Church is a dangerous place

Three months into the pandemic, 2020 version, it’s beginning to sink in: Church is one of the dangerous places. Like movie theaters, concert halls, gyms, bars, and parties, church is an indoor place where people gather to breathe deeply, talk loudly, or sing, transmitting virions at rates high enough to infect whole communities. Singers, in particular, have been classed as “super spreaders.” Houses of worship will soon reopen under many restrictions, with extreme care and caution. Church will be unrecognizable to many of us, and in our masks, we might be unrecognizable to many of our fellow congregants.

I support this caution. I understand this danger. I believe the church leaders who have ignore civil leadership or medical wisdom, either as an expression of faith in God’s ability to protect from infection, or as a fight for religious liberty, are misguided and unnecessarily cavalier.  Nowhere in this little reflection on the dangerous nature of church do I think we should put ourselves or others in harm’s way.

The talk about the danger of religious gatherings should remind us that houses of worship have always been dangerous places. Think of Oscar Romero, Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, Christians throughout Sudan and, of course, Jesus.

Annie Dillard, in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), famously wrote about church (in a passage quoted so often it is in danger of being as banal as she worries church might seem to be):

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.

Some churchgoers may wonder what the heck Ms. Dillard is talking about! Isn’t church a place we go for our weekly dose of spiritual comfort food, words and songs of praise and hope to get us through another week? The loss of these gatherings and the techno-scramble to provide something comforting and familiar bends us still further into the illusion of church as a safe place.

Photo by Dave Goudreau on Unsplash

I’m not sure safety is what Jesus had in mind when he taught his followers to love their enemies, give all they have to the poor, resist idolatry, and go into the world teaching others to do the same. The Jesus emulated by the earliest churchgoers and church-builders offered words of comfort and healing to the poor and outcast, but never promised safety to anyone. On the contrary, Jesus came to start trouble, preaching a message of hope for the poor and an invitation to freedom for all those bound by wealth. He turned religious authority on its head with his legacy of the revolutionary holiness of everyday bread and wine. He came to preach a message of liberation from captivity, release from prison, and new power for the powerless. He did not bring a message of safety, but of life in all its fullness for those on the margins. His work was to push us to the edges, not to rest in a safe center. To be church, to be ecclesia, is to be called out, not in.

Many of my friends and colleagues are pondering, as I am, what church will look like after reopening, and how long we will worship outside our buildings, either on-line or outdoors. Language of safety and sanitation abound, rightfully so. Let’s keep ourselves and our congregants physically healthy and protected from COVID-19, but let’s not confuse that with making Christian faith and practice safe. As we tiptoe into our churches, masks on, distance kept, hearts singing with anticipation of seeing loved ones in the flesh and sharing communion with them, I hope we can remember these words:

Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal. (Book of Common Prayer, p. 372)

May the strength and the renewal of your gathered community indeed send you out to love and serve the One who, like Aslan, is always good and never safe.