Reclaiming Experiences
with Rev. Alex Lang
September 19, 2021
In 2020 and 2021, our experiences got delayed, cancelled, or significantly scaled back because of the pandemic. These are experiences that, often, can never be recovered. This Sunday, we’re going to talk about why this loss can feel overwhelming and how we can position ourselves to create new experiences in the places we least expect!
The Scripture
John 4:3-18, 25-26
3 So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.
4 Now he had to go through Samaria. 5 So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.[a])
10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”
13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”
16 He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”
17 “I have no husband,” she replied.
Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. 18 The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”
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25 The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
26 Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”
Matthew 17:14-18
14 When they came to the crowd, a man approached Jesus and knelt before him. 15 “Lord, have mercy on my son,” he said. “He has seizures and is suffering greatly. He often falls into the fire or into the water. 16 I brought him to your disciples, but they could not heal him.”
17 “You unbelieving and perverse generation,” Jesus replied, “how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring the boy here to me.” 18 Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of the boy, and he was healed at that moment.
Read the Full Text
During the fall, we are doing a sermon series called Making Peace with the Pandemic. Each week we are examining a different aspect of how the pandemic changed our lives. Some of us have struggled in really challenging ways. Others used the pandemic as opportunity to reset our priorities. The goal of this series is to talk about what happened to the world, what happened to us and how our faith can guide us towards healing.
Each week we will begin our sermons in this series with an interview of members of our congregation. This interview will set the stage for what we are talking about for the rest of the sermon. The people who did these interviews, many of them were extraordinarily vulnerable. If you see them, please thank them for what they’ve done. Today, we begin our sermon series with Mark Bishop and Katy Allen. Mark is a long-time member of First Pres and a Trustee, while Katy is our Director of Children’s ministries. Let’s hear what they have to say.
Finish reading
So last week, we talked about the loss of community and this week is really an extension of that theme with the loss of experiences. I think all of us were looking forward to having a lot of experiences in 2020 and 2021 that got delayed, cancelled, or if they were able to happen, scaled back significantly. Whether it be family get-togethers, graduations, weddings, funerals, study-abroad programs or even vacations, these are experiences that, often, can never be recovered and coming to terms with that can feel overwhelming.
Perhaps one of the reasons why it feels overwhelming is because the reason for having to miss those experiences is driven by a force outside of your control. Indeed, it is driven by a force you cannot even see. A virus is microscopic and with all the protections and preventions we put into place to stop its spread, it can feel like you’re building your life around something that’s not even real.
This is part of the reason why some people claim the virus is hoax. Many people, even as adults, are concrete thinkers. To understand how a virus functions, you need to be able to engage in abstract thought. The only way you’re going to physically see COVID-19 is with an electron microscope and since most of us don’t just have one of those sitting around, we have to use our imaginations. There are segments of people in our population who are simply not capable of comprehending how a virus spreads and functions.
But even if you do understand how a virus functions and you can imagine how COVID spreads, our minds can still struggle to comprehend the loss of these experiences. It’s one thing if there is a physical barrier preventing you from achieving your goal. A wall standing in your way makes sense to your brain. However, a barrier that you cannot see creates a dissonance. Hence, having to miss all those experiences feels like a much greater loss that it would be normally.
Mark Bishop endured a great loss of experience as a result of his hiatal hernia. As you heard him say, almost everyone who has what he has doesn’t live to tell about it. So he makes it to the other side of this really awful condition and then he contracts COVID. All told, he was in the hospital and rehab for 4 months because of the COVID protocols and he was there, by himself, without family.
Now, in the midst of all of this, he’s missing out on incredible experiences—specifically the birth of his grandchildren. You could see in his interview, the fact that he couldn’t be there to meet them was soul crushing to him. Yes, he was able to see them on video chat, but it’s not the same. Babies don’t have the best eyesight early on, so they often recognize you by smell. His granddaughter, because he couldn’t be there, never developed that recognition and so he’s having to cultivate his relationship with her from scratch. His relationship with his grandson is better, but he wasn’t there for his birth either.
