It may seem strange, but I imagine that decades from now, some of my fondest memories of St John’s will involve water, in all its troubling and inconvenient forms: Talking on the phone with Doug from my summer vacation in Long Island as he scrambled around the church setting up tarps and buckets to prepare for the hurricane that was on its way; Priscilla showing me how water poured through a particular hole in the outer kitchen ceiling from the windows upstairs, and hearing Tom and John drilling holes in the windowsills to let the water flow through; seeing the look on Louis’s face as our Search Committee chairs showed me around the church for the first time and realizing how badly the paint on the arch in the balcony had peeled; seeing that same arch sanded and painted for the first time as I stood at the altar; watching Simon and the kids scooping shovels’-worth of water out of that vexatious puddle in the Garden; watching half the congregation shovel snow out of the Harvard Mall so we could have an outdoor Christmas service.

This morning (Tuesday), I walked into the building as rain poured down and the nor’easter pummeled the city. I took off my rain pants and jacket, folded up my umbrella, and walked around. Not a sound of gushing water, not a drip-drop anywhere. “Hm,” I thought to myself. “I guess we’re watertight, for now.”

And then the second thought, as I looked up at the ceiling over the stairs. “Was that water damage always there?”

Because I’m a preacher, I live in a three-year lectionary cycle. So I’ve been reflecting recently about March 2020, the last time we heard this set of readings on the Second and Third and Fourth Sundays in Lent, Year A. The crisis and the emergency of the pandemic are over, although the virus and sickness remain. Our lives are mostly watertight, for now. But I can’t help but find myself looking at my life, from time to time, and thinking, “Huh. Was that damage always there?”

You may find the same thing has happened in crises in your life. When the emergency is over, and you’ve made it through to the other side, when you finally have the space to look around, you may see that the damage is still there, that you’re still carrying pain or worry or grief from that time. And that’s okay. Healing is a process that takes much longer than being hurt. (Heaven knows sanding and repainting can take much longer than fixing the leak.)

I’m reminded often of the fact that when Jesus appeared to the disciples after his Resurrection, he did so still bearing his wounds. He appears to them, and he says, “Peace be with you,” and then he shows them his hands and his side. (John 20:19-20) The promise of the Resurrection is not that our wounds will disappear and be forgotten. It’s that they will be transformed, that we will be transformed, still bearing them. For better or for worse, they have shaped us into the people who we are. But there will come a day when they don’t hurt any more, when the storm has passed and the drainage has been fixed and the damage has been repaired; when we can finally look back on all our crises and see the presence of God’s love, working in and through them, despite it all.

There’s a preaching podcast I listen to most weeks while I’m walking up or down Main Street to church, early in the week; two preachers reflect on the readings for the upcoming Sunday and what’s speaking to them this week. It’s always nice to have another perspective on the texts.

This week, one of them mentioned that this Sunday’s psalm is the Venite, Psalm 95, a psalm I know quite well. And I was suddenly overcome by a memory: the memory of preaching on this very psalm on the Third Sunday in Lent three years ago, March 15, 2020, the very first Sunday of remote digital worship.

We’ve made it through the lectionary cycle, once more.

Since I was at a different parish that Sunday, and since I won’t be preaching on the psalm this Sunday, I thought I’d share with you an excerpt from my sermon on that day. I’ll preface it by saying that as I read it, I was reminded of a lesson I’ve learned again and again over the last few years: what is true of God in the great and global crises of our lives is also true of God in our smaller, more personal crises.

Come, let us sing to the Lord; *
let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving *
and raise a loud shout to him with psalms.
For the Lord is a great God, *
and a great King above all gods.
In his hand are the caverns of the earth, *
and the heights of the hills are his also.
The sea is his, for he made it, *
and his hands have molded the dry land.
Come, let us bow down, and bend the knee, *
and kneel before the Lord our Maker
For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. *
Oh, that today you would hearken to his voice!

            I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said these verses of Psalm 95. These words, known as the Venite, are the default opening prayer of Morning Prayer in our prayer book, which I’ve said more or less every day for more or less eight years, and so I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation—to be honest, I did a type-it-into-the-computer calculation—and realized I must’ve said these words about 2,500 times. [2023 note: Add another thousand or so over the last three years.]

Okay, let’s say I took off Saturdays for most of that time and skipped a few weeks on vacation and used a different psalm occasionally, and so I’ve said them, what—2,200 times? [Say, 3000…]

And they’ve never felt more true to me than they do today.

