How the Gospel Works
By George “Chip” Hammond
It’s not been a good two years. The year 2020 threw everything into chaos with the advent of a once-in-a-century pandemic. If anything good came from it, it’s that I repented more, learned to trust God more, and learned to be more flexible. But the whole year was painful.
The next year, 2021, didn’t bring much mitigation to the hardship. State and local governments lost their will to try to contain the spread of the virus, and we no longer had the burden of mandated restrictions, but the surge from the Delta variant sickened and killed many people. Then in March my youngest daughter died. I was devastated. I still haven’t really “recovered,” whatever that will ever mean now. As we neared the end of the year, death visited the households of four families dear to me in rapid succession, three of them untimely. Christmas 2021, our first Christmas without Becca, was the hardest day I’ve been through since her death.
As 2022 dawned and the new Omicron variant raged, nearly half of Bethel Church fell sick with it, some worse than others. (One woman told me in a text that during the worst of it, “I was desperately wanting not to live anymore.”) As I write this, I’m praying for the father of someone who is suffering what may be permanent disability from the disease, and for a relation of someone in the church who is in the hospital fighting for his life against this lung-destroying microbe.
Our church has implemented as many passive mitigations as we can, with air movement and virus filtration systems in place. It is a constant burden to try to find the balance between caring for people’s spiritual health (including emotional and mental health because people can’t stay isolated or “online” forever without consequences), and their physical health because being together is how this diabolical disease is passed.
I was worn out and needed a break. Ben, a former military chaplain who is a member of our church, agreed to preach on a coming Sunday, and I planned to take the week to sit quietly, read, pray, sleep, and to visit a friend’s church.
That week our other daughter, who works in the healthcare field and is living with us right now, came down with “something.” Because she works with people infected with Covid, she had to take off from work until she could get tested, and testing was hard to find. Whatever she had, she passed it to us. If it was Covid, it wasn’t too awfully bad. Extreme fatigue was the most notable symptom. As it turned out though, she was able to get tested late in the week and whatever she had (and passed to us), was not Covid. That Sunday I woke up very late and very tired. As I started to get ready for worship a "grief ambush" hit. I thought of Becca, went into her room and sobbed. Sobbed? Wailed, for about an hour. When I came out, I rushed to get ready for worship, but due to some miscommunication we (my wife and I) had different expectations of what we were doing that morning.
I don’t know what aggravated it – the newly opened wound of the grief of my daughter’s death, the constant shadow of death that seemed to hang around us lately, the burden of trying to care for the church in this unpleasant providence that God has brought into our world, the aftereffects of the illness we had – whatever it was, the frustration of conflicting expectations turned into a heated disagreement between my wife and me. As voices rose, my daughter made herself scarce and headed for the hills.
With plans in tatters, I got my Bluetooth headphones and signed into Bethel's worship on my phone. I did not know at the time that my wife and daughter were doing the same because we were all in different parts of the house. Not liking to try to watch and participate in worship on my phone, I signed into Bethel’s livestream on the TV. My wife and daughter heard it and came sheepishly to the family room to participate there.
It was chilly, and not because of the temperature outside. My wife and I sat on the sofa as far apart from each other as we could. Then the worship started and something amazing happened. By the time Elder Tim was done reading the Law and speaking about it, my wife and I were holding hands. After that our silent participation turned into singing out loud. Ben preached a great sermon on Jesus as the Wonderful Counselor and urged us to submit ourselves to Jesus’ counsel. By the end of the service, there were apologies, assurances of love, and peace and well-being were restored.
And that is how the Gospel works, through the ordinary service of worship and through the preaching of the Word. You simply can’t be at peace with God and at odds with others. We can, of course, look at that statement as a test. “Am I at odds with others? Because if I am, than I am not at peace with God.” And there is legitimacy to that (see 1 John 4:20). But we can also look at it as a promise. For those intent on not resisting and quenching the Holy Spirit (see Acts 7:51 and 1 Thessalonians 5:19), peace with God must spill over into our relationships with others: “For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14). And that is how the Gospel work
