How do you measure, measure a year?

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?

In daylights, in sunsets
In midnights, in cups of coffee
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife
In five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, a year in the life?

                        Seasons of Love from RENT (Jonathan Larson)

How do you measure a year?
In daylights, in sunsets?
In cups of coffee, or laughter or tears?
In truths learned, or times he cried?

And how do you measure a pandemic
?In lives lost or tests taken?
In days of isolation or meetings on zoom?
In £ and $ or ministers’ statistics?

Or maybe, if we make it personal, on pounds gained or sit-ups completed?
On hobbies learnt or arguments with family?

How do you measure a pandemic?

The church is measuring too.
Online services are attracting many times more the number who go on a normal Sunday.
The Bishop of Manchester’s Palm Sunday service got 400,000 views.

But churches are also losing money each week the buildings are closed.
Redundancies and furloughing are unwelcome new words in the church’s lexicon.

How do you measure a pandemic?

If we listen carefully, might we hear God’s summons to measure this time differently?

As online inquisitive seekers look for something they can’t quite pin down, and ancient Greeks groped for God in the agora of the first century, might the pandemic cause us to look again?

We have had to learn again, as Paul’s listeners were told, that God does not live in a shrine built by human hands – even a beautiful English one. 

We are learning again the language of exile, of trauma, even of feeling God’s absence in the desolation of this new landscape (Naomi Nixon has written eloquently of this here “By the Rivers of our own Back Door”).

So if we are in a kind of exile, if God has in some way allowed this to happen, what is God’s voice in a pandemic? 

When we come out the other side of this – for we will, one day – how will we measure what happened to God’s people in the pandemic? 

In services streamed or worship recorded?
In buildings reopened, or churches abandoned?
In lessons about me? And encounters with God?

Just as the Biblical exile was a summons to God’s people to call them back to God, so this ‘exile’ might also be a call to a new relationship between God and God’s people in this century.

And as the people of Israel came out of exile having learnt more about themselves, and about their relationship with God, so we might also learn more about ourselves and our God.

The call to the church to be a prophetic voice in this generation is a strong one, and one that I speak about often. I can’t see me stopping that conversation any time soon, as the world begins to emerge into a new ‘normality’ with a once in a generation opportunity to reassess and recalibrate virtually everything and every way it interacts.

But the call is to individuals as well as communities. What will we have learnt about ourselves at the end of the pandemic?

Will it simply be that my hair really is greyer than I thought, or will I have a deeper understanding of who I am in God?

Will I realise that I’m possibly never going to get round to mastering that new hobby, or will I have learnt something new about God?

How will I measure this pandemic in personal terms? 

The theologian Tom Wright speaks of Jesus’ whole ministry being ‘calling people home from exile’. In this new exile, this new place we find ourselves in, what is the call you are hearing? Or is the voice of God being drowned out by those numbers and statistics and fears and concerns?

If you’re floundering, I get it. I have not found it straightforward either; prayer in a busy household ( a lovely one, but a full one) does not come easily to me. In recent days, I have begun to hear again the quiet, insistent summons from God. Something has shifted. I guess it takes 8 weeks for me to begin to hear God in a pandemic!

The final words for the moment go back to RENT, and the song that’s here. How do you measure, measure a year? How about love, how about love? Measure in love.

God’s call out of exile was one of love. God’s call in the ministry of Jesus was a call of love. Always love. 

God’s call out this pandemic will remain the same.

A call of love into a new future, just beginning to be imagined and shaped.