When I heard about Mark’s story, it made me think of how this pandemic has really stolen so many life experiences from all of us. And again, the force that is causing all of this is something we can’t see. This is similar to when Jesus heals the boy who is suffering from epileptic seizures. At the time, they didn’t understand that epilepsy was caused by electrical signals in the brain going haywire. They thought that epilepsy was caused by demons or spirits that possess the person.
When you can’t see the cause, but you have to deal with the consequences, like with COVID or the boy’s father in the story, then your world can feel very out of control. Indeed, it is in situations like this where the world can feel very unjust and many people will blame God because they believe that God controls everything that happens in our lives. I will tell you that, from my perspective, I do not believe that to be true. I do not think that God caused the pandemic. I do not think that God wanted people to get sick and die. Because God gives us, and all other creatures, free will, I think God was mourning right alongside us.
These losses of experience, like what happened to Mark, are the ones that are more well-known and publicized because they are really heart breaking. However, there is another loss of experience that many of us have endured, but are rarely considered and it is exemplified in Katy Allen’s story. So Katy’s story is not nearly as dramatic as Mark’s and they may even seem like an odd pairing to have them together. But I did that intentionally because, as extreme as Mark’s story is, Katy’s story is reflective of what many of us endured through the pandemic.
As her life shutdown, she had to balance how that impacted her, her husband and her two daughters. Something I think we can all relate to is that none of them reacted in the exact same way. In particular, when it came to her daughters, Katy was having to balance the fact that one wanted to hunker down for fear of getting infected and the other was chomping at the bit to be social again. All of us were having to walk this tight rope and, if it wasn’t with other people, it was this internal struggle within yourself.
Now I don’t know about you, but as the pandemic forced me to pull back from my social outlets, what I became acutely aware of is how many of my experiences were based on chance encounters. Under normal circumstances, my day is pretty set as I go from one thing to the next. But what I never appreciated before the pandemic is how, within that set pattern, were these random experiences where I would run into a person I hadn’t seen for a while or have a conversation with someone I’ve never met before or just be swept up in something I hadn’t planned for originally.
So when I heard Katy talking about her daughter Emily wanting to go out and be with her friends, it’s not just the act of being with her friends that she longs for, it’s the unexpected experiences that comes with spending time with her friends that matters to her. And, of course, those chance encounters can’t happen when you’re stuck inside your house.
What many of us don’t appreciate is how those unexpected experiences actually bring a lot of meaning to our lives. For instance, I randomly met my wife at a birthday we both attended. I almost didn’t go and neither did she because we both disliked the birthday boy. We happened to be sitting at the same end of the table and she was so impressed with my theological knowledge that it was love at first sight! That chance encounter changed the direction of my life.
We actually see this happen in our gospel reading from John. Jesus is sitting next to a well waiting for his disciples to return from the city and a Samaritan woman comes to the well to fetch some water. She goes to this well every day. It’s part of her routine, but this woman has never seen Jesus before. To her, Jesus is just some random guy, sitting at the well and getting in her way. Jesus strikes up a conversation with this Samaritan woman and, as the conversation progresses, Jesus reveals that he can see into this woman’s heart and knows information about her personal affairs.
As a result, this woman walks away from their conversation believing that Jesus is the messiah. This one chance encounter completely changes her life for the better. Much of Jesus’ ministry is surrounded by these chance encounters and when those experiences are stripped from us, we miss out on a big part of what makes us whole. So as much as we’ve lost out on the planned or expected experiences, we’ve missed just as many wonderfully random experiences that can enrich our lives in unexpected ways.
So as I end this morning, I hope that you have the opportunity to mourn those big experiences that you lost as a result of the pandemic. But I also hope you remember, it’s those unplanned, chance encounters that ultimately bring a great deal of meaning to our lives. I feel like God is really hidden in those conversations. So I hope and pray that you might have the opportunity to reclaim those experiences right here, in our community, but also out beyond these walls. Because if there’s one thing we all need right now, it’s the opportunity to have a really great, chance encounter in the places we least expect. Amen.