Hilton Head Island, SC – December 27, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 2:1-11; Luke 2:12-19
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
--Judges 21:25 (RSV)
2020 has been one of the most if not the most exasperating, bewildering, infuriating, challenging, frightening, fed-upping years any of us has ever encountered. No matter how old we might be, 2020 is what Queen Elizabeth once described as an annus horribilis, a horrible year, the worst year imaginable. She coined that term in 1992 year when it had become evident that Prince Charles and Princess Diana were not going to make it in marriage, when Price Anrew and Fergie also were headed toward divorce, when the royal family was losing favor with the British people, and when the beautiful chapel in Windsor Castle disappeared in regal flames. But for most of the rest of us, 2020 felt as bad as that horrible royal year felt for the queen.
For at least half the American population, there was more than enough internal American political turmoil to mark this as a bad year, quite apart from the plague. But we shall not enter into any of that. Instead we shall focus solely on what early on was declared to be COVID-19, an acronym which I think means something like “Novel Coronavirus Identified in the Year 2019.”
We didn’t know about COVID-19 until 2020, however. The Chinese knew about it, perhaps as early as mid-summer of last year. They did their best to keep it under wraps and to control it. Being a highly centralized autocracy, they may have largely succeeded in doing that for themselves. It escaped, however, and began to attack the rest of the world beginning in January and February, but we still did not know it. By early March we realized it had smitten us, and by the Ides of March, March 15, the whole world was beset by it everywhere.
Now, ten months after our viral invasion and incarceration, it feels like we have been in semi-lockdown perpetually. Tala Schlossberg, a writer in the Editorial Dept. of The New York Times, wrote an essay about how the good old days now seem like the bad old days when we had to do things we didn’t want to do but we were at least free to do them (12/12/20). She called her piece An Ode to the Before Times, which had as its subtitle, Also, I think I’m losing my mind.
She wrote, “Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve been yearning for a return to normal. But if you try to remember what life used to look like – when a trip to the grocery store was a chore and not an adrenalin-induced biweekly outing – it’s elusive….Sometimes it’s hard to believe we’ve always been living in unprecedented times. We strive for ‘normal’ in the future, but it never seems to exist in the present. - - - When we finally emerge on the other side of this – hopefully with our sanity loosely intact – will we come to miss this strange year too?”
There’s could be something to that, couldn’t there? As much as we hated what happened to all of us in 2020 because of the plague, at least we were all in it together. No one was spared from its disruptions and dislocations. And if, in two or three or five years from now we all conclude that Covid-19 was an astonishingly unifying factor (which it certainly is not at the moment), we may consider this to be a remarkably providential year, despite its relentless assaults on us.
In 1920, after the First World War had ended and the Spanish Flu pandemic finally died a natural death, Warren Harding launched a campaign for the presidency. It had as its slogan, “A Return to Normalcy.” (Incidentally, that word had never existed in the English language until Mr. Harding or a political publicist coined it.) When we think about it, however, what is normal? Do we ever fully recognize whatever is normal until it is no longer normal?
One thing has been certain. There was no unanimity on how to deal with the threat of the virus, at least in the United States of America. China and many other nations took centralized measures to attack the virus, but in the U.S., there was never an attempt to unify how we would combat the merciless pandemic. We do know this: From the beginning, grocery store and pharmacy workers risked their lives on a daily basis for a minimum wage, because those business establishments had to stay open. Millions of other workers took their work home with them via computers, and untold millions of them may never return to their offices, except for brief appearances. Millions of other people may have permanently lost their employment, their homes, their health, and the food on their tables. Americans have always been more “’I’ people” than “’We’ people” compared to most other people in the war against this virus. This behavior was promoted by certain politicians in the “politics of the pandemic,” because this was a presidential election year.
A little over 5% of Americans have contracted the virus, and about one-tenth of 1% have died from it. We represent only 4.3% of the world’s population, but we have had 18% of the world’s deaths from it. Americans like to think of our nation as being exceptional, and in testing positive from the virus and in dying from it, we definitely are exceptional. At some point, most Americans will be vaccinated and “herd immunity” will take over. Until then, at the rate the virus is currently spreading, thirty million Americans may soon be afflicted, and half a million may have died from COVID-19.
Two economists from the University of Notre Dame made a study of patients in nursing homes. Because the virus has kept family members and friends from visiting them, the professors concluded that many patients died, not from COVID-19, but from loneliness. Earlier this week there was a news report saying that over three million Americans will have died in 2020, making it the largest number and percentage of annual deaths ever in our country’s history. Over a tenth of those deaths were because of the virus, but others were indirect results of the virus. Isolation can be deadly for many people, but unless we are adequately isolated, there will be far more deaths. It is a classic situation in which we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
The Book of Judges in the Old Testament contains a strange history. In January I will be giving a series of four sermons about four of the Israelite judges. The word “judge” is misleading to modern people. We think of judges as people in black robes sitting on an elevated platform in a courtroom, but in modern terms these judges were actually tribal strongmen and warlords.
Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and through the forty-year Wilderness Wandering in the Sinai Desert. Joshua led the people into the Promised Land, and he organized its conquest. After him there were no leaders like Moses or Joshua; there were only informal individuals who assumed tribal control or were coaxed into trying to control the Israelites. The period of the judges lasted for about a century and a half.
