A Word from Pastor Lisa: Speaking the Truth in Love
But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.
—Ephesians 4:15-16 (NRSV)
Truth is hard to come by these days. We often blame politicians and media for leading us astray, but if we’re honest with ourselves, truthfulness starts within our own hearts. This Easter season, I’ve been encouraging the church staff to follow the practices of resistance to the pandemic lockdown that Sam Wells and Maureen Knudsen Langdoc highlight in their article, “The Practices of Resistance: How Not to Respond to the Lockdown.”
We focused last week on resisting denial and practicing truthfulness, defined as recognizing, naming, and accepting the disempowerment of our situation. Wells and Langdoc encourage us to acknowledge the depth of our grief and the extinguishing of our dreams. We must accept that the old ways don’t work anymore. Even in this difficult place, we must remember how spiritual transformations happen in lockdown, from Joseph being called to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams to Paul converting his jailer to Martin Luther King, Jr. writing to the pastors in Birmingham.
If we can speak the truth in love to ourselves and each other, this time of confinement can be our teacher. As Ephesians reminds us, this type of truthful speech helps us to grow into Christ and to build up the Body of Christ in love. It’s still too soon to name all of the ways this pandemic will shape us, but here are three I hope we’ll reflect upon:
We must name our pain. Staying home is hard. Physical distancing is brutal on our bodies that crave human contact. The temptation will be great this Mother’s Day weekend to travel or be together, but we must continue to respect physical distancing and stay-at-home orders with creative or virtual means of connecting to those we love. Being built together in love means grieving people we cannot see or touch right now, while also staying home to protect the most vulnerable among us.
We must claim a different way of being “church.” The church has always been a body of people, never a building. This pandemic season has reminded us of that truth now more than ever. We are called to be the hands and feet of Christ in the world, caring for those with COVID-19, supporting those on the front lines, being generous toward those who are poor or newly poor, improving global health conditions, and caring for the earth. We are discovering more deeply how technology connects us and the limits of that technology. How will this shape First Methodist in the future? How will it affect our denomination, too? This week should have been the start of our United Methodist General Conference 2020, where we were exploring plans to separate. While we have managed in recent weeks to unite around compassion, we will most likely be more distant in the future over the full inclusion and affirmation of those who are LGBTQIA+. Perhaps this “together yet apart” model of pandemic church may also play out for our broader denomination.
We don’t know what the future holds, but we trust that speaking the truth in love will build us up into greater love. British artist and poet Probably Tomfoolery has created a brilliant visual story called the “Great Realisation,” which is a bedtime story about life before, during, and after the pandemic. The storyteller tells a child about our pre-2020 lives full of busyness and disregard for each other and creation. Lockdown forces us to slow down, be together, prepare meals, bake bread, dance, sing, and envision a different future.
May we continue to be truth-tellers about our own lives, share our pain, claim new ways of being church, and envision God’s future together, as we are built up in to Christ’s Body of love.