18 April 2020 | Tallinn, Estonia [Mervi Kalmus]
I’ve never watched a horror movie in my life but believe me, I have a pretty good idea about what kind of things would make me freeze in front of a screen in utter horror!
The Bible has a few stories that seem worthy candidates for a horror movie script. One of them is an Old Testament story from the desert wandering days of the Israelites – the story of the poisonous snakes.
This means that the last thing we want to think about when coming together as a church, is death. And yet, this is exactly what we came together to do. In the middle of this deadly pandemic, we came together to remember a death.
We didn’t have a real communion service – because communion involves being together. We could not be physically together but were connected electronically and in spirit.
We did our best to stay true – even during a national lock down – to our Christian calling to “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26). This call has not been cancelled, not even now.
For us, staying true to this call meant that we all, individually, baked some unleavened bread. We remembered to buy some grape juice on our weekly shopping trip. And when we got together at the appointed time on Friday evening, we were ready.
We sang worship songs, we prayed, our Baltic Union president shared the Word, we thought about Jesus and His broken body, and then we ate the bread and drank the cup. We proclaimed the Lord’s death, we remembered that one death which has a potential to give us all life. Life everlasting.
I teared up several times during the service. It wasn’t just that I miss my church family so much. I teared up because I suddenly understood what it might have been like for the Israelites to live in the middle of a snake plague with danger around every corner.
I understood how difficult and yet how crucial it was for them to look up to that bronze snake even as people were dying left and right. How confusing and yet how real their salvation was! And I understood that our only hope in the world where death runs havoc is a disfigured body hung upon a cross. Jesus, bruised and broken, really is the only hope we’ve got. Because only “by His wounds we are healed” (Isa 53:5), only by His death we are given life.
This truth suddenly hit home in a new way.
We are all waiting for a human cure, a covid-19 vaccine. We are waiting for that time when we can leave our homes, go to church and have real communion services again. But I will never forget the lesson I’ve learned during this pandemic – the cure comes from the suffering. Life comes from death.
Yes! With Christ comes not just a story of death, but the promise of a glorious resurrection – a message well worth proclaiming.
tedNEWS Staff: Victor Hulbert, editor; Deana Stojković, associate editor
119 St Peter’s Street, St Albans, Herts, AL1 3EY, England
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.ted.adventist.org
tedNEWS is an information bulletin issued by the communication department of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the Trans-European Division. Readers are free to republish or share this article with appropriate credit including an active hyperlink to the original article.
