Beset by COVID-19’s trials, the spirit still moves at Gethsemane
COVID-19 walloped Gethsemane Missionary Baptist. On March 31, the disease killed James C. Campbell — a sequoia in the church, a man who’d served 30 years as a deacon — and the congregation couldn’t even say goodbye to him with the big, packed funeral everyone thought Brother Campbell deserved.
Campbell had also been active in Pleasantville, the church’s northeast Houston neighborhood, a seat of black political activism and striving since it was founded in 1948. But it’s a place whose heyday seems past, whose population had been dropping even before Hurricane Harvey hit it hard.
Rev. Dennis Jones, Gethsemane’s pastor for more than 40 years, preached Campbell’s eulogy to an empty church. The staff streamed it, so the mourners could join remotely, wherever they were. The family watched on iPads at the funeral home chapel. Jones couldn’t even hug them.
Now, two months later, the disease has hit six more church members, including one of Jones’s staff. No one else has died, but four had to be hospitalized. Some of the survivors, Jones worries, won’t ever be the same again — physically, emotionally or both.
Even congregation members who haven’t been infected are in pain. Prayer requests cover lost jobs, anxiety, unpaid bills, looming evictions, loneliness. Weddings are postponed. Hard-won graduations can’t be celebrated.
Before the coronavirus, the church attracted 700 or 800 people most Sundays. Jones chafes at preaching via Facebook Live, at holding Tuesday and Thursday prayer meetings and Bible studies as conference calls. He longs to console his flock in the flesh — he’s a hugger, a kisser, a joker — but he wouldn’t dream of gathering them.
“I know too many people who have been infected, and I have lost too many that were dear to me,” he said. In April, the virus claimed his mentor, Dr. Harry Blake, a Shreveport pastor who,
as a civil rights activist, had been been shot at, beaten and jailed. And just days ago, Jones heard that a Houston minister, a friend of his, had been diagnosed.
His church’s seniors, Jones worries, are squarely in the virus’s sights — as he is too, at age 60 and with asthma. “Look at the TV,” he said, half mournful, half angry. “We are an endangered species.”
Last Sunday, for reasons that seemed all too clear, Jones titled his sermon “I’m at the end of my rope.”
‘Hoo!’
The Facebook service was one of those strange new livestream events, the kind that seem like low-budget substitutes for the world we used to know. Instead of the usual full-on gospel choir massed in the risers, about a dozen young members sang standing far apart, nowhere near touching each other when they swayed or raised their hands.
On one chorus, Jones commanded his viewers to join in: “You in the kitchen! You in the living room!”
Maybe they did.
The preacher decried President Donald Trump’s call to reopen churches now, with the virus still spreading. He didn’t contest that churches are essential — “This church has always been essential” — but argued that worshiping God doesn’t require packing together in a building.
“This church has never been closed!” he thundered to the empty pews. He quoted a friend: “If your church needs to reopen, you are going to the wrong church!”
Consider the Book of Acts, he said. God permitted the early Christian church to be persecuted, and the resulting adversity scattered the disciples. But that scattering turned out to be a good thing: While scattered, they spread the gospel further, got more of God’s work done.
“Hoo!” Jones said, feeling the Spirit.
That was true for Gethsemane Missionary Baptist too: Scattered
and under fire, it was spreading the gospel further than ever. More than 3,000 viewers watched that morning on Facebook — more than three times as many as would normally sit in the pews on a Sunday. In the comments section, amens and hallelujahs scrolled past, and people blessed God’s holy name.
‘Now it’s God time!’
Jones based his sermon on a story from II Kings, the one where a desperate widow comes to the prophet Elisha. To pay her husband’s debts, creditors were about to seize her two sons as slaves, and all she had in the world was a small jar of olive oil.
“The story of her life is the story of our lives,” Jones said, warming up. “She’s got family issues! She’s got finance issues! She’s got faith issues, and she fears for the future! She’s at the end of her rope!”
Go borrow jars from your neighbors, the prophet told the widow, as many as you can. Then close your door and pour your jar into those jars, one after another.
The widow poured and poured. Only when all the jars were full did her little jar run empty. She had enough oil to buy her sons’ freedom.
“God told me to tell you this story!” Jones said to the Facebook audience. “Somebody out there is at the end of your rope. You’ve tried everything! Now it’s God time!”
Desperate prayers — not cute now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep prayers, but anguished cries to the Almighty — are the kind that precede miracles, Jones said: The more desperate you are, the more room you leave for God to do miracles. Desperation is like empty jars. God’s grace won’t run out until the emptiness is gone.
“We serve a God who makes house calls!” he rumbled, fullthroated, full-bodied. “He won’t just show up at His house! He’ll show up at your house!”
At the end of the sermon, just like always, Jones urged people to join the church, to dial the number at the bottom of the screen and talk to him after the service. You wouldn’t think that would work on Facebook, but it does. There’s a lot of desperation out there, he said, a lot of emptiness to be filled.
Last week, during one of the strangest, most awful chapters of its history, Gethsemane added 10 new members.