February 14, 2021: Ring a Bell!
Psalm 30
Rev. Rhonda Blevins
I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up,
and did not let my foes rejoice over me.
O Lord my God, I cried to you for help,
and you have healed me.
O Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol,
restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.
Sing praises to the Lord, O you his faithful ones,
and give thanks to his holy name.
For his anger is but for a moment;
his favor is for a lifetime.
Weeping may linger for the night,
but joy comes with the morning.
As for me, I said in my prosperity,
“I shall never be moved.”
By your favor, O Lord,
you had established me as a strong mountain;
you hid your face;
I was dismayed.
To you, O Lord, I cried,
and to the Lord I made supplication:
“What profit is there in my death,
if I go down to the Pit?
Will the dust praise you?
Will it tell of your faithfulness?
Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me!
O Lord, be my helper!”
You have turned my mourning into dancing;
you have taken off my sackcloth
and clothed me with joy,
so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.
______
On Friday I had another COVID test. If you’ve had this test, you know it’s not the most comfortable experience. The nurse brings over a 72-foot Q-tip and pushes it up into your nasal cavity. But they don’t stop with the area inside your nostril accessible by your pinky finger. No! They keep going! All the way up through your sinus cavity into the gray matter area of your brain. It’s not comfortable. At all. The best feeling on the planet right now is the feeling of not having a 72-foot Q-tip in your nose. I promise you that. (My test came back negative, by the way.)
If you’ve not been so fortunate as to have a COVID test, maybe you’ve had the experience of wearing uncomfortable shoes all day. You know the feeling of relief you get when you take those torture devices off and you wiggle your newly freed toes, what a great feeling that is? (Who am I kidding? Most of you haven’t worn anything but flip flops since you moved to Florida!)
The feeling of relief after the Q-tip is removed, or after you take off those dress shoes, is palpable. You wiggle your toes. You breathe a sigh of relief.
That palpable feeling of relief is similar to the feeling of relief I get when someone I love tells me that they’ve received their first, and especially second, COVID vaccine shot. I feel the weight lifting off my shoulders. I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s as if a little bit of the anxiety I’ve been carrying with me over this past year dissipates—anxiety I wasn’t even aware of. Maybe you know what I’m talking about.
It’s been roughly one year since people all over the world started becoming aware of the novel coronavirus—one year since we began to understand the implications of such a deadly disease making its way through the population, sparing most, taking some. Perhaps you’ve lost someone you know, even someone you love to COVID-19. Let me pause so that you can whisper their name or names to God . . . God rest their souls.
The difficulties we’ve faced over this past year are unique, perhaps, in our lifetime, but not unique when we look at the scope of human history. Our ancestors have faced plagues and pestilence and persecution of all kinds before us.
The psalm that we read together today acknowledges a dark time in the life of the psalmist. The psalms are songs expressing the entire breadth of human emotion—terrible sorrow, great joy, horrific fear, exuberant hope—some of the psalms pick one emotion and hang out there. Today’s psalm, on the other hand, acknowledges the range of human emotion:
Weeping may linger for the night,
but joy comes with the morning.
The psalmist acknowledges his desperation from the past coupled with joy and hope for the future. There’s no promise that things will always be rosy—no prediction that life will always be dour. Rather, the psalmist recognizes that life is comprised of laughter and tears, celebration and loss. And through it all, there is God, worthy of our praise.
Over this past year, we’ve known our share of disappointment, of frustration, of “weeping that lingers for the night.” One of the most difficult things about this pandemic is that so many of our mechanisms for coping with loss have been taken from us—travel, gathering with friends around the table, singing great hymns of the faith with one another.
Lurane Worth shared an article with me a week or two ago that talks about the importance of rituals as containers for the ubiquitous human experience of loss.[1] With the appropriate rituals or “containers,” loss can feel like an opening into something bigger, greater, more expansive. Take high school graduation ceremonies, for instance. Young people are losing their school, their friends, their routines—but it doesn’t feel like loss so much as a celebration—a ritual—that helps them frame the ending as marker of something new and bigger and better. Without the appropriate rituals or containers, however, loss can leave us closed off and shut down.
