Changed Eyes: Pandemic, Protests, Proclamation (Joel Huffstetler) -- A Review

CHANGED EYES: Pandemic, Protests, Proclamations. By Joel W. Huffstetler. Hannacroix, NY: Apocryphile Press, 2023. Xv + 191 pages.

                When the COVID-19 Pandemic hit with full force in March of 2020, life pretty much shut down. That included life in our faith communities, which valued meeting in person as a matter of course. Nevertheless, most of us found ourselves forced to go remote. It was, at least for clergy who had been out of seminary for a while, not something we learned in seminary. Nevertheless, most of us quickly learned how to lead worship, teach bible studies, and have meetings using online formats such as Zoom, YouTube, and Facebook Live. Preaching proved doable but challenging. Standing in front of a camera, seeking to deliver a message to a community that wasn’t in the same room makes life interesting. Clergy found different ways of doing this. As for me, I preached and led worship, along with my music minister and associate minister, broadcasting live on the congregation’s Facebook page. The congregation I served was small, but I was used to people in the room, some listening intently (and yes, a person or two might fall asleep) others perhaps not. But there were people there who gave at the very least facial responses to the message. Although this wasn’t ideal, we found a way to continue worshiping together, even if at a distance. As I reflect on what took place during that period of isolation, I imagine it changed how we preached (I don’t preach especially long sermons, but I cut my sermon length in half). It also affected what we shared in those sermons since we had to address what was happening around us, if not in every sermon, at least with some regularity. Proclaiming the Gospel required no less than that.

                In the three years since the COVID pandemic broke with such devastating force, many religious leaders and preachers have written about the implications of that period. Some have gathered their sermons into collections and made them available. I began pulling together sermon manuscripts, though I never finished the collection. What I thought about doing during those months in 2020 and early 2021, Joel Huffstetler chose to do. The result is found here in his book Changed Eyes: Pandemic, Protests, Proclamation. It is a collection of sermons Huffstetler preached between March 19 and December 27, 2020.

                Joel Huffstetler is the Rector of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Cleveland, Tennessee. He has served churches in both Tennessee and North Carolina. He is also the author or editor of thirteen books, including Practical Faith and Active Love: Meditations on the Epistle of James (see my review here). In addition to the contributions of Huffstetler, Carl Holladay offered a Foreword. In that Foreword Holladay notes that “Biblical preaching is a two-way street. It relates the Bible to people but also relates people to the Bible. In times of crisis, the preacher’s task is to find biblical texts that can speak to the uneasiness and fears created by social and political turmoil, or by global pandemic of unprecedented magnitude. But the preacher must also point people to the Bible, showing how it can sustain them in times of trouble” (p. ix). That is what we find here in this collection. In addition to Holladay’s helpful Foreword, Huffstetler’s Bishop, Brian L. Cole, offers an introduction, acknowledging the helpful words to be found in the collection.

                Since the Pandemic broke into our lives as Lent was underway, the sermons in this collection begin in Lent and continue until the Sunday after Christmas. Thus, we walk with Huffstetler as he and the congregation observe Good Friday, Easter, Pentecost, and other important feast days. 

                For the most part, the sermons in this collection follow the Revised Common Lectionary. While they may address the Pandemic at times that is not the only theme or even the dominant one present in the collection. It is interesting that the first message in the collection—preached on a Thursday during Lent in March 2020—draws from John 4 (Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well) and addresses the "loss of the art of conversation" in the age of technology. He points to the Samaritan woman as a model of conversation. The sermon addresses the challenges posed to conversation by technology. Interestingly enough, this sermon, which addresses the challenge of technology to human conversation and preached at the beginning of a Pandemic, doesn’t say anything about the value this resource presents, a resource that so many of us turned to in order to communicate with one another. The following message, preached just days later on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, a sermon that drew on the reading from John 9, addresses the emerging pandemic. Here he asks why the outbreak had occurred. But, as he asks that question, he also acknowledges the instructions being given by authorities: First, wash your hands, and secondly practice social distancing. At that moment handwashing and social distancing were the only things we had at our disposal. Only later did the authorities tell us to start masking. In the meantime, we would have to figure out how to gather online and accept the fact that the Pandemic might last a while. Of course, he was right about that.

                As we walk through the church year, moving toward and through Christmas, attending to readings from Scripture that speak to all manner of beliefs and concerns, whether COVID is directly addressed, it's always there, its presence affecting the way the church experienced life together. Of course, COVID was not the only concern we had during those months. In June we faced the reality of the murder of George Floyd and Armaud Arbery, which led to protests. Of these protests, at that moment, Huffstetler declares that these deaths cry out “against complacency, a crying out against emotional disconnection from the suffering. And in the moment that is now, this crying out must be heard by all. The compassion which Jesus calls us is characterized by both gut level emotion and appropriate, ‘connected’ action” (p. 71). The final sermon in the collection, the sermon preached the Sunday after Christmas, draws on John’s Prologue. He titled it: “It Makes a Difference What You Believe.” In that sermon, he notes that the previous Sunday morning, while on British television, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, let the viewers know that “Christmas isn’t canceled. Adjustments will have to be made to our celebrations. Plans and traditions will have to be altered, but Christmas isn’t canceled.” Huffstetler adds a word from John’s Gospel as a response: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (p. 167). Such was and is the case. Yes, what we believe does make a difference, especially in moments like the ones we experienced in 2020 and beyond.

                Sermon collections are intriguing because they offer us words on a page, words that were delivered live. I don't know what Joel Huffstetler sounds like and how he delivers his messages. I know that while I write out my sermons and use a manuscript, I don’t read them word for word, so I will add and subtract from the written piece. I wonder if we're missing some of the nuances and perhaps offhand comments in the sermon as delivered that reference the reality of the moment. While the collection takes us through December 2020, the pandemic itself would continue its march long after that. It would ebb and flow, forcing us to continually adjust to the moment. I retired officially on July 1 and while the COVID numbers on my last Sunday in June of 2021 in Michigan were near zero, it wasn’t long before the virus came roaring back with a new iteration. While things have quieted down, COVID is still with us more than three years later. So, I can imagine that the sermons preached by Joel Huffstetler would continue to address the impact of the Pandemic, even if it became less and less a focus of the sermons.

              I believe that books like this will serve us well as we move beyond COVID, at least the pandemic version of the virus. That’s because books like Changed Eyes might help us think through how to respond the next time a pandemic hits. I expect that such events will continue to hit us. How we respond may depend on remembering what happened the last time, that is, when the church experienced COVID. It is good to remember, as the deaths of George Floyd and others, remind us, that we often deal with more than one crisis at a time. But the preaching and the work of the church must go on. For that reason, we can find sustenance in Joel Huffstetler’s Changed Eyes: Pandemic, Protests, and Proclamations.