jn vns auß den augen rucket) and makes our hearts restless (vnruhig)” (1545, a1v-a2v). Thus, the invisible consolation of eternity must be understood as visible to the inward eyes faithful. Against the devil, Christ at the Last Supper promises the Holy Spirit to console and strengthen Christians in trials; this is the second consolation, according to Dietrich.21 Christ also promises that the Father will give whatever we ask in the  One sermon can be traced to Luther himself; Dietrich used Luther’s Good Friday sermon from April 3, 1534, in his devotional book, then reinserted that version with his other sermons into the 1545 House Postils. 20  For uses of “Vermessenheit,” “vermessen sein,” “Sicherheit” and “sicher sein,” see Luther [Dietrich] (1545), 127v-128v, 129r (on Judas), 138r-39r (on Peter), 155v-156r, 168v, 171v. 21  The consoling work of the Spirit here is described in very Augustinian terms and in terms of elevating our Spirit above flesh (Dietrich 1545, a2v). 19

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name of Christ (John 14:13), and Dietrich here offers biblical examples of God’s concrete interventions in the history of Israel: from the Exodus and the wandering in the desert to the reign of David and the rescue of Jerusalem during the reign of King Hezekiah from the siege of Sennacherib. The Spirit “drives” the heart to prayer, Dietrich says (1545, a1v-a4r). Dietrich cites the Psalms to show David’s confidence in trials, noting that he was: stuck up to his earlobes [literally over his ears] in misfortune and had to bear such a cross that he might well have sunk to the ground.22 But he turns his eyes upon God’s goodness and mercy, and compares temporal misfortune with eternity, [and] that makes him courageous (mutig) and consoled, so that he comforts himself more with God’s goodness and mercy than any misfortune can frighten him. Paul in 2 Cor. 4 calls this looking not at the visible but at the invisible. One sees and feels suffering and the cross; it is like a great high mountain that no one can see over. But if you are a Christian, you will turn your eyes from this for a while and look at the invisible, that is, hold to God’s word and hear how it consoles and what it promises. (1545, a5r-v)

Dietrich now adds an additional consolation—that of the Word, which we need because “we either forget the invisible or let it out of our sight for too long.” Thus, we must not look only at our experience, but at how things went for Christ (1545, a5v-a6r).23 True to Luther, Dietrich does not base consolation on retreat from concrete experience, but on the visibility of the invisible in Christ and in scripture. From this comes the audibility of Christ in the proclamation of the Gospel. Dietrich here focuses on the picture of the invisible in scripture: The history of the suffering of our dear Lord Christ is the true mirror into which all anxious and troubled hearts should look; there they will find refreshment and consolation, as the Lord himself says in Matthew 11, “Learn from me for I am meek and humble of heart; thus you will find rest for your souls.” Humility sees that the Lord allows himself to be oppressed and stepped upon (drucken vn[d] trette[n]). … Meekness says also that he does not strike back or complain. … Therefore if Christians never again let this image fall from view, they will control and compose themselves right and well under the cross. Conversely, where one lets this image out of sight, discontent, impatience, and finally despair will come in. (1545, a6v-a7r)24

According to Dietrich, we must be conformed to Christ’s wretchedness as suffering incarnate before we can “come through him into glory.” Thus, when the cross falls upon Christians, they should set before themselves the image of Christ on the cross. “Thus, not only will their suffering become light and bearable for them, but also the hope of the future glory will cause us to thank God that he shows himself to be a father towards his children” (1545, a7v). Baumgartnerin may be sure that God hears her prayer and will not forsake her. Nevertheless, all Christians must “sharpen such hope through the word and, just as one does with fire, blow on it and stir it up  This recalls the line on a2v about sinking and rising; see also a5v.  Dietrich proceeds here to explain both that human beings deserve their suffering and that the cross benefits us by working humility and turning us back to the Word. Christ suffered more than human beings, and he suffered for human beings, although he was a sinless Lord; the sinful servant should therefore not complain. 24  My translation seeks to convey Dietrich’s thought without excess literalism. 22 23

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(anschu[e]ren) through the word so that it does not go out in our cold, wishy-washy, fleshy hearts” (1545, a8r-v). In his first sermon, on Christ’s agony in the garden, Dietrich upholds Christ’s anguish first as a “mirror” or “painting of sin”—of how it appears in the light of God’s “wrath and judgment” against sin. He then describes the devil’s visual combat: the devil entices human beings to sin, then comes to paint its image for us to terrify the soul. Against this demonic picture, Christians may “fix this image of the Mount of Olives before” them (Luther [Dietrich] 1545, 123r-125v).25 For Dietrich, as for Luther, the art of being a Christian was to maintain both assurance of God’s mercy, even when one sinned and understood the severity of God’s wrath against sin (Luther 1545, 140r),26 and assurance of God’s care even in the face of suffering (Luther 1545, 126r-v). Such confidence enabled true prayer and surrender of self-­ will to the divine will in suffering—all this was taught and shown by Christ’s prayer and yielding to God’s will in the Garden (Luther 1545, 126v-127r). In Dietrich’s preface and his treatment of Gethsemane, one might well detect a retreat from the historical-ecclesial dimensions of Bugenhagen’s commentary—the focus has become individual temptation and suffering rather than steeling the evangelical community before its enemies. Certainly, Dietrich is as worried about adultery and greed as he is about persecution; still, persecution remained a concern, both as a possible experience that Christians needed to be prepared to face with patience and steadfastness (Luther 1545, 135v-138r, 141v-142r), and because the seeming power of the Roman church and its allies could be perceived as evidence of divine favor (Luther 1545, 129v-120r).27 In his sermons, then, Dietrich describes contemporary incarnations of biblical characters to expose both the enemies of the evangelical church and their spiritual errors, into which the currently faithful had to fear falling. For Dietrich, the story of how Christ was handed over to Pilate “paints a fine image” of the “beginning and source” of persecution—the proud take offense at the Word (Luther 1545, 141v). Simeon’s carrying of Christ’s cross is an image of how the church must suffer (Luther 1545, 152v-153r). Judas’ frivolous sale of Christ for pennies and subsequent suicide are “diligently painted (fu[e]rgemalet) so that we recognize there, as in a painting, the very manner and nature of sin and protect ourselves against it” (Luther 1545, 142v-144r ).28 The image of Judas hanging shows how sin “colors and adorns itself, and puts on a beautiful young mask (Schembart)  I will discuss only a few representative passages of Dietrich’s actual sermons as they appear in the House Postils; I am drawing from Evener (2023, 223–43). 26  Here the contrast is drawn between Judas’ despair and Peter’s repentance following their respective falls. 27  Here Dietrich cautions the faithful against mis-esteeming the prosperity of Roman clergy and monks as proof of God’s favor; these enemies of truth, he says, are already afflicted by their consciences and will be damned eternally. See also 136r, which equates “the pope, bishops, monks, and priests” to the high priests of the New Testament, warning, “Don’t look here at the office, otherwise you will be deceived; look there at how they act toward Christ, what kind of heart and will they bring to him … then you will be able to judge.” 28  “For this is the first color, with which one should paint sin, if one truly and genuinely paints it, that it seems a minor, insignificant, harmless thing. One doesn’t worry about God’s wrath.” 25

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so that one sees nothing ugly in it. Whoever could remove the mask right away, and wash away the makeup with a caustic lye, would flee from sin as from the devil” (Luther 1545, 142v-144r ). Judas failed, finally, because he did not hear and remember the Word—he did not hold the image of mercy before his inner eyes. Thus, one must counter the image of Judas hanging with the image of Christ as a revelation of God’s desire to save, “When sin awakes, preaches to you and troubles you, you must defend and preserve yourself with the Holy Gospel, which paints (mallet) Christ for you in this way, namely, that he suffered and paid for the sin of all the world. It paints God the almighty creator and Father thus, that he does not desire the death of the sinner … [but that] the sinner turn and live.” Here, Dietrich encouraged a memorization of texts to accompany the images, counseling Christians not to “go to bed or get up before you have spoken a beautiful saying—or two, three or four—[about God’s forgiveness] to your heart.” Such passages could be the “true soul medicine (seel artzney) that Judas lacks” (Luther 1545, 144v-145r ). As signaled by the dedicatory epistle, Dietrich teaches and encourages discernment of God’s mercy and power sub contrariis, using the theology of the cross. Faith makes such discernment possible; the discernment, in turn, sustains faith during trials. A particularly arresting passage came from the one authentic Luther sermon that Dietrich adapted into his (otherwise Pseudo-Lutherian) cycle. In this sermon, Luther teaches that Christ’s priesthood defies human expectations, while the Roman priesthood exalts human pride, claiming that “we ourselves should be priests, offer ourselves, and obtain eternal life through our own works” (Luther 1545, 162v-163r). The sermon continues: Therefore, let us open our hearts and see our priest Christ in his true adornment (schmuck). Beneath your eyes you will find no adornment (schmuck) in him, for how shamefully, miserably, and wretchedly he hangs there. But see him in your heart; there you will find such a jewel (schmuck) and treasure—for which you will never again be able to thank him enough. First of all he is adorned with great, heartfelt obedience to his father. … The second jewel is the great love he has for us. … Outwardly one doesn’t see such adornment, but inwardly one sees him just as his word sufficiently testifies. (Luther 1545, 163r-v)

