COVID
A New Exilic Period for the Christian Church?
“Why can’t we just sing hymns like we used to?” a young boy asks his mother in church.
It seems unfair that crowds of people now gather at football matches and sing songs and hug each other when many church congregations are still expected to observe distancing, no gathered singing and walk past holy water stoops which are rapidly filling up with dust.
As a priest, that child’s innocent question didn’t just remind me of a Biblical verse, it almost literally slapped me in the face:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? (Psalm 137: 1–4, KJV).
We certainly seem to be in a ‘strange land’ and most of us hung up our harps quite a while ago, but why does the Exilic Period of Israel’s history speak so loudly to me in this tragic global experience?
It’s not just because I used to be a tutor in Old Testament studies.