Abiding, Enduring & Infrastructures of Love

Endure
“To put up with or endure” is the first definition of abide In English. And are these days not a test of endurance?

I am often:

• exhausted
• infuriated our American ideal of individualism means the poor and people of color bear the brunt of the pandemic
• anxious about the future
• heartbroken when loved ones of people I care about die of COVID 

I am often also:

• grateful
• goofing off with my kids
• enjoying video production
• celebrating others’ kindness and courage
• experiencing God’s presence

It takes discipline to receive both, to deny neither, to not react compulsively, to respond wholeheartedly, and to trust. This is the test of endurance: not to survive or merely “put up with” but to do in this difficult season what Jesus did and taught.

Run the race and never give up
“Abide in me as I abide in you” includes Hebrews 12, 1st Corinthians 9, and 2nd Timothy 4. (Go read them.)

“…let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us…” 
“Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it.”
“I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable…”

Not all of us can or do run. Not many of us call ourselves runners. But use your hearts and hear the call.

I raced in the Quad Cities Triathlon twice. While I was in training, experienced triathletes gave me this advice. 

“You can train before you race, or you can train while you’re racing.”
“Train in all weather because you’ll race in all weather.”

Our race is not for toilet paper or to avoid COVID or even to live long lives. Our race is to love God with all our heart, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. The “weather” is bad and all of us are training while racing (i.e., we weren’t prepared for this), but Christ calls all the same, “Abide in me as I abide in you.”

More to the race: from me to We
I receive this pandemic as a judgment against us. Not in the way Christians so often do, scapegoating the few and exalting themselves while turning God into a torturer or mass-murderer.

God did not send the virus to punish anyone. Instead, we are the punishing ones, through our generations-long, bipartisan lack of care for our sisters and brothers. Which is really our insistence that caring should only be done in private, not on the public, collective level. The latter is where we decide who works in meat-packing plants and who can work from home; who has preexisting conditions that put them at higher risk and who has the time, money, and access to good food and medical care to be healthy; who succeeds in school and who goes to prison, whether healthcare workers have the supplies they need and whether we have enough tests and who gets loans and relief money, etc.

“Am I my brother’s keeper?” was Cain’s dismissive question for God. “And the Lord said to Cain, ‘What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!’”

To abide in Christ in these days of testing includes accepting humbly that we are part of the whole which has failed so many. And we are part of the possibility of a new way to be a nation together, creating infrastructures of love for the lost and least, the stranger and the poor, the oppressed, the orphan, and the widow.

the Race after the race
The church I long for struggles “to provoke one other”—and the world—"to love and good deeds,” including in public. Isn’t it love when schools continue to provide meals to kids that need them, even when school is cancelled? So much more love is possible.

Hope in Action’s work for a permanent bathroom in Clinton Park is valuable in itself and is training for even greater work in this direction. This is also true for this congregation’s long tradition of feeding ministries.
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When we’re done running this race—enduring isolation, disease, and death—there is another race ahead (which is the same race) to be transformed and to be transformers in love. This is our gift and calling as resurrection people. Christ abiding in us and us abiding in Christ means we’re never alone in that work of love, on the smallest and the largest scales.

Thanks be to God.
Pastor Clark Olson-Smith