The kingdom of God begins on earth, but it consists “only in Word and faith; outside of Word and faith there is suffering and dying on earth, just as our king himself suffered and died” (Luther 1545, 150r-v). The Word makes the eternal and invisible visible; faith sees the promise connected to humble elements and hears it flowing through humble human words. Knowing this and trusting in the eternal reward, Christians for Dietrich were to surrender willingly and courageously to suffering. But unless the kingdom was discerned under suffering, one could only “be sorrowful, complain, murmur, be impatient, and finally completely despair” in the face of suffering—just as the crucified criminal on Christ’s one side derided him as a defeated would-be king. In contrast, the other criminal discerned the kingdom of forgiveness and eternal life (Luther 1545, 150v-151r). Anti-papal and anti-Jewish invective features prominently in Dietrich’s sermons, as noted, and Luther’s authentic sermons are no different. Not only the invective but the underlying theological assumptions that would deny God’s sovereign care for these groups must be rejected today. In this essay, my intention has only been to

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illustrate how Luther, Bugenhagen, and Dietrich taught Christians to evaluate their own experiences and social and historical context through the lens of the passion. Here, the theology of the cross was (and can be) about more than an encounter with God concerning the contribution of human works toward salvation. It was and is a way of considering God’s action and of disciplining our own perception, thought, and action on the historical plane. The method can be turned against anti-Judaism, for European and North American Christians can hardly pretend to find themselves in the position of the crucified vis-à-vis Judaism. More to the topic of the present book, it guides the work of seeing God present in Christ during a moment of great suffering and division, of being seen as the body of Christ in a troubled and divided world, and of seeing others through relentless truth-seeking. There is a need, as stated above, not only for liberating and life-giving hermeneutics but also for the spiritual exercise of seeing the world through God’s self-revelation in Christ, rightly understood, and living accordingly. In so doing, we bear a message of radical hope, despite hard appearances; we welcome others into the body of Christ; and we incorporate the body of Christ for others, in unexpected places and in faithful truth-­ seeking. This truth-seeking will not accept that the supposed “reality” dictating the distribution of suffering and access to care in this moment of a pandemic is indeed God’s reality.

Conclusion The forms of passion meditation commended by Luther, Bugenhagen, and Dietrich were intended to guide the discernment of believers amid persecution and suffering and attendant spiritual temptations—above all, the temptation to despair of God’s care and of one’s possession of saving truth. The exercise of putting oneself in the biblical narrative in order to grow in attachment to Christ took a new shape: one put oneself in the narrative by seeing one’s own world there and seeing one’s own world through the narrative. The invisible became visible (and audible) in the incarnation, preaching, and scripture, but the faithful had to use this image of the imageless seen by faith to discern the truth of what their senses detected and their reason processed of the world around them. The technique of seeing oneself in and one’s world through scripture is a neglected resource in Lutheranism that merits recovery as we today engage in the work of seeing God in Christ, being seen as the body of Christ, and seeing and hearing those who are excluded from power and privilege. Seeing the excluded can begin with seeing in scripture those whose voices were regarded as unimportant, including by the biblical authors themselves; it can begin with placing ourselves in the story where we truly are rather than where we want to be. Moreover, being seen as the body of Christ will require being shaped and reshaped by a continued encounter with Christ in scripture, just as it will require being Christ’s body manifest in unexpected places—online, outside the walls, inside the walls if they can indeed represent a true sanctuary for the afflicted. The church that truly presents this image, steeled by the courage of seeing God’s presence in its own

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struggle, will disrupt all-too-understandable assumptions about the church’s disinterest in the modern world, hostility to science, and alignment with injustice. The coronavirus pandemic is not just a medical crisis; it is a social crisis that has exposed institutional injustice and incompetence, exacerbated divisions of race, gender, and class, and reinforced once again the global divide between wealthy and poorer nations. In the United States and abroad, it has exposed skepticism toward empirical science, widespread vulnerability to peddlers of conspiracy theory, and an absence of consensus over the rules and responsibilities that should guide life together. In this tragic moment, the church that sees God in Christ, in the body of an obscure man crucified as a criminal, must make itself visible as the body of Christ, witnessing to God’s presence and power in unexpected places. This means that the church’s own fears must not win the day—both fear of digitally mediated community and fear of witnessing to uncomfortable truths prevent the church from doing the two-fold work of incorporation, that is, incorporating the spiritually hungry into the body of Christ and incorporating the body of Christ into the world. The latter happens, in Lutheran perspective, not only when we are gathered and active as church community, but also when Christians in their vocation engage the world of penultimate social existence with readiness to seek truth in ways that respect the needs of those who are vulnerable (Evener 2021a, b, c). Our God became vulnerable in Christ. Saved by grace through faith, as church communities and as individuals in daily vocation, we reach out to those who need God’s friendship, wherever they may be found; we challenge policies and practices for the distribution of health care and vaccination that do not reflect God’s love of all people; we reject narrow conceptions of individual freedom that warrant the disregard of others’ needs; and we support scientific inquiry that seeks to make life better here and now.

References Primary Sources AL: See Luther, The Annotated Luther. Bonaventure, “Tree of Life,” 117–76, in Bonaventure. 1978. The Soul’s Journey into God. The Tree of Life. The Life of Saint Francis. Translated by Ewert Cousins. Classics of Western Spirituality. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist. ———. 1882–1902. Doctoris Seraphici S. Bonaventurae opera omnia. Edita studio et cura pp. Collegii a S. Bonaventura, ad plurimos codices mss. Emendate, anecdotis aucta, prolegomenis scholiis notisque illustrate. X voluminal. Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae. Bugenhagen, Johannes. 1544. Das leiden vnd Aufferstehung vnsers HERRN Jhesu Christi aus den vier Euangelisten Durch D. Johan Bugenhagen Pomern vleissig zusamengebracht. Auffs new mit vleis emendirt. Auch die versto[e]rung Jerusalem vnd der Ju[e]den kurtz gefasset. Wittenberg. de Caulibus, Johannes. 1997. Iohannis de Cavlibus Meditaciones vite Christi olim S. Bonauenturo attributae. Cvra et stvdio M. Stallings-Taney. Turnholti: Brepols. ———. 2000. Meditations on the Life of Christ. Translated and edited by Francis X. Taney, Anne Miller, and C. Mary Stallings-Taney. Asheville, NC: Pegasus. Dietrich, Veit. 1545. Passio oder histori vom leiden Christi Jesu vnsers Heylands. Nuremberg.

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Ignatius of Loyola. 1991. Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works. Edited by George E.  Ganss, S.J. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist. Luther, Martin. 1883-2009. D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. 73 Volumes. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger. Luther, Martin. 1955–. Luther’s Works. American Edition. 75 Volumes. Edited by Jaroslav Pelikan (Volumes 1–30), Helmut T.  Lehmann (Volumes 31–55), and Christopher Boyd Brown and Benjamin T.G. Mayes (Volumes 56–75). Philadelphia: Fortress; St. Louis: Concordia. Luther, Martin. 2015–17. The Annotated Luther. Six Volumes. Edited by Hans J. Hillerbrand, Kirsi I. Stjerna, and Timothy J. Wengert. Minneapolis: Fortress. LW: See Luther, Luther’s Works. Luther, Martin [Veit Deitrich]. 1545. Haußpostil D. Martin Luthers … Mit fleiß von newem corrigirt vnd gemeret mit XIII. Predigen von der Passio oder histori des leide[n]s Christi. Nuremberg. McNamer, Susan. 2018. Meditations on the Life of Christ: The Short Italian Text. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. WA: See Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke.