I feel right now as though we’re the residents of a seaside community who’ve just been warned that a tsunami is coming. The local university’s seismographers have detected a massive earthquake far out in the ocean, and we’ve been given a couple hours’ warning that something big is coming. So we’ve packed our bags and gathered our families and fled to higher ground, and now we’re sitting behind our sandbag walls and waiting for the waves to come.

Some of you, like Garrett [the Rector of St Anne’s] and I, have spent the last week inundated with emails and phone calls and meetings as you try to figure out how to prepare for what’s coming. Some of you have probably not seen that behind-the-scenes activity. Maybe you wonder what all the fuss is about. In any case, as a society we’ve pooled our wisdom and our resources and settled on our plans, and now we settle down to wait.

I don’t know what you’re feeling right now. Confusion, or fear? Anxiety, or panic? Exasperation that we’re all overreacting to something that might just flop? To be honest, I’m praying that it flops. I’m praying that the coronavirus-skeptics are right, in the same way that I pray that climate-change deniers are right. I hope that in 50 years we look back and laugh at the climate catastrophe we thought we coming, and I hope that in six months we look back and laugh at how silly we were for canceling all these events. Because if we look like fools in six months, it will be because we took the right precautions today. [Alas.]

Whatever you’re feeling, though, God is right there with you. If you can’t “shout for joy to the Rock of [your] salvation” right now, then wail in lamentation. If you can’t “come before [God’s] presence with thanksgiving,” then “raise a loud shout” of fear or frustration. Trust me, there are plenty of psalms for that.

“For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.” God is with us when we’re down in the darkest caverns of the earth, and she’s with us up on the highest hills of joy. The tumult of the sea is his, for he made it; and her hands have molded the driest wildernesses of our lives.

If you ask me where God is a global pandemic, I can’t in good conscience just quote St. Paul in this morning’s epistle and say that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” (Romans 5:3-4) Maybe that kind of thing is helpful to you; it’s cold comfort to me. But I can tell you that wherever you are today—not only literally, on this Sunday of live streams, but emotionally—wherever you are, God himself is there, right beside you.

There’s so much to say about the events of the last three years, more than I can put in any newsletter article. We are, in nearly every way, “back to normal.” But we will never be back to normal. There are people we lost—who died, or moved away, or became strangers to us—to whom we never had the chance to say goodbye. There are memories of fear, or hope, or joy that have reshaped how we think about our lives. For many of us, there is unexamined pain inside those three years that we’ve never had the time to really let heal.

This was not the first global pandemic, and it will not be the last. It was not the first crisis that upended our daily lives and shook the Church, and it will not be the last. It was a new and an extraordinary experience for all of us, in a way that I hope we’ll never encounter again. For a time, we all experienced many of the same experiences of grief, anxiety, fear, loss, and hope; now, we’ve returned to experiencing these things in our own cycles and our own ways. But whatever any one of us encounters in our lives, God is there.

I pray, this week, for the nearly seven million people who have died during the course of this pandemic. May their souls, and the souls of all the departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

This week plays two very different roles in our church calendar. On the one hand, it’s the first week of Lent. On the other, it’s the due date for our annual Parochial Report, the preparation of which is more often dreaded than enjoyed. Most years, this involves cracking open the big red Service Book and tallying up total attendance for the year, filling out financials and summing up spreadsheets. This year, for the first time the Parochial Report asked for some demographic data about the congregation, which amplified both the dread of those who resent the added tallying, and the delight of those who—like your Rector—are total nerds. So who exactly are we, Saint John’s?

Well, you might be a little surprised to find out.

Before I tell you, I want to take a small step back. It’s not secret that, statistically, the Church is in decline. I don’t mean Saint John’s Church in particular, or even the Episcopal Church, or even the traditional mainline Protestant churches. Generally speaking, in terms of membership and engagement and finances, Christianity is in decline in North America, although this is not at all true around the world. And one of the most common anxieties you’ll hear in churches around the country wraps around the question of the magical, elusive, and highly-valued “young families,” a phrase that’s become so common in church conversations that I’m inclined to give it its own capital letters.

“How do we attract Young Families to our church?” members wonder, in towns and city neighborhoods across the country. “Will this new pastor attract Young Families?” a search committee might ask. Young Families are, it seems, the solution to a huge variety of struggling ministries, church conflicts, and financial woes—never mind that they have no time to spare and even less money.