The last verse of the last chapter of Judges well describes what was going on during the entire period of the judges. It says, “In those days there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). That strange, haunting, disengaging observation can either be highly comforting or greatly alarming, depending on your point of view. Libertarians, who desire the least and the weakest feasible government, praise it, and strong government politicians and citizens fear it.
In 2020, the federal government of the USA made no attempt to establish national policies for how to combat COVID-19. The battle was left entirely up to the states and municipalities to determine whatever they thought was best to try to quell the onslaught. Now that vaccines have been developed, it is also the states and municipalities which will decide who, when and how the populace will be vaccinated. “In those days there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes.” There will not be one policy followed. Instead there will be fifty policies, or five hundred, or five thousand. It is a reflection of the American Way of addressing issues.
There was an Associated Press story in the newspaper about protesters in Idaho breaking up a meeting at the Idaho State Health Department building regarding vaccination plans. The protesters did not want any such plans to be made. In addition, they went to homes of health officials, noisily demanding that orders for mask-wearing and social distancing cease.
It’s one thing to refuse to wear a mask, to stand six feet apart from everyone else, or to be vaccinated. It’s quite another to try to prevent everyone else from taking those measures. Where do such notions originate? On what valid statistics are such anti-government ideas based? In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. If governments are prevented from doing what governments exist to do, chaos ensues. And how many more thousands of people will die because millions of people are travelling over the holidays when they were warned not to do so?
“Operation Warp Speed” is one of the most significant programs initiated by President Trump in his four years in office. Scientists in other countries also have sped up their research. China, Russia, and other European nations have developed vaccines. On the basis of what epidemiologists were telling us nine months ago, we could not expect a vaccine to be available for at least eighteen months, and perhaps up to two or three years. But huge teams of scientists in many places have been working 24/7 to come up with an inoculation which could stop the spread of COVID-19 in its lethal tracks. We know that in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19, fifty to sixty million people around the world lost their lives. In the last couple of weeks, and within days of one another, several international pharmaceutical companies have come up with several different vaccines which are from 85 to 95% effective in staving off a further spread of the disease. We are told that when 75 to 85% of the world’s population receive the vaccine, herd immunity will kick in, and the days of whine and noses will be behind us.
In the meantime, though, we must all continue to be vigilant. The Chapel Without Walls will hold our services in this outdoor pavilion until we can return to The Cypress sometime in late spring or the summer. We likely have not seen our last lock-down, either as residents of Hilton Head Island or as citizens of the United States of America. The news of a new and even more rapidly spreading variety of coronavirus in the UK means the US, along with every other country, may be forced to double down on what we have already been doing poorly to try to quell the advance of the virus.
A December 8 story in USA Today said that in the three and a half weeks between November 16 and December 8, there were 25% more new COVID-19 cases in America from the numbers that had been confirmed just 25 days earlier. In other words, it took eight months to reach the number of cases which had been diagnosed up until November 16, but only 25 days to increase that number by 25%. We do not have this plague under control yet, nor shall we for several more months. That is particularly true because as an entire people we are not seriously attempting to kill it. The situation will be even worse if too many decide to follow the Judges 21:25 plan of action, or inaction, for tumultuous times. Epidemics cannot be conquered when all of us do only what is right in our own eyes.
Fortunately, not all the news in the past ten months has been bad news. There have been hundreds of stories in newspapers, magazines, and on television about extraordinary kindness offered to relatives, friends, and complete strangers by people of good will in this time of crisis. The Golden Rule has glowed brightly through the actions of people reaching out to those who are ill or hurting or without the necessities to sustain life. Some of that would have been happening anyway had there been no pandemic, as such things are always happening, but the volume of good deeds has increased exponentially because of the virus. In unusually bad times, unusually good things happen.
One of the most altruistic of actions all of us can take is to be vaccinated. You owe it to you fellow citizens as well as to yourself to do so. You may say, “But I hate shots!” You are not alone in that sentiment. Have you ever met anyone who said they love shots? “Give me a shot! Please give me a shot! In my arm, in my abdomen, in my thigh, in my eye: Bring it on!” No one likes to get injected. But for your own good, and far more importantly, for the good of the whole world, you should get vaccinated as soon as possible. Don’t put it off. When your turn comes up, carpe diem: seize the day. You will have done what you ought to do for yourself and for everyone else.
Americans are admirable and inscrutable, valorous and vilified. Because of our fiercely independent spirit and our rugged and sometimes ragged individualism, we have a higher percentage of cases and a higher death rate from COVID-19 than any other nation on earth. And since there was never any effort from the top to engender a nation-wide policy for combatting the virus, many of us felt free to do whatever we chose to do with respect to the pandemic.
What do we most need now? We need Emmanuel, a title which means God With Us. God has always been with all of us, from the time the earliest Homo sapiens emerged from their caves to the present. But in a baby born in a stable in Bethlehem, God has entered among us in a uniquely powerful and captivating way. More than two billion people see God With Us in the person of Jesus, whom we perceive to be the Messiah. In 2021 God can change us; Jesus can give us new hope.
There are lessons to be learned from the past year. Have we learned all the lessons we need to learn? And are some of these lessons larger than the pandemic itself? May God be with us as we seek to provide good answers to these challenging and difficult questions.