Secondary Scholarship Altmann, Walter. 2015. Luther and Liberation: A Latin American Perspective. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. BBC News. No date. “Stopping the next one: What could the next pandemic be?” https://www. bbc.com/future/article/20210111-­what-­could-­the-­next-­pandemic-­be [Accessed 26 May 2021]. Berkhout, Esmé, et al. 2021. “The Inequality Virus: Bringing together a world torn apart by coronavirus through a fair, just and sustainable economy.” Oxfam Briefing Paper. https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621149/bp-­the-­inequality-­virus-­250121-­en. pdf [Accessed 26 May 2021]. CDC. 2021. “Risk for COVID-19 Infection, Hospitalization, and Death By Race/Ethnicity.” https:// www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-­ncov/covid-­data/investigations-­discovery/hospitalization-­ death-­by-­race-­ethnicity.html [Accessed 26 May 2021]. Echols, James Kenneth. 1988. The Two Kingdoms: A Black American Lutheran Perspective. In Theology and the Black Experience: The Lutheran Heritage Interpreted by African & African-­ American Theologians, ed. by Albert Pero and Ambrose Moyo, 110–132. Minneapolis: Augsburg. Evener, Vincent. 2021a. Church as Counter-Image to Brutality. Journal of Lutheran Ethics 21 (1) https://learn.elca.org/jle/church-­as-­counter-­image-­to-­brutality/ [Accessed 26 May 2021]. ———. 2021b. Enemies of the Cross: Suffering, Truth, and Mysticism in the Early Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2021c. Learning to See the Vulnerable. Dialog 60 (4): 345–346. https://doi.org/10.1111/ dial.12701. ———. 2019. ‘Our Jews’: Anti-Judaism and the Formation of Reformation-era Christians. Journal of Religion 99 (4): 403–431. ———. 2020. Spirit and truth: Reckoning with the crises of Covid-19 for the Church. Dialog 59 (3): 233–241. ———. 2023. The Suffering and Death of Christ as Epistemological Framework in Reformation-­ era Lutheran Teaching: Martin Luther, Veit Dietrich, and Cyriacus Spangenberg. In Reading Certainty: Epistemology and Exegesis on the Threshold of Modernity. Essays Honoring the Scholarship of Susan E.  Schreiner, ed. Ralph Keen, Elizabeth Palmer, and Daniel Owings, 223–43. Leiden: Brill. Featherstone, Rudolph R. 1988. The Theology of the Cross: The Perspective of an African in America. In Theology and the Black Experience: The Lutheran Heritage Interpreted by African & African-American Theologians, ed. by Albert Pero and Ambrose Moyo, 42–55. Minneapolis: Augsburg.

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Forde, Gerhard O. 1997. On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Frymire, John M. 2017. Works: Sermons and Postils. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Martin Luther, ed. Paul Hinlicky and Derek Nelson, vol. 3, 561–589. Oxford: Oxford UP. Horowitz, Juliana Menasce, Anna Brown and Rachel Minkin. “A Year Into the Pandemic, Long-­ Term Financial Impact Weighs Heavily on Many Americans.” Pew Research Center. March 5, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-­trends/2021/03/05/a-­year-­into-­the-­pandemic-­long-­ term-­financial-­impact-­weighs-­heavily-­on-­many-­americans/ [Accessed 26 May 2021]. Kolb, Robert. 1996. Passionsmeditation: Luthers und Melanchthons Schüler predigen und beten die Passion. In Humanismus und Wittenberger Reformation, ed. Michael Beyer and Günther Wartenberg, 267–293. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt. von Loewenich, Walther. 1976. Luther’s Theology of the Cross. Translated by Herbert J.A. Bouman. Minneapolis: Augsburg. Maimela, Simon S. 1988. The Twofold Kingdom: An African Perspective. In Theology and the Black Experience: The Lutheran Heritage Interpreted by African & African-American Theologians, ed. by Albert Pero and Ambrose Moyo, 97–109. Minneapolis: Augsburg. Ng’weshemi, Andrea M. 2020. Lutheran churches in Africa: Vitality, challenges, and opportunities for the new face of Lutheranism in the 21st Century. Dialog 59 (1): 14–22. Oppel, Jr, A. Richard, et al. 2020. The Fullest Look Yet at the Racial Inequity of Coronavirus. New York Times.. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/05/us/coronavirus-­latinos-­african-­ americans-­cdc-­data.html. Puchner, Otto. 1953. Baumgartner, Hieronymus. Neue Deutsche Biographie 1: 664 f. https://www. deutsche-­biographie.de/ppn116067128.html [Accessed 26 May 2021]. Skegg, David, et al. 2021. Future Scenarios for the Covid-19 Pandemic. The Lancet 397 (10276): 777–778. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-­6736(21)00424-­4/fulltext [Accessed 26 May 2021]. Solberg, Mary M. 2006. All that Matters: What an Epistemology of the Cross is Good for. In Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today, ed. Marit Trelstad, 139–153. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress. Steiger, Johann Anselm. 1996. Die communicatio idiomatum als Achse und Motor der Theologie Luthers. Der ‘fröhliche Wechsel’ als hermeneutischer Schlüssel zu Abendmahlslehre, Anthropologie, Seelsorge, Naturtheologie, Rhetorik und Humor. Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 38 (1): 1–28. ———. 2005. Zorn Gottes, Leiden Christi und die Affekte der Passionsbetrachtung bei Luther und im Luthertum des 17. Jahrhunderts. In Passion, Affekt und Leidenschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Johann Anselm Steiger, 179–201. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Thompson, Deanna A. 2006. Becoming a Feminist Theologian of the Cross. In Cross Examinations: Readings on the Meaning of the Cross Today, ed. Marit Trelstad, 76–90. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress. Walker, Amy Schoenfeld. 2021. “Pandemic’s Racial Disparities Persist in Vaccine Rollout.” New York Times.. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/05/us/vaccine-­racial-­disparities. html [Accessed 26 May 2021]. UNICEF. 2021. Covid-19 and the Looming Debt Crisis: Protecting and Transforming Social Spending for Inclusive Recoveries. Florence, IT: Unicef Office of Research. https://www. unicef-­irc.org/publications/1193-­covid-­19-­looming-­debt-­crisis-­protecting-­transforming-­ social-­spending-­for-­inclusive-­recoveries.html [Accessed 26 May 2021]. Vincent Evener  is Associate Professor of Reformation and Luther Studies at United Lutheran Seminary. He is the author of “Enemies of the Cross”: Suffering, Truth, and Mysticism in the Early Reformation (Oxford University Press 2021) and the co-editor, with Ronald K.  Rittgers, of Protestants and Mysticism in Reformation Europe (Brill 2019). He has published numerous articles and book chapters on topics from Reformation history and theology, as well as editorials addressing the church in the contemporary moment. He presents frequently both to academic and church audiences. He is the co-Editor-in-Chief of the Lutheran theology journal Dialog.

Chapter 13

One Body, One Spirit, One Hope: We Are Part of this, Together...Intercultural Connectedness as a Church After Corona Sivin Kit

Introduction There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling. – Ephesians 4:4 (NRSV, emphasis added).

