Cast your minds back to the first lockdown.

It was a time of turmoil, of fear, of loneliness, of everything that we knew and trusted being turned upside down. We couldn’t just ‘keep calm and carry on’ because the carrying on had to stop, or continue in a very different way than before. Working from home, schooling from home, shopping from home, even socialising from home via online quizzes and live screenings of theatre productions. Nothing remained the same. Even church stopped.

In these weeks of….nothing, one word on the search engines became more popular than ever: prayer. Church buildings, legally, had to close, but clergy and ministers of all types and denominations found other ways to worship. As a vicar myself I ‘livestreamed’ via Facebook for the first time, and it has since become a way of life. I livestreamed thoughts for the day, and morning prayer, and even toddler groups. In short, everything that I had once done in church, now took place from my study, or the Rectory garden, or on Sundays from the doorstep, so that my neighbours could join in from theirs.

As I continued I noticed that my ‘congregation’ wasn’t just the regulars who would normally have come to church on a Sunday, but people from across the parish, outside the parish (even Australia, California…) and people who hadn’t been inside a church for many years. There were actually, at times, more ‘lost sheep’ returning to the prayerful fold than those who were normally safe members of the flock.

During the pandemic people rediscovered the place of prayer in their lives, or perhaps discovered it for the first time. Lockdown, for me as a priest, became a time of blessing due to these connections that were being made.

The pandemic, in many ways, was just like the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Israel had been in Exile, but allowed to return and to rebuild. The people feel lost, but when Ezra, the priest, reads from the books of the law, the Jewish Scriptures, their hearts are re-awakened to God’s presence. The people stand to attention to hear Ezra, men, women, and children able to understand are gathered together, and they respond with the heads and hearts and their whole bodies: lifting up their hands, crying Amen, pressing their faces to the ground, and weeping.

The people weep for all that has been lost, they weep for the years in exile, they weep for having erased God from their lives. Perhaps we too were experiencing a similar sense of lamentation, as, with nothing else to do, we found time to really think about what matters in our lives: family and friends, loved ones, our relationship with God?

Our readings for this Sunday move us on to the Gospel. It is the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, he leaves the wilderness where he had been sent after his baptism, and returns home, preaching as he goes. He is fuelled by the Holy Spirit, and eager to re-engage his fellow people in God’s purpose, and it is contagious. When he reaches Nazareth where he was brought up, he takes to the podium to read from the prophets, finding the promise of hope and renewal for all people, that his mother based her song upon when she was pregnant with him. Everybody in the synagogue that day is focussed upon Jesus and the energy and vitality with which he reads those words, their hearts are stirred, just as the Jewish people of Nehemiah’s day were. Just as we were when the gospel was shared online during the pandemic?

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,

   because the Lord has anointed me;

he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,

   to bind up the broken-hearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives,

   and release to the prisoners;

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour,

   and the day of vengeance of our God;

   to comfort all who mourn;

Isaiah 61:1-2

When Ezra re-engaged the people with God’s way, he did not do so alone. The Levites (the priestly tribe, the teachers of the law) were there to interpret what Ezra had read so that the people could understand. The day was turned into a holy festival, the tears were stopped and with shared food for everyone, God’s love was celebrated. This day became a reminder that no matter what had happened before, God still loved the people, they were still precious, and that together they would rebuild the faith community.

When several hundreds of years later the descendants of those people heard Jesus read from the prophet Isaiah, their hearts were also rekindled with hope. However if we read on we discover that the words of affirmation spoken to Jesus soon turned to rejection; Jesus was driven out of town, with the murderous intention of throwing him off a cliff.

How easily we take from God what we need when we need it, and yet without a thought, reject it when we feel challenged.

Although attendance of church grew when it was easily available online, when we could worship in the privacy of own homes, numbers of people returning to church buildings for worship has dropped. Some of us continue with the livestreams, but perhaps not as regularly as we once did.

Although we are not quite out of the woods yet, a sense of normality is returning and life is getting busy again. The lockdown gave us the opportunity to re-think the way that we lived and what was important to us. Now the lockdown has been lifted it is all too easy to go back to what we knew before, but God’s way is to make all things new, even whilst holding onto tradition.

St Paul wrote to the church in Corinth that they all needed to connect with the life of the church, and that is just as important now as it has ever been. Perhaps you have re-connected with church, with God, via online worship because it has been easy to do so, but now it is more complicated. The challenge for you is to face those complications: is it possible to give of yourself so that you become a full member of a worshipping community? For those who found themselves disconnected when church buildings closed the challenge is just the same, how can you be part of the whole, what do you have to give? A church service needs a surprisingly large amount of people working behind the scenes, as well as the ones you see ‘up front’, and in a time when there are more churches ‘in vacancy’ than ever, it is truly time for each and everyone of us to step up.

Even as the people of Nehemiah’s time were still weeping, Ezra gave directions on how to make this day of return a holy day of celebration with food and wine and rejoicing, ensuring that those who couldn’t be present were included in the festivities. So let us gather around the Lord’s table to feast, if we are able, and not forget those who aren’t. Let us turn this painful pandemic into a time of reconnecting with God, and with each other.