Tom Schaefer: Churches may be closed, but our call to serve and worship continues

It’s an odd feeling sitting at home on a Sunday morning. Sunday is a gathering time. A time of prayer, praise and fellowship with those who profess the same faith. But the coronavirus has shut the doors of most churches, synagogues and mosques. We are locked out.

How appropriate for Christians to be exiled from community in this season of Lent. The prototype for Lenten solitude, Jesus alone in the wilderness for 40 days, should remind the faithful that, when community support is reduced or absent, temptations mutate and infect us like a virus. How will each of us confront selfishness, impatience, anger and the vicissitudes of a solitary life?

The experience of exile is all too familiar, too disquieting in Jewish history. Ancient, ruthless powers of Assyria, Babylon and Rome scattered a persecuted people to the ends of the earth. Exile is the story of trying to hold on to community when separation is forced and violent. And now this affliction.

In our Sunday solitude, the first Sunday of shuttered churches, my wife and I turned on the soaring music of a church choir. We read from a devotional book and offered a prayer. A kiss was our benediction. There was no hymn singing, no sharing of fellowship with others, no sacramental meal.

This past Sunday, our church, as have many others, posted the worship service online; other types of help were offered to those at home. While the service was uplifting, that vital sense of community remained hidden behind a computer screen. How long this self-isolation will go on, no one can say.

While resources are plentiful for personal spiritual refreshment, what about serving our neighbors, the horizontal outreach branching out from our vertical connection to God?

Some places to start: Check on your neighbors by phone or text to see if they need anything that you have — and leave it at their door. As you’re able, donate blood, an increasingly critical need, through the American Red Cross. Go online to see how to assist charities and other non-profit organizations whose needs will only increase. Creative ideas for service will continue to bubble up. Be alert for ways you can serve. Think about things you can do.

At some point doors will open again, but the call to worship and service should not go unheeded during this time of trial. We can worship and pray together in our own special ways, apart from our gathering together in one place.

After all, the definition of church is not merely the gathering on Sunday. “The church is church only,” said the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “when it is there for others.”