One Way I'm Grateful for 2020
2020 awakened my desire for the return of Christ.
Let me explain. In my safe Littleton life, it had never been harder to gather with God’s people than the early days of COVID. When it’s easy to gather, I take it for granted. For a few months, the mere fact of gathering was almost entirely taken away. I longed for it so much that I planned for it, I tried to preview it, I arranged my life around it.
Behind all the letters of the New Testament, there is an unmistakable longing, not for a return to the gathered church, but the Return of Christ. They ordered their lives around the expectation that it will happen soon. Converts inherited the disciples’ love for him and therefore their longing for his return.
In my life, the gathered people of God worshipping and learning around the Lord’s Table have been the best possible preview of being physically with Jesus. When that was taken away this year, I found myself pining - for them, yes… but it awakened the ancient path, the desire for him.
The Room Matters:
During the “stay-at-home” period, I regularly saw my people on screen - thanks to Zoom, I saw their likeness more than typical. This was both a treat and a tease. When we gather in the room, we can make eye contact - something poorly simulated by the screen (You can appear to look someone in the eye by staring at the camera - thus not looking at them). In the room we can exchange knowing glances. We can whisper a private comment, comfort someone with a touch. Not on Zoom. In the room, a group of 100 people in a room can achieve intimacy not only by singing together (and actually hearing all the voices), but also because smaller groups can form to pray together. In a room we can sense each other. We smell each other, pass anxiety and peace to one another. I love shared silence with a group of people - that blanket of peace that settles over a room as you hear people take deep breaths, shuffle in their seat, quiet their young kids. In the room, even if I don’t discern the voice of God to me, I sense him among my people.
For preachers, much is lost over the screen. I don’t know how my words are impacting my people. I cannot sense their tiny reactions to the word, their furrowed brows, their deep breaths, their quiet hums of inspiration, agreement, or disagreement; their increased or relieved tension. On screen, I cannot feel whatever it is that tells me “this needs to be rephrased,” “that needs to be repeated,” “he disagreed with this,” and “she really needed to hear that, let it sit for a moment.” That makes me long for more. It makes me long for immediacy.
First, I mean immediacy in terms of time. Something is nearly instantly exchanged between two people in a room; whether warm or cold, tracking or confused. It is immediate - not instant, but as fast as light and sound.
Second, I mean immediacy in terms of the connection. Notice this family of words: medium, mediate, mediator, immediate. They’re all describing the same thing: a means of communication, and connection. Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message.” In communication, form and function are inseparable. The medium is the mediator, the form of communication between two people. When I meet with people on a video-internet call, there are (far) more mediators than we realize. Not merely my computer and theirs. The software we’ve chosen - whether Zoom, FaceTime, Skype, Google Hangouts, Facebook Live, or dozens more - is a mediator. It shows us to one another in a specific way. We can control how we see and hear one another - turn up the volume, mute, change our background, brighten our screen, and more. The mere fact that we had a choice of software makes choice a mediator. Technologically speaking, there are countless unseen mediators. My computer is not speaking directly to yours. We are both on an internet network which is passing our communication through routers, wires, signals, servers, satellites. The delay between what I say and what you hear leads to countless awkward “who’s turn is it to talk” moments. This delay is reminds me that our words have passed through miles of wires, waves, walls, servers. Even when my associate and I are on our computers in adjacent rooms participating in the same meeting, the data created by the sounds and images captured by our microphones and cameras will travel thousands of miles and through hundreds of machines before it arrives on one another’s screens. The technology is a gift in this season, but it also a reminder of the curse of this season. We were apart, though we were made to be together. Hebrews 12 rings in my ears: “let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing.”
As I reflect on these challenges this year, I’m grateful: It has awakened my desire for prayer and the return of Christ like nothing else in my life (side note: that means I’ve had a pretty safe life…).
The Fresh Air of Prayer:
Compared to the countless unseen mediators involved in Zoom meetings, the mediated presence of the Father by the Son, delivered by the Spirit, none of whom are bound by time and space, is infinitely simple. I may be alone in my office, but by closing my eyes and calling on the Lord, by breathing deeply and welcoming His presence, I feel Him. He is here. In fact, He comes closer to me even than someone in the room, embracing me. With that person, communication is still mediated by air and light, by biochemical responses in my brain, by language and cognition. My wife and I love each other, but constantly miscommunicate. Our connection is still mediated. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit do not miscommunicate, and in prayer we are invited into Triune Intimacy. God is with us, he is still Immanuel. God is his own mediator, and he is nearer to me than my own soul. This is the gift of his Spirit - the most precious gift in History.
The Desire behind the Desire:
We already have that immediate presence, but, in a way that’s hard to explain but easy to experience, we don’t have it yet. The immediate presence of God is both closer than anything else will ever be - Jesus himself said it is “better” for us! - and more distant. By God’s design, we experience each other through God-created media: light, air, biochemical reactions in our brain, gut, skin, nervous system. God’s immediate presence is both imminent and transcendent. It is “closer than a brother,” but infinitely far away. We still miss the physical presence of Jesus, just as I missed the physical gathering of my church this spring.
The Book of Revelation ultimately envisions a gathering where Jesus is physically with his people. The Christian faith expects a literal, physical return of Christ. He is not with us in the mediated airwaves at present - he will be. When he died on Friday and stayed dead on Saturday, the disciples likely used the word “gone” to describe him. He is not with us anymore. When he rose, they were astounded and elated. He was physically with them again. He was back. He walked with them, talked with them, ate with them, even allowed them to touch his body and feel the puncture-wounds left by nails and spear. They saw him, heard him, smelled him, and felt his breath - that breath that filled them with peace.
Then he left again, too soon. As he departed from the God-ordained media of air, light, and touch, he promised he’d come back. Until this spring, when I waited for someone to say “you can gather again,” I’d forgotten what that longing felt like. Spring of 2020 was a mere fraction of the longing Peter, John, and James felt when their closest friend gave a similar promise. It fueled them for the rest of their lives: Be ready! Don’t forget! Don’t over-spiritualize him: he is flesh and blood, and he will return, flesh and blood. We will literally gather with him.
When he does, to return to the book of Revelation, another layer of… what to call it?… ungodly mediation will be removed. I said my wife and I constantly miscommunicate. That does not mean our marriage is hanging by a thread: she is my favorite human. I’d rather be with her than any of you, by a country mile. But a day will come when all the shame and sin and cloudy thinking and physical limitations that distort even our best communication will be removed: it will happen when He enters back into the physical media he created.
So, Lord: thanks for 2020. Even so, Come Lord Jesus.