“Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us,
looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.”
– Hebrews 12:1–2

On Monday night, I met with members of our parish Reopening Committee and the Vestry, and together we made a very difficult but important decision: to take a step back from the in-person, indoor component of our worship during this Advent and Christmas.

I’ll still be here on Sunday mornings to lead worship; Douglas will be here to play the organ and lead us in music, and we’ll have a couple of readers to read one of the lessons and the Prayers of the People. The rest of the congregation will be on Zoom.

We’ll continue celebrating the Eucharist together. After the service, in fact, I’ll bring the consecrated bread to the door of the church, where you can walk by on Devens Street to receive communion, if you’d like. It will be very different from the March and April shutdown. In a sense, it will be a better worship experience. It will be easier; we’ve done it before. In a sense, it will be harder, because… we’ve done it before.

When I was in high school, I used to run track pretty competitively, and my main event was the mile: four loops around a 400 meter track. I always though that there is a sense in which the fourth and final lap was the easiest, even though there was a sense in which it was the hardest. You had already run most of the race. Every system in your body was shutting down. Your muscles were locked up with lactic acid. You could barely move or breathe, and yet here you were. The end was in sight. It wasn’t like the third lap, when you were feeling awful and still had half the race to go. You were in the fourth and final lap.

I think many of us feel as though that’s the position we’re in now. Most of us won’t get a vaccine in the early waves, but within the next six months it seems a large fraction of our population will have been able to receive a highly-effective vaccine, bringing the pandemic under control. As spring and summer come again and vaccination continues, the virus will recede. It is not the end, but the end is in sight, and so there is a sense in which we’re in that final lap: exhausted, barely upright, but almost there.

The most important thing we can do right now is to finish well. Not to fall down, as my father-in-law says, on the wrong side of the finish line. Not to run the risk of having to quarantine a whole church full of people, let alone the risk of infection, serious illness, or death for one of our members.

Online worship is difficult. It’s sad. It can be hard to engage with. I imagine you’re as tired of it as I am. But it won’t be forever. We will be back here together. The season of Advent is a season of anticipation, of waiting in a difficult time for a brighter future, and there’s no year when Advent will ring truer for me than this one.

But before Advent begins, we still have Thanksgiving tomorrow. It’s hard to be thankful this year. And it’s very hard to say you’re thankful for online church. I have to say, though, even ten years ago this all would have been impossible. We simply couldn’t have seen one another, Sunday after Sunday, in church, because we weren’t all walking around with cameras attached to supercomputers in our pockets or on our desks. It’s a gift for us, this year—as sad and difficult as it is to only be together online—to be able to be together at all. So I give thanks, today, for that gift of seeing one another face-to-virtual-face. (Even if our faces are pixelated and a bit small.)