Holy Week is soon upon us, but it is very likely that we will not be allowed to gather for public worship. It may be hard for us to imagine a freedom we take for granted removed from us.
Even as we realize that this is essential for the good of all, some of us are grieving this thought.
As I contemplate this possibility, my heart goes out to countless Christians for whom freely gathering to worship Jesus Christ, God’s Son, their Savior and Lord, is not taken for granted. It comes at great cost. It could indeed cost them life itself. To worship at all may need to be in secret, moving from place to place, so as not to be discovered.
In places such as Estonia, from World War II until the Soviet Union’s collapse, churches were shut down, clergy taken away to gulags to suffer and even die in captivity. A 95 percent Lutheran country was reduced to a tiny fraction of believers. In China and India today, governments are intensifying their scrutiny and threats, making public worship often hazardous. In other countries, terrorists are hunting down and snuffing out the lives of Christian believers, making gathering for worship a life and death matter.
Could it be in facing the COVID-19 pandemic, in our time of social isolation, that we might ponder why it is that we gather for worship? Is it a take it or leave it matter, no big deal? How might we be helped in our reflections by why our brothers and sisters in Christ risk everything to gather for worship?
It would appear that in all these varied settings, these fellow Christians have been met by a God whose love knows no end. This God “so loved the world,” so loved each of these children of his, that he sent his only Son to pour out his life, hold nothing back, so that he might draw each of them home to His Father and their Father. Love so amazing, so divine, captivates them. Such love they find nowhere else. They cannot help but gather to worship, give thanks, and most importantly to hear over and over again of their eternal value won through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
We in our secular western world may disdain such nonsense. We live in a world where many have no notion of a transcendent God still coming to us in worship. To hear of God being “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” may to us be just foolishness. As long as we can keep ourselves thinking that way, we likely will not be all that troubled by public worship being banned temporarily or permanently.
Are we too sophisticated to learn from those who find worship being worth risking life itself?
These days, weeks, and months before us will call for us to care for one another in countless life-giving ways. As a part of that caring, we will need to refrain for a time from gathering for public worship. Could it be that the experiences of persecuted Christians hungry to be met by their crucified and risen Lord and Savior in worship is central to our present and future as well?
