One of my professors at Boston University School of Theology, the late Dr. Dale P. Andrews, wrote once about the 1958 movie “The Defiant Ones” starring the recently-deceased Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis. The two escaped prisoners–one white and one black–are chained together and though they detest each other, they cannot physically separate. Dr. Andrews reflects on one scene:
In one scene, in sudden fear of being spotted on the run in the pouring rain, they hurtle into a fifteen-foot pit to hide. But the rain-slicked mud would be both their barrier and their teacher. If they are to climb to their freedom, they have to climb together. They fail again and again at climbing alongside one another, sliding back into the pit with fists full of mud. Not until they struggle to climb with and for one another do they make it back to the road. Like the escaped prisoners…God shackles us to one another beyond our immediate vision so that in the strife for survival, we discover the life of the covenantal relationship.
In this season of the pandemic, we are reminded of how closely we are bound to one another, even if we are separated by screens, face masks, and distancing. That our public health is shared, and our spiritual health is shared as well. We cannot be “holy solitaries” as our founder John Wesley decried, but we must be up in each other’s business and allow our vulnerability to be opened. Just as our breath is both life and a caution to one another these days, our pneuma (breath or spirit in Greek) is both life and a challenge to one another.
The coming months will be formative ones for First Church as our resilience is tested…almost as if we are bound up with one another. The season of Lent, several months without a second pastor (as we say farewell to Pastor Yvonne a few months earlier than anyone expected, we are requesting a second pastor from the Bishop when terms renew in July), and a congregational visioning process will stretch each of us and remind us how bound up we are.
May we heed the call to covenantal community, bound up with one another, even if we are a screen width apart.
Blessings and see you Sunday,
Rev. Jeremy Smith