For people of faith, we come together regularly as a ritual—and in normal times we sing the great hymns of faith. And in the collective singing, we forget, for just a few moments, the trials and challenges we faced the week prior.
As we have suspended that ritual of congregational singing out of precaution, it’s been hard on many of us, not just because we would prefer to sing, but because one of our rituals has been taken—one of our ways of coping with the challenges of life has been suspended at a time when we desperately need a “container” for the collective trauma and grief we’ve felt.
Maybe it’s time to find a new “container” for our collective grief and trauma.
The psalm we read today, Psalm 30, is a psalm to mark a new beginning. Acknowledging life’s difficulties and challenges, but laser-focused on celebrating God’s faithfulness through the ups and downs of life.
One commentator wrote this about Psalm 30:
This psalm proclaims that endings are not as final as we sometimes think they are. It does not deny the reality of the darkness. It does not deny the experience of the absence of God. And it does not deny the dismay of finding that our beliefs do not always stand up to the realities of life. But it affirms that out of that grievous experience of death can emerge a new joy, a new hope, a new future, and a new confirmation of what it is to be the people of God.[2]
Last Sunday a couple stopped by after church—they’re not worshipping with us in person but online because they’re still playing it real safe with COVID. They told me that they had both gotten their first COVID vaccine shot. I told them what I told you, that every time someone I care about tells me they’ve gotten their first vaccine, I breathe a sigh of relief, a weight of anxiety is lifted from my shoulder. Kristen, our office manager, was there. And she said, “We should ring a bell or something.” I laughed. Then the more I thought about it, the more I thought, “Oh my goodness! We SHOULD ring a bell!” So I bought a bell.
We need a ritual—a container—a rite of initiation to help us move from a pretty dark chapter of our collective lives to a more open, expansive, brighter future. We may not be singing quite yet, but we can surely ring a bell!
Throughout history, people have rung bells for all sorts of reasons: you might think of the dinner bell or the bell rung at bars when someone leaves a really good tip. There are wedding bells, and then there’s the poem “For Whom the Bell Tolls” about an old funeral custom of ringing the church bell. Then there’s the ringing of the bell by an oncology patient after the last chemo treatment.
And here at the Chapel, over the next few months, we’ll ring a bell to celebrate the completion of the COVID vaccination. Let’s call it our “Victory Bell.” The reason is twofold (at least):
1. I shouldn’t be the only one at the church who gets to enjoy the feeling of relief upon hearing about the successful completion of vaccination treatment for my fellow church members. We can celebrate this milestone together! We can rejoice with one another as one by one, we gain immunity, growing collectively stronger, until that day when we reach herd immunity and can gather and eat and sing—and on that day we’re gonna SING!
2. There’s a second reason, beyond celebrating together, that I think this new ritual may prove valuable. Like other markers in life—high school graduation ceremonies, receiving a driver’s license, weddings—ringing the “victory over COVID” bell can serve as a tangible marker, delineating the line between the COVID way of life and the post-COVID way of life. It may serve as an “ebenzer,” that a biblical word for marker or sign for when something important happens. The day I get to ring that bell, for instance, I’m going to go eat at a restaurant . . . indoors! What will you do the day you ring the bell (or we ring it on your behalf)? Return to worship in person? Go out to eat with friends? Invite friends over to your house? Book a trip to somewhere fun?
The ringing of the bell is a marker and a celebration—and it is also a call to remember God’s faithfulness to us throughout this dark and difficult chapter. And every time we hear that bell ring, we can breathe a sigh of relief as we whisper a prayer of gratitude. Because since the time of David, God continues to turn our mourning into dancing!
I close with a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson entitled, “Ring Out, Wild Bells.”
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
[1] Francis Weller and Alnoor Ladha, https://www.dailygood.org/story/2680/deschooling-dialogues-on-initiation-trauma-and-ritual-with-francis-weller-francis-weller-alnoor-ladha/
[2] Dennis Bratcher, http://www.crivoice.org/lectionary/YearC/Ceaster3psa.html