Today in church one of our priests gave a pastoral message in lieu of a sermon in order to address some practical concerns regarding coronavirus and also tornado cleanup. And he went on to recommend that while the chalices would still be available that we receive communion in one kind only, and the chalices were available as it is a requirement in the prayer book and necessary for some people’s personal piety or… and then he stopped, searching for a word, and said, “I don’t know what word to use… I shouldn’t say obstinance,” referring to people who insist on drinking from the chalice anyway. That cracked up many who were listening, and my husband turned to me and said, “holy obstinance,” and as you can imagine, we were among the obstinate few who received from the chalice anyway (wine is anti-viral and silver chalices are non-porous and our mouths are cleaner than our hands, so don’t come at me).
But the phrase “holy obstinance” caught my imagination and I came home pondering what that means for our moment in time that often feels overwhelming as though we can scarcely catch our breath from one thing before something else hits. And what better description is there of hope in this moment then pressing on out of a holy obstinance? To have faith that we can ultimately bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice to paraphrase what Dr. King once said.
Many of my favorite stories, whether it’s Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars, or Doctor Who (yes, I am a big geek and I own it proudly), feature long sections of darkness with very little chance of success. And it’s one thing to read and reread (or watch and re-watch) these sections of darkness knowing how it all turns out. It’s another thing to be trekking through Mordor with enemies all around and your water’s running out, or to crouch by Dumbledore’s body knowing there’s no one left to stand between you and the battle that is to come, or to take a run at blowing up the death star knowing there’s just one chance to get it right and so many ways to get it wrong–to stand in those moments and not know where the story ends, to live into the uncertainty and do the right thing anyway out of hope that if enough people join you in doing the right thing, then it will make a difference. But even if they don’t, you do it anyway, because no matter the outcome, you have chosen to do what’s right. This is holy obstinance.
And no, I’m not equating drinking from the chalice or not as making the right choice in dark times, the phrase just grabbed my attention and I wouldn’t be giving its origin proper references without the story.
The second piece of this is that thinking about the coronavirus (or to be accurate: the novel coronavirus, COVID-19), has me thinking about the nature of interconnectedness. In his address, my priest today also mentioned how preventing the spread of a virus as best we can falls into love of one’s neighbor.
In a time where border-consciousness in the United States is seemingly at an all-time high, here comes a little brand-new virus to remind us that borders are artificial lines drawn on a map. To remind us that we are all global citizens in a world that is more interconnected than ever, bound together in a common destiny for better or worse and the attempts to practice isolationism or pretend that isn’t so are not only wrong but incredibly… naive to put it as charitably as possible.
Today’s gospel lesson contained one of the most memorized verses of all time: “For God so loved the world…” God so loved… not a single country, nor a single people group, but the entire world–which incidentally includes creation itself as the author of Romans put it so eloquently: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now: and not only the creation, but we ourselves…” (Romans 8:22-23 NRSV).
God so loved the entire world–all of creation–that God gave of Godself the ultimate sacrifice in order to put things to right. This reconciliation is both here and now, and an eschatological reality. In other words, the reconciliation offered to us here is not yet complete as we experience it, but in terms of the world to come, it has already been made complete, and indeed, all things have been made new.
But since we live before everything being made new, things like the coronavirus come along and highlight the fact that none of us can “go it alone” on this planet. Tornadoes reveal to us both how fast life can change and how much we need our neighbors. It is a reminder to care for our neighbors at all times, not just in the midst of sickness or disaster because we need them and they need us and all of us are loved equally by a God who demonstrated what love is with the ultimate sacrifice for the whole world.
To stand in the knowledge that we follow the crucified one and to refuse isolationist doctrines that would divide us from members of our human family, to acknowledge that all human life is sacred and created in the image of God and should be treated as such in a time of xenophobia, to resist the supremacies of our nation that seek to oppress and divide us from acknowledging each others’ full humanity, to stand firm in all of this: that is holy obstinance.
