By Tish Harrison Warren and Jonathan Warren Pagán
The last few years, by nearly any measure, have been difficult. We’ve walked through a global pandemic, profound political and ideological polarization, violence, riots, disinformation and widespread despair. Many parishioners are struggling. Many pastors and church leaders are as well. In November, Barna reported that after years of “the pandemic, along with intense congregational divisions and financial strain, an alarming percentage of pastors is experiencing significant burnout, driving them to seriously consider leaving ministry.” Many of us are tired. Many of us are yearning for hope.
This week, we proclaim Jesus’s death and resurrection. It is a profound privilege but also a heavy responsibility. The Church in the USA is shrinking. And this often brings sadness and desolation for Christian leaders. Beyond that, it feels like each week we see examples of pastors failing, abuse in the Church, and Christians, sometimes even in our own province, being cruel to others online.
In 1918, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a poem about a deadly shipwreck. In it is this prayer: “Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us.” These last few years we have all seen tragedy. Many of us have felt sorrow. Some may even feel shipwrecked. But Jesus, who rose from the grave, easters in us. He meets us where we are and gives us, as Romans 6 says, “newness of life.” This is true for ministers of the gospel and true for the Church as well.
We are right now living through an arc or a pattern that has recurred throughout the history of the Church. It is the pattern of the revival or renewal of the Church, or—more to the point—the death and resurrection of the Church throughout history. The 19th century Scottish historian of revivals James Burns appropriated a metaphor used by the British poet Matthew Arnold to describe this pattern. In his poem “On Dover Beach,” Arnold makes an analogy between the withdrawing tide, revealing nothing but dead and desiccated shoals, and the fading faith of the Western world:
“The Sea of Faith/Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore/Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled./But now I only hear/Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,/Retreating, to the breath/Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear/And naked shingles of the world.”
But as Burns points out, this analogy is incomplete. Whenever the tide flows out, it must inevitably come rushing back in.
And so it is too with the Church. The history of the Church follows a pattern that may well be described as tidal. It is a pattern in which the Church in a period of vitality slowly grows bored and apathetic. The gospel no longer dazzles. It no longer transforms. Then, people grow skeptical, and ultimately contemptuous of faith. Many lose heart and fall away. The Church seems to lose herself, forget who she is, and have no confidence in her story. But this is a phase that precedes—and precipitates—the Spirit’s work of renewal. As the Church gets smaller and weaker and things look bleaker, the Spirit begins a silent work of rejuvenation.
When we are weak, God is strong. When we are winded, the winds of the Spirit begin to surprise God’s people anew.
In these seasons, men and women grow dissatisfied with the Church as it stands, but they are also increasingly certain that they are incapable of solving the Church’s problems in their own strength. Small groups of people begin to pray and live as if the resurrection is the central fact of history. And Jesus’s Church is slowly reborn. The Church itself becomes, as the Romanian theologian Dumitru Staniloae says, a “laboratory of the resurrection.”
We—our country, our world, our Church, and ourselves—are a people longing for hope. This Easter, as we celebrate the resurrection and victory of Jesus, we need to be reminded that Jesus has not abandoned his Church even when it seems wayward and weary. Jesus has not abandoned us when we ourselves are wayward and weary. There is a gentle and profound work of the Holy Spirit happening in the Church and in us, even now. Jesus most powerfully showed up, not in prosperity, not when things seemed to be going well, not in the disciples’ hoped-for success and political dominance, but in a grave. It is only through death that we re-encounter the stone rolled away.
This Easter, may he easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness in us, so that we might become a people transformed by Jesus’s victory over sin, death, and the devil, who can announce that news to a world in search of hope.
The Rev. Tish Harrison Warren is a C4SO priest and writer-in-residence at Resurrection South Austin. She is the author of Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life and Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work, or Watch, or Weep, which is the 2022 Christianity Today Book of the Year. Tish writes a weekly newsletter for The New York Times, and she is a columnist for Christianity Today. Her articles and essays have appeared in Religion News Service, Christianity Today, Comment Magazine, The Point Magazine, The New York Times, and elsewhere.
The Rev. Dr. Jonathan Pagán is a C4SO priest and assisting priest at Resurrection South Austin. Jonathan received his Ph.D. in the History of Christianity at Vanderbilt under the supervision of Dr. Paul Lim and Dr. Peter Lake.