Dear Friends,
I began writing this letter while sitting in my kitchen staring out the window at a beautiful spring day. The sun was shining, the sky was clear and the temperature was incredibly comfortable. While writing, I found it hard to believe that in the midst of this beauty we are being affected by incredible anxiety and unrest. The global fear around the COVID-19 pandemic makes each day feel more challenging than its predecessor. Our Lenten experience and season appear to be a never ending journey in a strange, unsettling wilderness.
A wilderness, I might add, that is filled with unknowns.
Wednesday morning, there were only a few cities and counties under direct Shelter-in-Place or Stay-at-Home orders. Before the end of that day, the mayor of our capital city, Jackson, issued such an order. Mayor Lumumba’s order was followed soon after by Governor Reeves issuing a similar order for our entire state. The CDC, and other entities from our federal government, support the necessity of these state and local actions. You may remember on March 20, I suspended all public face-to-face worship in the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi through Easter Day. Today, I’m officially extending the suspension through at least April 30. All other directives from my letter on March 20 remain in effect as well.
Many have suggested interesting and creative liturgical approaches and ideas. I appreciate these suggestions but “drive-by communion” and intentional distribution of communion from the reserve sacrament are prohibited. In addition to my concern, our Presiding Bishop offers similar concern in the attached document. The practice of Spiritual Communion is still very much in order and recommended. Allow me to offer up another possibility, namely, for all of us to lean into our Church’s tradition of Word and Prayer. Our Book of Common Prayer provides such services in the Daily Office (pages 37-144). These services provide an amazing, prayerful order for each day. In fact, Morning Prayer might even remind some of a time when weekly Eucharist was not the norm in our church.
I know my directives, and the prohibitions put in place, will draw criticism from many people. A week ago, I told the clergy of the diocese that, “I hope these directives draw extreme criticism because that will mean that very few people contracted the COVID-19 virus, none of us suffered the loss of a friend or loved one from virus and our health care system was not stretched to unhealthy expectations.” I will continue to lead out of an abundance of caution, care, and concern. Ultimately, however, I lead with faith in God’s abundant love.
This extension, coupled with Shelter-at-Home orders will make Holy Week and Easter even more challenging for our clergy and parish leadership. Many of our churches will be offering services recorded prior to the civic orders. Other churches may attempt a livestream from the church or their own homes. Additionally, I’ve published my schedule of services for Palm Sunday through Easter. These offerings will be available through Facebook live and any other media I can utilize. I hope you will join me!
I’m aware this is not the Holy Week or Easter any of us pictured, even a few short weeks ago. I do believe, however, that God is calling us to respond to this challenging situation in bold and innovative ways. Easter is the good news of the empty tomb, the conquering of death, the forgiveness of sin, and salvation freely offered to all. It is a message of hope that we preach, at all times, regardless of where we are and who we’re with.
Throughout Easter season, we read from the Act of the Apostles. It is a beautiful story of how, while living into a new reality, the first generation of Christians created the first Christian communities. Perhaps those Acts can be, for us, tangible signs of how God works in and through God’s people, particularly in trying times like these. In spite of this Lenten anxiety, and time in the wilderness, we have so many reasons to lift up our hearts in praise and
thanksgiving.
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8: 38-39)
God bless you and Peace be with you,
+Brian
Enclosure
An Offering of Reflection by Presiding Bishop
Michael Curry
On Our Theology of Worship: Questions in the
Time of COVID-19
Across The Episcopal Church the current Pandemic has given rise to many questions about challenges to our liturgical life. Bishops are being asked, “May we do this or that? Will you permit this or that way of celebrating the Eucharist or delivering Holy Communion to the members of our congregations?” Some years ago in an essay titled “Is There a Christian Sexual Ethic?” Rowan Williams observed that in the then current debates about marriage rites for same sex couples, this “permissible/not permissible” way of conducting the conversation was a dead end. The real (and much more productive) question for a sacramental people, he said, was not simply whether a given practice was “right or wrong,” but rather “How much are we prepared for this or that liturgical action to mean?” How much are we prepared for it to signify? Sacraments effect by signifying.
Sacraments are actions that give new meaning to things. The current questions about the way we worship in a time of radical physical distancing invites the question of what we are prepared for a given sacramental encounter to mean. Sacraments are communal actions that depend on “stuff”: bread and wine, water and oil. They depend on gathering and giving thanks, on proclaiming and receiving the stories of salvation, on bathing in water, on eating and drinking together. These are physical and social realities that are not duplicatable in the virtual world. Gazing at a celebration of the Eucharist is one thing; participating in a physical gathering and sharing the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist is another. And, God, of course, can be present in both experiences.
And that is surely the most important thing to remember. From the time of Thomas Cranmer, mainstream Anglicanism has insisted that the Holy Eucharist is to be celebrated in community, with no fewer than two people. In contrast to some medieval practices, the Prayer Book tradition was deeply concerned with reestablishing the essential connection between the celebration of the Eucharist and the reception of Holy Communion. Over time, of course, many factors contributed to a general decline in the celebration of the Eucharist well into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Morning Prayer became the common service of worship on the Lord’s Day. And while it is good and right that the situation has changed dramatically, that the Holy Eucharist has again become the principal act of worship on Sunday across our church, few would suggest that the experience of Morning Prayer somehow limited God’s presence and love to generations of Anglican Christians. There are members of our church today who do not enjoy a regular sustained celebration of the Eucharist for a variety of reasons other than this Pandemic — they are no less members of Christ’s Body because of it.
Practices such as “drive by communion” present public health concerns and further distort the essential link between a communal celebration and the culmination of that celebration in the reception of the Eucharistic Bread and Wine. This is not to say that the presence of the Dying and Rising Christ cannot be received by any of these means. It is to say that from a human perspective, the full meaning of the Eucharist is not obviously signified by them. Our theology is generous in its assurance of Christ’s presence in all our times of need. In a rubric in the service for Ministration to the Sick (p. 457), The Book of Common Prayer clearly expresses the conviction that even if a person is prevented from physically receiving the Sacrament for reasons of extreme illness or disability, the desire for Christ’s presence alone is enough for all the benefits of the Sacrament to be received.
Richard Hooker described the corporate prayer of Christians as having a spiritual significance far greater than the sum of the individual prayers of the individual members of the body. Through corporate prayer, he said, Christians participate in communion with Christ himself, “joined … to that visible, mystical body which is his Church.” Hooker did not have in mind just the Eucharist, which might have taken place only quarterly or, at best, monthly in his day. He had very much in mind the assembly of faithful Christians gathered for the Daily Office.
While not exclusively the case, online worship may be better suited to ways of praying represented by the forms of the Daily Office than by the physical and material dimensions required by the Eucharist. And under our present circumstances, in making greater use of the Office there may be an opportunity to recover aspects of our tradition that point to the sacramentality of the scriptures, the efficacy of prayer itself, the holiness of the household as the “domestic church,” and the reassurance that the baptized are already and forever marked as Christ’s own. We are living limbs and members of the Body of Christ, wherever and however we gather. The questions being posed to Bishops around these matters are invitations to a deeper engagement with what we mean by the word “sacrament” and how much we are prepared for the Church itself — with or without our accustomed celebrations of the Eucharist — to signify about the presence of God with us.