We are part of this, together. All of us who are part of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) share our joy for the polyphonic witness of the Lutheran communion. We rejoice together that the meaning of church is pure freedom: freedom from sin and freedom for the neighbor (Lohre 2021). Throughout the COVID-19 global pandemic, much media attention has been on the technological response from churches, primarily in western contexts. However, the more profound theological and contextual questions are revealed with greater clarity when we focus on churches outside of our immediate context. Attention to our intercultural connectedness as a Church after Corona invites us to reconsider what it means to be part of a global communion during these unprecedented times in which we live. Undoubtedly, such a global communion has technological resources available today that did not exist a few decades ago, which allows the stories of hope in the midst of tragedy to be made known, and theologies and theologians from non-western contexts to be heard and seen globally (Crizaldo 2020, 58). In the highly secularized country, the Church of Denmark discovers afresh the importance of online engagement to reach out to those who normally do not attend church services (“COVID-19: Push for Digital Engagement” 2020). The churches in Germany speak of renewed understanding and creativity in worship. Bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, head of the council of the Protestant Church in Germany, remarked, “We have seen an incredible creativity, both in digital and non-digital S. Kit (*) Department for Theology, Mission and Justice, The Lutheran World Federation, Geneva, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero (ed.), Church After the Corona Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23731-7_13

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formats. I have experienced that the Holy Spirit works despite facemasks and social distancing” (“COVID-19: Online worship” 2020, par 1). Although technological innovations are points of departure, there have been deeper theological discussions on the “priesthood of all believers” and the nature of the Holy Communion (Wengert 2005). Can we apply the notion of ‘fasting’ to the practice of Holy Communion in person, which the pandemic has disrupted? Indeed, I’ve been following intently the various ways churches reach beyond the walls of ancient building structures while also reviewing their liturgical practices and theological understandings of worship. In contrast, when turning to non-western contexts, the main focus was on essentials, such as basic daily needs and livelihoods, rather than theological. The pandemic has not leveled the ground, but rather it reveals the existing inequalities in the world (“Calling for an Economy of Life” 2020); this does not mean that theological questions were not raised. Pastors expressed hesitancy about “virtual” communion, reflecting fears about the “cheapening” of the sacrament of the Eucharist (“Being Lutheran” 2021). Many churches in Asia and Africa were already early adopters of innovative methods for reaching out to their members and the wider society, as they were avid users of new or even older technologies. For example, the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus used the existing TV station to address the immediate spiritual needs of the congregation members. But during the pandemic, some countries experienced significant trauma, focusing their attention on the physical needs of their citizens. The Lutheran Churches in India faced life and death conditions where significant numbers of their leaders were casualties during the height of the pandemic. How does one respond when news comes that more than 15 pastors have died within a week? The impact of the pandemic affected everyone. Due to contextual differences, church responses were determined by the underlying needs of their community and their ability to adapt. What are the critical insights gained from paying attention to churches in Latin America, Africa, and Asia? How does that reshape how we look at our world and the world in its entirety? In a time when restrictions dominate our attention, is there a way to look at freedom in a new light – especially the freedom to be a Christian during this unprecedented time of a pandemic? Why is this important?

Revisiting Intercultural Connectedness Often, intercultural connectedness might appear to be a novelty to the uninitiated, and this quality of the church might be an exotic addition rather than a central aspect of the church globally. Significant contributions are being brought to our collective attention to World Christianity or the renewed interest in the churches of the non-­ western world. As a global communion of churches, the LWF, which consists of 148 member churches in 99 countries across its seven regions, connects different experiences that might have been otherwise detached from one another. Within the Lutheran communion of churches lies the institutional memory with a growing awareness of what interconnectivity means for all churches.

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Moreover, this is particularly relevant to churches that are not the traditional Lutheran strongholds, both theologically, institutionally, and economically. Paying attention to the non-western contexts with limited resources allows a reframing of how to understand the gifts that each church brings to the table. Although scattered across the world, Lutherans and all Christians are in solidarity through our common experience of suffering and anxiety due to the pandemic. Nevertheless, we are also united in our joint quest to live out the hope that pulls us forward into God’s future for a world shaped by God’s vision.

Rootedness During Exceptional Times During this pandemic, we learned how many churches rooted in their context were rapid in their response to a crisis. For example, during the early days of the pandemic, the Lutheran Church in Singapore was quick in implementing protective measures for people to enter the worship services. Such a response could be explained by their experience with the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003. In Singapore, the Lutheran Church advised congregations to ensure they have non-contact thermometers, face masks, hand sanitizers, come early for temperature screenings, and avoid close contact or sharing eating utensils. The Bishop at that time, Terry Kee, related how “[s]ome congregations temporarily canceled the fellowship lunch to minimize person to person contact.” In addition to practical measures, Kee highlighted how “[they] encouraged faith and caution … [shared] information on the virus and update[d] not only the number of new cases but more importantly, the number recovered and discharged from ICU and hospitals” (“COVID-19: Churches in Asia advise” 2020). At that time, what appeared to be unwelcoming is now considered by health officials to be the responsible way of protecting worshipers. The rootedness of our churches demonstrating the capacity to respond to various situations is not dependent on whether churches are necessarily small or poor; it arises from the wealth of inner resources within them. In the neighboring countries of Singapore and Malaysia, where Christians are the minority and are subjugated to watching eyes in a Muslim majority community, the multi-religious context is equally important. Early on, the Lutheran Church in Malaysia issued a pastoral letter seeking to calm the church members. In the concluding remarks, the letter stated (“COVID-19: Churches in Asia advise” 2020, par 8): This crisis will come to an end, it will blow over. But the witness that we bear as children of God in this crisis is even more important. Let us be witness of hope, encouragement, generosity, patience and prayer. It is in the deepest darkness that light shines brightest. Let us be that light.

As one revisits these pastoral words of comfort and guidance from the church leaders to their congregations, it is profound how they remain so relevant beyond their

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original settings. Combined with caution, such words of faith would resonate beyond the borders of Asia as the entire world recovers from the effects of COVID. At a global level, Lutheran leaders retrieved the significance of the cross as the sign of our hope and strength. The then-president of the LWF, Archbishop Dr. Panti Filibus Musa, and General Secretary Rev. Dr. Martin Junge pointed to the fact that “This is a time to continue trusting in God’s compassionate presence among humankind” (“COVID-19: Love and Self-Discipline” 2020, par 2). Furthermore, drawing on the biblical text from 2 Timothy 1:7, Junge and Musa urged all church members to reflect on the words: ‘For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love, and self-discipline.’ During the season of Lent in 2020, as restrictive measures were continually imposed in some countries, Lutheran leaders called for assessing practices regarding gatherings and worship. They commended the Asian member churches for their example and urged all other churches to take necessary steps to contain the virus and protect the vulnerable. In the 11 March letter sent to 148 member churches, Musa and Junge reminded the churches who represented 77 million Lutherans around the world: “We take courage in the knowledge that God never abandons us, even if it means going through the experience of the cross. We see the cross of Christ as the sign of our strength and hope” (“COVID-19: Love and Self-Discipline” 2020, par 5). Through these words, we catch a glimpse into the deep connectedness of the churches in respective contexts with a global communion that is rooted and far-reaching. The words and other messages from the leaders kept the theme of resilience and hope at the forefront. These were not empty slogans but also accompanied with a spirituality of realistic hope and prayer (“He Gave His Life” 2021). Intercessory prayers, from the beginning until now, have been translated into more than 13 languages; offering a deeper prayer amid the desire for interconnectedness, as reflected in the opening lines of prayer below (“Intercessory Prayers” 2020; “COVID-19: Christians around the Globe” 2021): In times of restraint and physical distancing, when the body of Christ cannot meet in one place, we gather through the Holy Spirit in our many different places – house, apartment, room – and call out to you. Hear our cry, O God.

The collective commitment of Christians around the world living, praying, and witnessing together during a global crisis shows how we are connecting the local experience of member churches with an interconnected global vision of who we are as a communion of churches. One’s rootedness in theological and spiritual resources is further strengthened as the church battles corona and walks through to the other side.

Give Us Our Daily Bread, Rice, … and Tiffin It is important to note that while the messages from church leaders above were not empty, there were stomachs that indeed were empty. The LWF rapid response fund was mustard seed-like funding compared to the big humanitarian and development

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funds. However, they were important to enable churches to do their part where they are rooted, where the debate was not about the bread at the communion table but whether there was rice to feed the hungry (“COVID-19: LWF Intensifies” 2021). Yet, as churches were addressing emergency physical needs, it was nonetheless within the context of pastors and members to weave meaning into their ministry. As such, they were providing sewing machines and tools to tackle economic hardship and were also about visibly empowering women who were already bearing much of the pre-pandemic weight. In India, ordinary members demonstrated how they were empowered and given agency to make a difference. The following statements are from inspired voices of women; a snapshot of what was happening on the ground supported by the women’s desk of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Madhya Pradesh: I was helpless and had no equipment to begin earning for myself, but today I am working from home with the sewing machine and can feed my children (“COVID-19: India’s Churches” 2021, par 5). I received help to open a small shop selling tiffin from the GELC women’s network. My tiffin [a traditional light lunch and tea] shop has become extremely popular, and it continues to provide an income for me. I am proud to also be a role model for the other women who want to earn and to live in peace (par 6).

