As the months have come and gone during this COVID season, many beautiful ministry stories have surfaced. Students are coming to know Jesus over Zoom, leaders are dropping off socially distant snack prizes, there are online games and connections galore. It’s amazing. 

As part of a team on a campus that entered the pandemic with no ways of contacting students, I often felt jealous of these stories. I knew my team would have been able to CRUSH online programs and connections, but there were no students.  Like a dehydrated hiker in a desert, I searched. Maybe I can find students on Instagram…maybe I can make a TikTok…maybe I can develop a new love of videogames and connect with them on Minecraft…searching to no avail. The students were facing so many struggles in their homes and but were nowhere to be found online.  I felt like a lame ministry duck, swimming in the same pond water as everyone else, yet unable to make the same thing happen.

Because we couldn’t find our kids, our volunteer team decided to study the Gospel of Mark together over Zoom.  Every week there is tension as each of us grapples with the various stressors and emotions of the pandemic while lamenting the fact that we aren’t able to connect and be with the students we’ve all come to love. 

Yesterday we studied the calling of Levi in Mark 2. In this passage, Jesus has just finished healing a paralyzed man and having his authority questioned by the religious leaders of the city and is walking alongside a lake.  He sees Levi and calls to him, “Follow me.” Immediately Levi leaves his cushy job as a tax collector where he profits from the oppression of his people and follows Jesus.  

Along the way, many other “tax collectors and sinners” follow Jesus to Levi’s house where they stop to have dinner.  The religious leaders, the Pharisees, are baffled and perplexed that Jesus would walk and eat with such people, and question his disciples, “Why does he eat with them?” 

“It’s not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.”  – Mark 2:17

“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. In the same way, I have not come for the righteous, but for the sinners”, (Mark 2:17) Jesus replies.  I believe that had the Pharisees not been so concerned about whom they were associating with, there would’ve been room for them in Levi’s house at the dinner. They could’ve sat down and asked Jesus the very same question, but with a very different tone of voice.  Instead of asking with condemnation and judgment, they would’ve asked to seek understanding, to learn his heart, which ultimately would’ve led them to the very God they were trying so desperately to serve correctly. 

This week our team sat in tension again as we each saw our own inner Pharisee staring back at us, chattering away with judgment and condemnation. Our inner Pharisees look different too, race, class, social and political views give each one a different shaped pedestal that they attempt to yell from.  

Yet Jesus longs for us to understand his heart just like he wanted the Pharisees to understand, so we must ask: What are the places in which we are so desperately trying to serve well and do faith right that we’ve become rigid?  Where does our perspective feel so firm that the foundation it rests upon is no longer able to mold and shape it?  Where have we succumbed to the idols of judgment and condemnation to pacify the powerlessness we feel at the injustice around us? 

What began as a feeble attempt to continue some semblance of ministry, pacify my own feelings of being a lame ministry duck and to serve my team well, has become a beautiful hour and a half where we dive into scripture and wrestle with deep questions like the ones above. No longer just a group of individuals that partner together to love students, our group is becoming a team of friends who are actively pursuing a deeper relationship with Jesus together.  

While each of our hearts ache to be back with students, we know that because we are spending time studying and being transformed by scripture together, we will be more equipped and ready to love students well in the fall, regardless of what it may look like.