Planning What Comes Next

Here in the middle of the global pandemic, as numbers are spiking all over the world, as the sunny warmth of summer is giving way to the dismal chill of fall, my friend Pam has lifted my eyes to a reality that is opaque to us right now.

Pam’s husband, my friend Ron, passed away recently. Ron was not only a friend, he was also a member of our church staff, one of our tech guys. I’ve known the family since their daughter Briley was a student in my classroom twenty years ago. His colleagues here at church miss him deeply, and I know that our sorrow is only a tiny portion of what Pam and Briley are experiencing.

Quite apart from the pandemic, we have become all too well acquainted with death over the past several months. In our own family we had two funerals in six weeks this summer, as my wife’s sister and her husband passed away just weeks apart.

And we are see the same thing in our own congregation. Just a couple of weeks ago we had three funerals in ten days. And now we’re planning another one. These are sober, sorrowful days in our fellowship.

When I met with Pam and Briley to plan the service, we were all aware of the way the pandemic has limited our options. So they have elected to have a small, private ceremony next week.

But they also want to schedule another service, a celebration of life, in July, in what we all hope will be our post-Covid environment. And what a celebration that will be! We will not only celebrate Ron’s life so well lived, but we also celebrate our return to fully engaged social interaction.

This is literally the first time in months that I have even thought of planning an event that won’t be constrained and limited by pandemic protocols. The very thought of planning a post-Covid celebration is, to put it bluntly, thrilling!

It’s so comforting – no, thrilling! – to imagine a time in which we can hug one another, gather in large numbers, and enjoy one another’s company without fear of spreading a deadly contagion.

Planning in the middle of a pandemic is always tentative; it’s hard even to imagine long-range plans in such an uncertain environment. So Pam’s decision to plan for a celebration of life next summer is refreshing!

No, thrilling!

And this is how Pam’s plans for next summer have brightened these dreary days. What is true in the smaller scale of pandemic protocols is true in a larger sense in all of life. Right now we do struggle with sin and disease and death and rancor and sorrow aplenty. And of course we need to cultivate strategies and habits that will serve us well in these troubled times.

But back to the question we have often asked: what does the gospel mean in this situation?

What does the gospel mean in these sorrowful times?

One thing it certainly means is that this is not all there is.

In the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, God has declared that this is not the final state of things. Like labor pangs, the sorrow and the trouble we know now are temporary, a passage from one state to another. Something much better is coming.

In Jesus of Nazareth, God invaded space and time and changed forever our world and the world to come.

In Christ, God has promised that He will remake the world and everything in it.

The glorious, cosmic implications of the Son’s time on earth point forward to what one writer called the great “eu-catastrophe,” that cataclysmic moment when all that is wrong will suddenly, catastrophically, finally be made right.

So, yes, we must deal with things as they are, uncertain and chaotic and filled with conflict and sorrow and even death.

But, as Pam has reminded me by lifting up my eyes to a post-Covid reality, because we have put our hope firmly in the promises of our promise-keeping God, we can plan for and look forward to What Comes Next, when God will bring to glorious consummation all the promises He has given us in Christ.

Maranatha, come quickly, Lord Jesus!

Until that Day, we persevere.
Pastor Paul Pyle
Discipleship Pastor

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