More than a lunch shop, it is about living in peace, echoing the blessedness of being a peacemaker when conflicts in both the family and communities were exacerbated during the health and economic crisis. In times of despair, the church becomes a channel of hope that cannot be underestimated when communities might be cut off from the outside world and plunged into dark times. In addition, vulnerable populations cried out for help under the weight of psychosocial stress and mental strain. In Nepal, Nepal Evangelical Lutheran Church President Rev. Joseph Soren highlighted how “Food insecurity, fear of contracting coronavirus, lack of alternative livelihood options, and pressure to earn a living have increased stress and mental health issues” (“COVID-19: Nepal Needs” 2021, par 8). At the same time, he noted that “[NELC’s congregations and surrounding communities] are looking to the church with great hope to start a new way of living and coping with the pandemic” (par 12). While the discussion about Holy Communion and fasting from the Lord’s Supper is a theological discussion that warrants attention, this cannot be detached from the daily bread that brothers and sisters struggle with. In one case, we might choose to fast, while in another, the concern is how to feed the hungry. Both the spiritual and the physical come together as we consider the meaning of the Eucharist theologically that touches the physical hunger that brings life and death priorities to the forefront of our minds. This is humbling and necessary.

When One Part Hurts, So Does the Other We learn that churches showed solidarity in the wake of suffering from the pandemic; this solidarity is anchored in the self-understanding that we are here for each other. For example, the Indonesian Youth reached out to the churches in Hong

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Kong. In Indonesia, the Lutheran Youth Network, formed by the Indonesian National Committee, collected 2211 surgical masks and ten large packs of sanitizers for their fellow Lutherans in Hong Kong. Despite difficulties in shipping and with the customs in Hong Kong, the special package of solidarity reached their brothers and sisters across the ocean (“COVID-19: Churches in Asia 2020). Such examples point beyond masks or sanitizers, but we see that this is an expression of ‘communion in suffering and resilience’ through a theological lens. The young people with the communion are aware of the interconnection between the churches. Often, they are the ones who show immediate concern to brothers and sisters on the side of the ocean. Indonesia sent five loaves and two fishes to Hong Kong during the early days of the pandemic. Particularly important is when youth are mobilized to reach out beyond themselves to their brothers and sisters in another country. Their gift of solidarity adds to the outreach ministry of churches such as the Eternal Life Lutheran Church in their outreach ministry (“COVID-19: Church Brings Hope” 2020). The comment of Rev. Ken Leung, their pastor, captures the shared witness well in the following: During a time of epidemics, it’s easy for us to lose all hope and joy. However, as we are willing to walk in faith, to sow seeds of peace and comfort, we experience the presence of the living Christ. May we look back after the epidemic and see the footprints of Christ with us. (“COVID-19: Church Brings Hope” 2020, par 8)

After a preliminary exploratory assessment of how churches responded to the pandemic, their explicit answers offer important insights from a global perspective as we move forward into the ‘new normal’ in our respective contexts. One of the key findings of the LWF survey of members on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is solidarity. Julia Brümmer, LWF Planning, Monitoring, Evaluation, and Reporting Coordinator, summarized the survey results in the following (“Being Lutheran:” 2020, par 11): Apart from supporting churches in their current struggles, one role of LWF could therefore be to safeguard and remind churches of the broader perspective, including the concept of solidarity and their belonging to a worldwide Communion of Churches.

Overall, besides women and youth, church leaders too showed that one hurts another is hurt too. In their regional pastoral letter in Latin America and the Caribbean, the leaders amplify interconnectedness and interdependence. Addressing the members in the region, they wrote, “We are more interconnected and interdependent than we thought” and we have “rediscovered our humanity and all its inherent contradictions” (“COVID-19: Latin America 2020. Par 4). This solidarity is partly through the shared experience of trauma, pain, and suffering due to the pandemic. Nonetheless, on a deeper level, echoing Rev. Leung’s words earlier, this is solidarity connected to the suffering servant Jesus, and now through the presence of the Living Christ, churches around the world can see the footprints of Christ with us. We also learn that churches intensified their role in pastoral care for stressful times. For example, a new wave of spirituality in France attended to using nature (“COVID-19: Leading the Church” 2020). In Asia, when many leaders were equally overwhelmed by the surrounding needs, there was a call to ensure that self-care was

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not neglected (“Asia: ‘Self-Care” 2020). During the pandemic, pastors and their families, in particular, were under tremendous pressure. Often the challenge is how to shepherd members when face-to-face meetings are restricted. Moreover, we see that the strain increased throughout the churches, even with leaders who are often perceived as spiritually strong, were also vulnerable. While peer support is valuable, Rev. Antonio Del Rio Reyes, president of the Lutheran Church in the Philippines, highlighted that “We need to stand by each other, to walk with each other, to give to support each other. We, as leaders do have problems, and at times we need other bishops from other churches to stand by us and give us words of encouragement” (par 10). It was noteworthy that the impact of the stress levels on families of church leaders received attention, and therefore, as Bishop Sani Ibrahim Azar of The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land noted, “the practice of self-care can be beneficial to spouses and children” (par 11). Rather than being entangled with debates over wearing a mask or vaccination, which is often dominated by political interests, the French demonstrate that deep compassion and theological orientation of life-affirmations are needed, for example, the flowers of comfort to the tree of life in the Holy Land. In the ceremony where ‘trees of life” were planted, Bishop Azar asked that people not only remember their loved ones, whose names will be placed at the base of every tree but that they also be reminded to continue the fight against the virus with “hope, prevention, distancing, wearing masks and care for our loved ones” (“COVID-19: ‘Tree of Life’ 2021, par  4). Simon Awad, Executive Director of the Environmental Education Center, further reminds the church, “In every branch, root, and leaf, the biology and genealogy of loved ones who died of the virus will become visible again in these trees” (par 8). When the examples of the experiences of the churches in the west are put side by side with the churches in the non-western world, we see how the global communion addresses trauma, stress, and suffering together.

Spreading Hope and Not the Virus Next, as the global church embodies the living Christ on earth, churches cannot be inward-looking but must take note of their neighbors’ plight and include them in all our responses. Questions of suffering and an uncertain future fed into the discussions of the global Lutheran young reformers. The conversations of young adults expand the horizons of our vision of life and suffering. For Tsegahun Assefa Adugna, Youth Pastor of the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus, guiding young people with Biblical principles during the pandemic was necessary to maintain and enhance spiritual health. More importantly, in an online session he facilitated, he discovered that the pandemic’s uncertainty leads youth groups to ask theological questions like the purpose of suffering (“COVID-19: LWF Young Reformers’” 2020). Addressing questions of suffering both theologically and practically has been the hallmark of the necessary response of Christians during this pandemic. In another example, the youth in India became front-line workers to reach out to

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migrant workers at risk. What would you do when you are stuck at home, detached from work, and with so many restrictions even between one location after another? In another case, the Lutheran churches in Indonesia offered an innovative way of offering online learning in rural areas. Here students can benefit from the internet provided through the churches. The church is continuously extending its reach beyond the compounds of the church buildings. We start where we are, but what we have is not restricted only to students from the churches – the connection is open, “everyone, from all faiths can freely access [the] internet” (“Indonesian Churches” 2021, par 7). In countries where broadband is a norm, and internet access is widespread, we forget how a simple monthly subscription and a transceiver station remove the obstacles to education in rural communities (“Indonesian Churches” 2021). We learn that these churches were already innovative using older broadcast technologies such as radio and TV. For example, Senegal saw this as an opportunity to spread the gospel – the good news of comfort needed (“COVID-19: Sharing” 2020). In Ethiopia, even when there was the use of the Mekane Yesus TV channels, there is still an important reminder of not only a digital divide but also a more fundamental economic divide in the rural areas, as highlighted in the remarks by the church president Rev. Yonas Yigezu Dibisa below: The Mekane Yesus TV channel broadcasts worship services and social media, messaging apps and video conferencing calls are used to gather people virtually. We are meeting in new ways and learning to overcome the challenges of social distancing, but we also face the difficulties of reaching people living in the rural areas, the poor who have no access to television or internet. There are many who still live without electricity. (“COVID-19: Being” 2020, par 5)