I don’t mean to sound resentful. It’s nice to feel wanted. But the focus on one demographic or the other in the church obscures what matters in the church and what makes for a strong church. It’s not the number of Young Families: it is the love and the respect and the care for one another that we show every person, as a sibling in the family of God. Young Families are great, and so are Old Singles, and Empty Nesters, and People Who Wish Their Families Would Come to Church But They Just Won’t, and I’m The Only One I Know Who Even Believes in God…ers. And everyone can tell—from 2 years old to 92 years old—whether you’re treating them as a human being, or as a representative of a group, desired or not.

And I guess very few of you would be surprised to hear me say that… You know I spend as much time chatting with some of our younger members at Coffee Hour as I do with some of our older ones. (Well, sometimes a little more…)

So who are we, Saint John’s? Well, just to keep it to the question of generations and stages of life— We’re pretty much like Charlestown.

The Parochial Report asked us to count people in certain categories — children (0-12), youth (13-17), young adults (18-34), middle adults, (35-64), senior adults (65 and older). (Their categories, not mine!) So I thought, after looking through the parish directory and adding numbers up, that I’d compare to some recent Census data for our little neighborhood. (Those data are from 2017.)

This is really astounding, to me. Sure, we all know that 20-to-30-somethings are unusually unlikely to go to church in general, and retirement-age folks are much more likely. But overall, these numbers are astounding: generationally, if not racially and ethnically, our church reflects our neighborhood really well.

I loved the Parochial Report this year. But what I loved the most was not the discovery of how many children are in our church, or how many middle adults, or how many seniors or anyone else. It was reading through the list of names, thinking about and praying for and remembering each one of you, the beloved children of God.

I said at our Annual Meeting that I’ve long enjoyed the joke, “Welcome to New England — if you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes.” Last weekend’s extreme cold snap is probably the most radical example most of us have ever seen. Friday’s 34°F became Saturday’s low of -9°F (with 21 mph wind!) became Sunday’s high of 50°F. If you spent a particularly lazy weekend day in a well-heated apartment, you could’ve missed the entire thing.

Most of us didn’t quite have that luxury. I heard more than a few stories of frozen pipes and frigid rooms on Sunday mornings, and that’s not even counting the text I got on Sunday morning from my friend Reid (an emergency-medicine physician at Boston Medical Center), with the simple message: “uh-oh,” and an attached video of himself sloshing through two inches of water on his way out of the ED, as water poured into the department through a burst pipe.

But if you neither particularly lazy nor particularly unlucky, you probably spent the weekend as I did. You checked that you had oil in the tank, piled on a few extra blankets, hunkered down, and hoped that the car would start when you needed to go out to buy a few more ingredients for pancakes. (It did.) The cold was sudden, and bitter, and brutal, and then it was gone.

I wonder how many seasons of our lives are basically like that. We go through periods of excitement and joy, spiritual fulfillment and religious devotion; and we go through periods of doubt and despair, of questioning and wandering. We enjoy seasons in which our relationships with friends or family or spouses feel easy and give us energy and life, and we go through seasons in which they are more difficult and drain our energy instead. I’m not talking, to be clear, about mental illness or depression or abuse—I just mean the lowest points of our ordinary, healthy lives.

There are books, workshops, and coaches dedicated to these dark and cold seasons of our lives. The “self-improvement market,” by some estimates, amounts to some $10 billion per year. And I can understand. When we find ourselves in one of these times, many of us assume that there must be something we can do, something we can read, someone who can give us the right advice or motivation to get us out of it. We sometimes even imagine that the answer is to change everything, to leave a job or a city or a spouse and to start anew.

But I wonder how much these spiritual winters are sometimes simply to be endured until they pass, times for humidifiers and extra blankets, but not for sudden change, phenomena that wash over us like a cold front, coming from who knows where and headed who knows where next, neither or fault nor our responsibility but simply something in the air, a season that may end slowly and gradually or a cold day that may snap back to be sixty degrees warmer tomorrow.

If this is true, then what a relief. Because it means that even if we never figure it out, even if we can’t manage to fix it ourselves, it will one day change. There’s nothing more terrifying, in the midst of one of these periods of spiritual winter, than the thought that it will go on forever. There’s nothing more comforting than the promise of spring.