Page 13 - CBFK SUMMER Newsletter 2020 flip

by Rev. Zachary L. Bay, Pastor, First Baptist Church, Middlesboro
In the latter part of the nineteenth cen- tury in a foundry in Seneca Falls, NY, red-hot iron was poured into a mold. The Goulds Manufacturing Company made bells. Founders cast ten inch bells for kitchen lawns, eighteen and twenty four inch bells for school house lawns, and occasionally, a thirty inch bell that would enjoy the privilege and prestige of a belfry. For 130 years, my church has been graced by one of those big ones.
In fact, it’s simply an old hunk of iron. “The church,” we pastors preach wearily, “is not the building. It’s the people.” I’ve pastored the First Baptist Church of Middlesboro, KY, for nearly seven years now, and for nearly seven
years I’ve looked right through that old hunk of iron. “The church is the people,” we pastors say with hoarse voices. We’re right about that, and yet sometimes the Spirit has to call us out on our dualisms.
For sixty days, the church has refrained from gathering in the building. The Spirit has taken up the preaching of good ecclesiology and we pastors have had to find something else to say.
For sixty days, every day at ten in the morning, I have met the church—one person, one family at a time—on the lawn near that old hunk of iron. Six, ten, twelve feet apart, we have laid eyes upon one another’s faces and savored one an- other’s voices without a mic and speaker digitizing and synthesizing them. I’ve enjoyed sixty in-person pastoral visits in
the midst of a global pandemic, all be- cause of an old bell I had barely noticed and subtly maligned before.
Ours is a disembodied age. Email, social media, phone calls, texts connect us and they don’t. I’m grateful the Spirit took my tired sermon away from me so that I had to think about something else.That something else: God loves to play in the dirt. Genesis says so.
The rest of the Bible says so, too. God loves to dwell, to turn aside for, to speak to, to take in hand the stuff of this world. When God does it, it’s always for the purpose of making re- lationship.
I didn’t know that an old hunk of iron cast by a long-gone foundry could be a burning bush. Until I did.
What I’m Learning About
Community
During Our Pandemic