In addition to spreading the gospel, churches had to show strength and a prophetic stance to confront misinformation especially seen during the height of the pandemic where deaths reached 200,000 in Brazil. Rather than offering religious morphine only to ease pain, the Brazilian leadership of the church was critical of falsehood amid a political climate full of disinformation. Issuing a manifesto showed how the church looked at death and acknowledged the pain squarely in the eye (“COVID Deaths” 2021). One area the churches focused on was the impact of social media, in particular the need to counter hate speech with hope speech. Renato Valenga, a journalist and youth leader with the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil, spoke of how social media was manipulated during the most recent elections in his country “to attack and undermine candidates and their political agenda” (“Sowing seeds of Hope” 2021, par 7). He stresses that the task of challenging hate speech and misinformation online is a “complex and challenging assignment,” but it is a “call to action for all of us” of whatever age group, religion or political persuasion (par 7). Valenga’s call to action resonates with a similar call in Finland in the context of interfaith dialogue as highlighted by Rev. Dr. Elina Hellqvist, emphasizing that rationalistic approaches must not be dominant dialogues; she stresses that it is important to have a holistic approach, integrating “emotions and everyday

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interaction” while searching for the “theological answers.” Furthermore, she notes, “at this time of COVID-19, it is also an important task for all theologians and religious leaders to combat disinformation and fear around the vaccines” (“Women’s Voices” 2021, par 6).

Being Lutherans in the New ‘Normal’ After Corona During the COVID pandemic, Luther’s letter addressing the plague of his time received attention among Christians and among the interfaith community (“Martin Luther’s Pandemic” 2020; “Martin Luther: Whether One May” 2020). One particular paragraph by Luther referring to those who were irresponsible during the plague is worth an extended quotation below: They are much too rash and reckless, tempting God and disregarding everything which might counteract death and the plague. They disdain the use of medicines; they do not avoid places and persons infected by the plague, but instead lightheartedly make sport of it and wish to prove how independent they are. They say that it is God’s punishment; if he wants to protect them he can do so without medicines or our carefulness. This is not trusting God, but rather tempting him. God has created medicines and provided us with intelligence to guard and take good care of the body so that we can live in good health. (Luther 2016, 67)

In a world full of disinformation and hate speeches, being (as stated in the quote) “too rash and reckless” might distort what being a Christian represents. Luther’s words are worth deeper reflections. Hundreds of years ago, Luther highlights an interesting range of themes that resonates with the churches’ contemporary responses to the Covid-19 pandemic: trusting versus tempting God, attitudes to medicine, human intelligence, and common sense, to name a few. However, although a direct quotation is already relevant, there is more. The hard work of connecting it to being Lutherans and Christians in a new context requires consistent encouragement to pursue constructive theological work. Intentional intercultural conversations provide collaborative opportunities in the longer term. This ongoing work of being Lutherans and Christians in our time challenges theologians to take new contexts seriously and have a renewed appreciation for our interconnectedness. Early in 2008, the late Brazilian theologian Vitor Westhelle had already called for greater reflexivity and creativity into Lutheran theology and practice that reshaped theological identity. Inspired by the notion of “transfiguration,” he aimed to raise the confidence of Lutherans in the Global South, in particular, to contribute to the shaping of Lutheran theology and identity globally. For Westhelle, “Transfiguration is the practice by which a figure from a given context has the potential for acting as a catalyst for experiences from other contexts, or when a figure from a given context embodies the spirit of figures from another context” (2008, 20). Applied to Luther, he further elaborates: Luther made a radical change. The final and decisive step in becoming a theologian was not peaceful and idyllic contemplation but, on the contrary, it was struggle and being on trial

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(tentatio, Anfechtung). His own experience as an outcast, persecuted by religious and political powers, driven almost to madness by the occasional doubt that maybe he could be wrong, that is what he said made him the theologian he became. Experience, he said, is what makes a theologian, and not any existential experience of angst. He was talking about undergoing concrete persecution and trial, being afflicted. This was the deadlock to which justification became the key that released him. Only having the key, without knowing what type of lock it fits, becomes an exercise in irrelevance. (Westhelle 2008, 22)

The struggle and being on trial – and being afflicted – amid a global pandemic offer us an opportunity to review not only the theological resources to help us cope, but more importantly, the theological approaches that would enable us to be better prepared to face other crises that would bound to come our way. Westhelle’s imagery of having the key versus knowing the type of lock provokes us to intensify both contextual – and even transcontextual –- theological responses that address the cries of our current moment. This theological work cannot be detached from the experiences that might appear distant from us at first sight. While we might seem to live in different ‘worlds’, we live in a common world. Extending his reflections to the church today, Westhelle highlights that: The church cannot be and never has been an entity in and of itself. Not being of the world, it is still in the world. One cannot be a Lutheran apart from the multidimensional contexts—religious, political, economic, or cultural—that border and even inhabit one’s own. We live in a world that is broken and damaged, but it is so in ways that need to be defined locally. Our identity as Lutherans does not lie in laudatory proficiency in reciting articles from the Augsburg Confession, but in our willingness to be vulnerable. While being immersed in the church’s traditions, our theologizing should allow the cries of the broken, forsaken and the frail to interrupt what we usually hear, so that God’s voice might be heard. (2008. 23)

The ‘multidimensional context’ with its respective deeper wounds is further revealed with greater clarity during this pandemic. The voices of those in Latin America, Asia, and Africa are ways God is speaking even louder today. The example of vaccine inequity globally where the debates about how rich nations hoard life-saving vaccines desperately needed in poorer nations are the most glaring case. The challenge of vaccine hesitancy due to misinformation or harmful religious ideas is a phenomenon various religious leaders struggle to address adequately. Meanwhile, public health officials are deeply concerned, and they are reaching out to faith communities recognizing the important role they play in addressing their congregation members (“Strengthening Partnerships” 2021). The phrase by the World Health Organization has repeated, “No one is safe until everyone else is safe.” is one that resonates with the public witness of the church that “Leave no one behind in responding to the Covid-19 pandemic” (“Leave No One “2020). The responses of the wider Lutheran communion show these churches’ and their communities’ vulnerabilities. In light of the pandemic, a new context for Westhelle – especially brought forward by the experiences of Lutherans in the global south, has

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morphed into further debates around the ‘new normal’ in this ‘new interconnected context’.

We Are Part of This Together While the churches and theologians in the non-western context are increasingly finding ways to be represented in the global theological discourse, their growing confidence, responsiveness, and adaptability in offering their gifts are much needed in the broader communion of churches. Tragically, various internal and external dynamics continue to put pressure to fragment the communion and common witness of Lutheran churches around the world. Often, voices from the global south remind us why it is important for us to refrain from turning inward and lose sight of the global communion of churches. The following story by Kathryn Lohre, Executive for Ecumenical and Inter-religious Relations and Theological Discernment for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, helpfully illustrates what such an enriching intercultural encounter looks like: I will never forget the experience of being on the bus in Windhoek heading to the stadium for the Commemoration of the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation. As I heard the people who had already arrived from far distances singing songs of praise, despite the heat, a lump formed in my throat. I am part of this. I squeezed hands with my sisters from the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus with whom I was sharing a seat. We are part of this, together. All of us who are part of the LWF share our joy for the polyphonic witness of the Lutheran communion. Together we rejoice that what it means to be church is pure freedom: freedom from sin, and freedom for the neighbor. Thanks be to God. (“USA: We Are” 2021, par 23)

Intercultural conversations and encounters highlighted above are important because, although it is understandable to protect one’s immediate turf, we might be preoccupied with our suffering, discomfort, and pain. Sharing in the pain of the global church, particularly from member churches widens our perspectives and experiential horizon. Intentional listening and dialogue with Christians outside our comfort zones opens us up to other religious bodies and the wider society and drives us to pay attention to the most vulnerable. However, it is more than a practice of empathy; such an open posture is a practice of humility. Through Lohre’s story and the snapshot of the collective witness in challenging circumstances in this essay, we witness their rootedness in their communities and awareness of their interconnectedness in solidarity in suffering and in offering solutions. The practical solutions might be evident in emergency health and the economic crisis, but the theological contributions are still distant and need more encouragement to enrich us all.

