Posted on 04/09/2020 9:31:56 AM PDT by Kaslin
The ancient Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was last closed during the Black Plague of the 1300s. Then came the coronavirus pandemic.
And now a video circulates across social media of the caretaker, a Muslim man whose family, it is said, has reverently tended this holiest of all Christian churches since the 1100s.
The caretaker closes the doors. The heavy bolts fall into place, sounding like a hammer thudding on the hearts of the Christian world just before Easter.
Coronavirus is most certainly not the Black Death. But the doors of churches are closed just the same.
This is Holy Week for Western Christians. The Eastern Orthodox celebrate Easter on April 19. But the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is shared by all Christians. And the closing of churches all over the world, of the East and of the West, couldn't come at a worse possible time.
Other faiths have seen their houses of worship closed, too, Jewish synagogues and Muslim mosques and others, as part of the fight against the transmission of the deadly virus through social gathering.
Human beings ache for what we've been denied, like the diabetic yearning for chocolate soda. We're stubborn and willful that way. For some, the church doors closing isn't all that important. They put their faith in other things.
But for many others, for Christians at Easter, what's been lost is more powerful and meaningful than ever. And this, too, is the story of the pandemic, but it is a story largely untold.
Wasn't it just weeks ago that we thought we had everything?
We carried our phones in our pockets, and at the touch of a button we could pull forth the sum of all human knowledge. The economy was thrumming, there was money in our wallets, employers were desperate to find workers, and almost anyone who wanted to work could find a job.
Now many of those jobs are gone, people are afraid and the doors of the churches are closed. We watch our services, masses and liturgies at the end of Lent via laptop in our homes. Rather than infect others, we stay away. We isolate, not merely to protect ourselves, but to protect those we don't even know. Isn't this love too?
Yet even with our laptops to watch clergy hold services in empty churches, it just isn't the same, is it? The words are the same, the feelings they evoke are the same, but it isn't the same.
It isn't kneeling in a pew next to your family, your wife and children, near your brother's family, and your cousins and neighbors, people you've known all your life, everyone feeling the awesome weight of judgment from above as we whisper, Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy.
The word for church is ecclesia, an assembly, a gathering, and dates back before Christianity. That is what church is, a gathering, the kind of place that people seek out to be together, not alone, when desperate.
With coronavirus at Easter, we learn truths about ourselves. Some speak hopefully about this time of trial as a blessing, one that might trigger a new Great Awakening.
But those same hopeful voices had sung the same song before the pandemic, as it became increasingly clear that the world was on the edge of a new age, a revolution of automation and artificial intelligence that would cause as great an upheaval in the social order as did the Industrial Revolution.
Just how will this story of spiritual longing, with the doors of churches closed at Easter, be told? I can't say.
Secular media is extremely uncomfortable with religion, particularly Christianity, at times barely tolerant, at other times hostile. When athletes score touchdowns and praise the Lord, when politicians campaign in urban churches seeking the political blessings of clergy, journalists are cautiously benign. They don't dare roll their eyes.
Other times you can hear the eyes rolling, popping out in rage, sounding like heavy ball bearings rolling around in a tin pan.
Consider what happened to Mike Lindell, the "My Pillow" guy who converted his factories to making masks to deal with the COVID-19 virus. He was vilified endlessly for daring to bring up his faith at a White House news conference during which he praised the president. The anger, from the usual media quarters, was vicious and predictable.
Yet with so many around the world still celebrating Easter during this pandemic, media feels an obligation to at least mention that houses of worship have been closed. We've found a safe space to tell the story of Easter, just as we tell of Christmas by glorifying a jolly fat man in a red suit and white beard, with his sack full of toys.
We talk about making this Easter special for the children, and we discuss chocolate bunnies, marshmallow Peeps, colored eggs, and where to order out for that brunch with those killer Bloody Marys.
When Constantine the Great, who'd converted to Christianity, built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre around the year 336, he had it constructed where his mother, St. Helen, found the place of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and his tomb, the place of his resurrection."
The church wasn't built to commemorate chocolate bunnies or glorify the yellow Peeps.
Now it is closed because of the coronavirus, as are other churches, for Easter. You can feel the hearts breaking all over the world.
I remember many businesses taking away Good Friday as a holiday early in the century. The PC’s began their assault on Christmas around 2005. Now it’s nameless, faceless “holiday.”
This will be a memorable Easter. Please don’t lecture about the Feast of Ishtar and all that. This year, we can genuinely enjoy the fact that Jesus Christ is risen. We don’t need a church to do that.
It goes beyond churches. This has broken up all of civil society and taken an already fragmented country and smashed it into more fragments. People are afraid to meet for anything, afraid to say hello on the street when passing somebody, afraid to touch anything, just in a state of total panic.
The churches could have done something about this by staying alive, open and visible. Obviously, group events would observe whatever precautions are considered reasonable.
But the disappearance of the churches takes away the one thing that might have prevented social breakdown.
We need widespread civil disobedience on Easter.
April 20, 2019 by RadicalDiscipleship
The Resurrection is Against the Law
An excerpt from Bill Wylie-Kellermann’s classic Seasons of Faith and Conscience (1991).
The sealing of the tomb is, I believe, notoriously misunderstood. I grew up with a Sunday School notion that to seal the tomb was a matter of hefting the big stone and cementing it tight. The seal, in my mind’s eye, was something like first-century caulking–puttying up the cracks to keep the stink in. Not so. This is a legal seal. Cords would be strung across the rock and anchored at each end with clay. To move the stone would break the seal and indicate tampering.
The event conspicuously echoes the story of Daniel sealed in the den of lions. “And a stone was brought and laid upon the mouth of the den, and the king sealed it with his own signet and with the signet of his lords, that nothing might be changed concerning Daniel” (Daniel 6:18). As there, this is a legal lock on the tomb door–not air tight, but politically tight. To move the stone and break the seal is a civil crime. The resurrection is against the law.
The seal is also a recurring theme in the book of Revelation. Remember the scroll of history sealed with seven seals? Only One is worthy to break them and look upon or unveil the truth: that One is the Lamb who was slain. The seal is a claim of ownership and authority. Its meaning in Revelation is at least that God in Christ reigns sovereign over all history and in all events.
Caesar, in Pilate, on the other hand, violently disputes the claim. He has set his seal of approval on Jesus’ death, and now he guarantees it with troops. Secured by security forces. When the seal is broken in the resurrection, it stands among the signs that the power of the powers (death in all its forms) has been broken. The dominion of political authority–especially inflated, aggressive–and imperial authority has been cut to the heart.
Nothing like mass-worship - as I discovered via a couple Promise Keepers conventions - but there's something to be said for personal/family worship sessions too.
Some of us have not closed and we are being vilified by the press, the government and other Christians. We will remain open however. I am surprised at the number of churches that closed during this time.
Pilgrims get to celebrate the feast-of-the-day at the actual places in the Holy Land, regardless of what the calendar says, so we had Easter Mass (very hurried, no music, per regulations) inside the empty tomb.
This breaks my heart.
I never argue theology. I used to do it all the time, especially over Bible Prophecy. Like everyone else, I pray and wait, and try to bless my fellow Christians as I can.
Thank you for posting this, Kaslin. I sent it to my priests.
Christ died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.
Blessed Easter to you and all our dear Freepers.d
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