Essential? Really?

While being tested for the coronavirus last week (it came back negative, I am fine), I had a series of conversations I couldn't shake:

Scheduler: What do you do for a living?
Me: I'm a pastor.
Scheduler: OK, so an essential worker.

Triage nurse: What do you do for a living?
Me: I'm a pastor.
Triage nurse: (to herself) Essential....

Nurse practitioner: What do you do for a living?
Me: I'm a pastor.
Nurse practitioner: (as she annotates the test order) Essential!

In each case, I responded to the the health care workers, the people who spend all day in masks and gloves and gowns, that I am not an essential worker. I shared that my church is not convening in person because we don't want to risk being a site of death or give the actual essential workers - those people who keep other people alive - any more work.

All of these conversations were brief, but they have stayed with me. They stayed with me because I have never lived in a world where a Christian priest is essential.

In my world until now church has been an option (and an oft-forgotten one) and worship a commodity (rather than a practice of community).

I know, of course, that my work being declared essential is part of a much larger political battle. Yet I wonder if, in their absence in the midst of so much shared pain, church and worship and their trained ritual workers might some day come to be treated as essential.

Please don't hear this as pouting about our previous lack of stature. Christianity's failure to be relevant is its own fault. You know our sins, our centuries of betraying our own gospels.

But what would the world look like if offerings of peace, prayer, teaching, feasting, healing, song, time, talent, and treasure were held dear?

Perhaps we wouldn't need so many ICU beds for the next pandemic. Perhaps we wouldn't even need so many protestors in the streets.