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 losing Remarks: Deeper Connectedness in One Body, One C Spirit, One Hope The COVID pandemic has defined our age irrevocably. Like the plagues of the past, it too will shape our present. Similar to the epidemics in different parts of the world, it would also shape our respective contexts. Nevertheless, one thing distinctive about this current pandemic is the awareness of our connectivity with one another physically and psychosocially. For Christians, we rediscover a spiritual communion in which we struggle to respond from where we are and across the ocean. Highlighting intercultural connectedness is not meant to downplay the traumatic experiences of churches in North America, Europe, or the Nordic countries where the traditional Lutheran presence, although waning but still more visible. The aim, however, is to uplift the witness of churches that have so much to offer and teach us. Mutual learning as a communion of churches can be discovered between our screen-­ to-­screen interactions and our face-to-face conversations. It is also captured in the stories and examples of many churches beyond the pages of this essay, all of whom invite us to hear their voices, listen to their stories, and challenge us to not see connectedness as a novelty, but rather as a necessity. Therefore, the theme of the 2023 LWF assembly based on the biblical text of Ephesians 4: One Body, One Spirit, and One hope is timely for our current moment as we seek to move beyond in these unparalleled times. The common public witness and mutual learning of churches globally make us stronger as we look beyond the pandemic – into a new ‘normal’ (some might prefer ‘abnormal’) context. Yet this common voice and expression are not merely well-crafted words, it is rooted in the lived experiences and pains of members and churches around the world. Because we are part of this together, we can open up to see ourselves interconnected in our problems and pains and in our capacity to be solutions and healing. As a communion of churches, we revisit the meaning of being part of the body of Christ means and further how the presence of the living Christ is embodied in our wounded world – this is so crucial during a time of crisis. This is who we are now as a Church going through Corona, and this is who will become as a Church after Corona.

References “Asia: ‘Self-Care in Stressful Times’.” 2020, December 1. The Lutheran World Federation, https:// www.lutheranworld.org/news/asia-­self-­care-­stressful-­times “Being Lutheran: Real Presence in Digital Church.” 2021, February 5. The Lutheran World Federation, https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/being-­lutheran-­real-­presence-­digital-­church “Being the Church in Times of COVID-19.” 2020, August 5. The Lutheran World Federation, https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/being-­church-­times-­covid-­19 “Calling for an Economy of Life in a Time of Pandemic.” 2020. The Ecumenical Review 72 (3): 503–506. https://doi.org/10.1111/erev.12536.

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“COVID Deaths Reach 200,000, Lutheran Church in Brazil Issues Manifesto.” 2021, January 15. The Lutheran World Federation, (accessed 25 September 2021) https://www.lutheranworld. org/news/covid-­deaths-­reach-­200000-­lutheran-­church-­brazil-­issues-­manifesto “COVID-19: ‘Push for Digital Engagement’ in Denmark.” 2020, July 2. The Lutheran World Federation, https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/covid-­19-­push-­ digital-­engagement-­denmark “COVID-19: ‘Tree of Life’ Initiative Launched by Palestinian Bishop.” 2021, March 7. The Lutheran World Federation, (accessed 26 September 2021) https://www.lutheranworld.org/ news/covid-­19-­tree-­life-­initiative-­launched-­palestinian-­bishop “COVID-19: Being Church in Times of Coronavirus.” 2020, July 17. The Lutheran World Federation, https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/covid-­19-­being-­church-­times-­coronavirus “COVID-19: Christians around the Globe Join Ecumenical Week of Prayer.” 2021, March 19. The Lutheran World Federation, https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/ covid-­19-­christians-­around-­globe-­join-­ecumenical-­week-­prayer “COVID-19: Church Brings Hope amid Hardship in Hong Kong.” 2020, April 7. The Lutheran World Federation, https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/ covid-­19-­church-­brings-­hope-­amid-­hardship-­hong-­kong “COVID-19: Churches in Asia Advise for Prudence in COVID19 Outbreak.” 2020, February 20. The Lutheran World Federation, (accessed September 2021) https://www.lutheranworld.org/ news/churches-­asia-­advise-­prudence-­covid19-­outbreak “COVID-19: India’s Churches Help Women Achieve Economic Independence.” 2021, August 17. The Lutheran World Federation, https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/ covid-­19-­indias-­churches-­help-­women-­achieve-­economic-­independence “COVID-19: Latin America and the Caribbean Lutheran Leaders Issue Pastoral Letter.” 2020, September 14. The Lutheran World Federation, (accessed 25 September 2021) https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/ covid-­19-­latin-­america-­and-­caribbean-­lutheran-­leaders-­issue-­pastoral-­letter “COVID-19: Leading the Church in Post-Crisis World.” 2020, May 19. The Lutheran World Federation, (accessed 25 September 2021) https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/ covid-­19-­leading-church-­post-­crisis-­world “COVID-19: Love and Self-Discipline Needed to Protect the Vulnerable.” 2020, March 12. The Lutheran World Federation, https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/ coronavirus-­love-­and-­self-­discipline-­needed-­protect-­vulnerable “COVID-19: LWF Intensifies Rapid Response to Include Long-Term Recovery.” 2021, March 30. The Lutheran World Federation, (accessed 25 September 2021) https://www.lutheranworld. org/news/covid-­19-­lwf-­intensifies-­rapid-­response-­include-­long-­term-­recovery “COVID-19: LWF Young Reformers’ Space.” 2020, June 4. The Lutheran World Federation, https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/covid-­19-­lwf-­young-­reformers-­space “COVID-19: Nepal Needs Additional Support for ‘People in Distress.” 2021, May 21. The Lutheran World Federation, https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/ covid-­19-­nepal-­needs-­additional-­support-­people-­distress “COVID-19: Online Worship Increases Outreach and Attendance.” 2020, June 24. The Lutheran World Federation, (accessed 25 September 2021) https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/ covid-­19-­online-­worship-­increases-­outreach-­and-­attendance “COVID-19: Sharing the Gospel Message in Senegal.” 2020, May 29. The Lutheran World Federation, https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/covid-­19-­sharing-­gospel-­message-­senegal “He Gave his Life that they Might Live.” 2021, April 1. The Lutheran World Federation, https:// www.lutheranworld.org/news/he-­gave-­his-­life-­they-­might-­live “Indonesian Churches Enable Online Learning in Rural Areas.” 2021, February 9. The Lutheran World Federation, (accessed 26 September 2021) https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/ indonesian-­churches-­enable-­online-­learning-­rural-­areas

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“Intercessory Prayers in the Midst of the Sprad of COVID-19.” 2020, March 19. The Lutheran World Federation, (accessed 25 September 2021) https://www.lutheranworld.org/content/ resource-­intercessory-­prayer-­midst-­spread-­covid-­19 “Leave No One behind in Fight against COVID-19.” 2020. The Lutheran World Federation, (accessed 26 September 2021) https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/ leave-­no-­one-­behind-­fight-­against-­covid-­19. “Martin Luther: Whether one May Flee from a Deadly Plague.” 2020, May 19. Christianity Today, (accessed 25 September 2021) https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/may-­web-­only/ martin-­luther-­plague-­pandemic-­coronavirus-­covid-­flee-­letter.html “Martin Luther’s Pandemic Advice Goes Viral  — 500 Years Later.” 2020, November 24. Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), https://www.ifyc.org/article/ martin-­luthers-­pandemic-­advice-­goes-­viral-­500-­years-­later “Sowing Seeds of Hope in Soil of Online Conversation.” 2021, May 28. The Lutheran World Federation, (accessed 25 September 2021) https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/ sowing-­seeds-­hope-­soil-­online-­conversation “Strengthening Partnerships with the Faith Community." 2021. World Health Organization, (accessed 25 September 2021) https://www.who.int/activities/ strengthening-­partnerships-­with-­the-­faith-­community “USA: We Are Part of This, Together.” 2021, September 9. The Lutheran World Federation, (accessed 26 September 2021) https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/usa-­we-­are-­part-­together “Women’s Voices for Interfaith Engagement.” 2021, February 9. The Lutheran World Federation, (accessed 25 September 2021) https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/ womens-­voices-­interfaith-­engagement Crizaldo, Rei Lemuel. 2020. Digital Theology: Practising Local Theology in an Age of Global Technology. In Missio Dei in a Digital Age, ed. Jonas Kurlberg and Peter M. Phillips, 51–72. London: SCM. Lohre, Kathryn. 2021. We Are Part of this, Together. The Lutheran World Federation, (accessed 26 September 2021) https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/usa-­we-­are-­part-­together. Luther, Martin. 2016. Sermon at Coburg on Cross and Suffering (1530). In The Annotated Luther, Volume 4: Pastoral Writings, ed. Mary Jane Haemig. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Wengert, Timothy. 2005. The Priesthood of all Believers and Other Pious Myths. Institute of Liturgical Studies Occasional Papers. 2. https://scholar.valpo.edu/ils_papers/2. Westhelle, Vitor. 2008. Transfiguring Lutheranism: Being Lutheran in New Contexts. In Identity, Survival, Witness: Reconfiguring Theological Agendas. Theology in the Life of the Church 3, ed. Karen L. Bloomquist. Geneva: Lutheran World Federation. Sivin Kit,  a pastor of the Lutheran Church in Malaysia, is the Director (ad interim) of the Department for Theology, Mission and Justice with the Lutheran World Federation. He has served as the program executive for public theology and interreligious relations with the Lutheran World Federation in Geneva, tasked with pursuing strategic theological questions and contributing in areas of religion in the public space, interreligious collaboration, and peacebuilding. Previously, he taught theology, ethics, homiletics, and religious studies at the Malaysia Theological Seminary, where he was also director of the Centre for Religion and Society. He has published articles in the fields of public theology, Christian-Muslim relations, ecumenism, and interreligious relations in Southeast and East Asia. His wider interests include contextual theology and religion and media. Kit holds a B.Th. and M.Th. from the South East Asia Graduate School of Theology. He received his PhD in religion, ethics, and society from the University of Agder, Norway.

