Church began hours before Jonas and Silas Hudson rang the bell for Service at 10:30 a.m. last Sunday. Two hours before words and prayers of comfort entered wearied hearts, people gathered. Donors dropped off bottles of water, perishable foods, toiletries, flashlights, tarps, batteries, any and everything to assist those who were displaced, uprooted and left homeless by Hurricane Michael. Children unloaded bottles of water from trucks, young men carried out and set up tables, women organized treats and toiletries, men set up grills under tarps. Those in need came in high numbers and volunteers assisted in the areas of their strengths. Serving came before the Service.
The bell, summoning members and visitors to the Service, rang louder than usual. The ceiling that once covered and prevented the bell from echoing was dismantled, ripped to pieces by the storm’s 150 mph hour wind. The ceiling that remains is twisted zinc and the rest is on the ground, like fallen leaves at the trunk of a tree. It’s like that here. Everything is out of place: bricks no longer form walls. Instead, cement bricks crumble like the shattered glass that once stood within them as windows to let in the light.
Crumbled Bricks.
Shattered Glass.
All things are in a shamble leaving each person, family, institution, and church scrambling, trying to figure out where to start.
The sermon after the hurricane was simple and seemed to preach itself: we start where we are. In which case, we started without the building in front of the crumbled bricks and shattered glass. Everything was the same with a twist: At the sound of the bell, congregants and visitors gathered outside in the heat – in front of the devastation. Some sat on the black chairs, the overflow and the CBS camera crew formed around them in a semicircle. The pastor stood behind a podium dressed in a t-shirt, shorts, sandals and a simple stole around his neck. His mouth trembled. Words moved through the heat and entered wearied hearts. Tears pooled in the eyelids of a few people and as for others, the healing waters of tears ran down their cheeks.
We didn’t attend church on Sunday. We were the Church
We didn’t attend Service on Sunday. We served.
What we did on Sunday was finally have a Church Service.