Appendix

Chapter 2: Questions for Further Reflection and Discussion 1. Did you miss communion, if you were unable to receive it? What, specifically, did you miss the most? 2. If you were able to receive communion, how did you do it? What instructions were you given from your pastor? What individual decisions did you make for yourself? How did it compare to receiving communion in person? 3. If you were able to speak to a loved one on the phone, or through the computer, in the hours of his/her death, were you able to say goodbye? How were you able to accompany that friend or relative on their journey from life through death to eternal life? 4. How would you describe the experience of a Zoom funeral? 5. What did you miss most about being physical together with loved ones? What ways did you experience togetherness? 6. In light of the concept of deep incarnation, what questions does a virtual mediation of our physical interconnectedness as the body of Christ raise for a congregation? 7. How was the experience of virtual worship different for you than simply the pre-pandemic practice of watching a worship service on the television? 8. How is watching a service, and/or participating in a service visually different from listening to a service over the phone? 9. Do digital communion and virtual worship violate the principles of embodiment? Do they affect it at all? Do they enhance it? 10. What principles should guide decisions about digital communion? 11. Which competing values should be prioritized: for example, all members sharing the same elements in the same physical space; all members communing with different elements at the same time virtually; or simply digital communion over no communion, regardless of how it is celebrated? © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero (ed.), Church After the Corona Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23731-7

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12. In what ways is the body of Christ enhanced in the practice of virtual worship? In what ways is it challenged? 13. How does our core incarnational theology need to be re-interpreted and reimagined for us to explicitly incorporate virtual worship practices? 14. What difference does it make for us as individuals and for us collectively as the body of Christ when we cannot physically touch each other? When we cannot sing? 15. What do we gain as the body of Christ when we worship together virtually?

Chapter 3: SWOT Analysis of Churches   Strengths  What is the church doing well?  What resources are available?  What are the primary strengths of the church? (Music)

Weaknesses  What can the church improve on?  What resources are needed?  What are the primary challenges of the church? (Music)

(Preaching)

(Preaching)

(Fellowship)

(Fellowship)

Opportunities  What opportunities are available?  What trends can be used as an advantage?  How can the church’s strength become an opportunity?

(Music)

Threats  What potential threats can harm the church?  What external factors can become a threat?  What current challenges can create more threats? (Music)

(Preaching)

(Preaching)

(Fellowship)

(Fellowship)

Index

A Accessibility in worship, 56 Accessible, 19, 114, 121–122 Adiaphora, 125–126, 132 African American worship, 35–43 B Baptist worship, 36, 40, 89 Black church worship, 36, 37 Book of Concord, 28, 30

E Ecclesiology, 14, 53, 74, 148–150, 153, 155, 158 Embodiment, 11, 24, 25, 149, 153, 155–157, 159, 195 Engaging preaching, 35, 37, 47, 50, 51, 53, 58, 81, 128 Epistemology, 135, 166–169, 173 Ethics, 173 F Fellowship online, 35, 38, 155

C Christology, 32, 137, 149, 153 Commemoration, 94, 191 Communion, 4, 16, 18, 19, 23–25, 30–32, 58, 90, 91, 101, 104, 106–110, 114, 117–120, 125, 129, 134, 136, 137, 139–142, 153–159, 181, 182, 184–187, 190–192, 195 Congregational leadership, 72, 73 D Deep crucifixion, 27 Deep incarnation, 24–28, 195 Deep resurrection, 24, 27 Diaspora, 147, 148, 150–152, 154–160 Digital religious practices, 4–6, 9, 16, 17, 19, 80, 117, 149, 154, 156, 157, 168 Digital theology, v, vi Digital worship, 6, 7, 9, 10, 16–19, 24, 25, 63, 80, 82 Discernment, 75, 82, 86

G The General Prayer, 91, 92, 94 The Great Litany, 92 H Hope, 113, 118, 183–186, 194 I In-person worship, 3, 6, 10, 11, 19, 23, 24, 32, 39–41, 61, 62, 121, 122, 155, 168 Intercessions, 89–96 Invocation, 136, 142 L Laments, 90–92, 94–96 Lectionary, 49, 51, 93 Liturgical theology, 4, 16

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. K. Schiefelbein-Guerrero (ed.), Church After the Corona Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23731-7

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Index

Liturgical year, 93, 95 Liturgy, 4, 7, 8, 11, 14, 18, 19, 31, 35–37, 89, 90, 92, 93, 102–104, 107, 108, 110, 128, 133, 137, 141, 142, 157 Luther, Martin, 5, 13, 30–32, 102–107, 110, 118, 119, 126–128, 130–134, 136–142, 149, 150, 164–177, 189, 191 Lutheran, 5, 7, 23, 25, 28, 30, 31, 36, 57, 62, 64, 70, 90, 91, 94, 102, 105, 109, 110, 117, 119, 125–133, 136, 137, 164, 168–178, 181–192 Lutheran ecclesiology, 14, 53, 148–150, 153, 155

Preaching online, 38, 39, 41, 61 Promise, 29, 31, 70–72, 74, 81, 92, 93, 104, 110, 128, 130–132, 137, 139, 142, 165, 173, 174, 176 Public witness, 19, 190, 192

M Media and preaching, 51, 53, 58, 63 Music online, 9 Mutual learning, 192 Mystagogy, 136, 140–142

S Sacramental practice, 105, 125, 129 Sacramental theology, 53, 69, 102, 104 Solidarity, 115, 127, 172, 183, 185, 186, 191

N Nominalism, 136, 138–142 Non-western, 181–183, 187, 191 O Online worship, 8, 9, 16, 60, 74, 81, 82, 90, 109, 114, 117–119, 122, 125, 182 P Panentheism, 32 Passion devotion, 164, 169–177 Pentecostal worship, 36 Pneumatology, 137, 149, 150, 158 Polymodal worship, 6–8, 15, 19, 54 Post-pandemic preaching, 47, 52, 60, 64

R Real presence, 4, 25, 31, 56, 69, 101, 104–108, 110, 130, 136, 137, 140 Religious rituals, 4, 10, 11, 17, 95 Revelation, 4, 5, 9, 17, 18, 37, 73, 74, 130, 138–141, 150, 166, 171, 176

T Testament, 12, 115, 118, 125, 129, 132, 157, 175 Theology, 4, 5, 12, 14, 27, 31, 32, 58, 60, 69, 73, 74, 93, 117–119, 126, 128, 137, 139, 153, 167, 168, 181, 189, 196 Theology of the cross, 118, 130, 164–169, 173, 176, 177 V Virtual body of Christ, 114, 116–122 Virtual communion, 114, 119–120, 133 Vocation, 24, 29, 30, 114, 165, 168, 169, 178 W Weakest members, 114–116, 118, 122