Hilton Head Island, SC – January 2, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
RR – Psalm 91:1-8; Jeremiah 14:11-17; Amos 4:9-13
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – The Lord said to me, “Do not pray for the welfare of this people. Though they fast, I will not hear their cry, and though they offer burnt offering and cereal offering, I will not accept them; but I will consume them by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence.” – Jeremiah 14:11-12 (RSV)
We begin 2022 as we began 2021. A pandemic is raging all over the world, but a new variant, Omicron, is rapidly spreading. For people who have received both vaccinations and the booster, it does not produce serious illness. But for those who refused to be vaccinated, it can be lethal.
Public health officials have tried to respond gently to anti-vaxxers, not wanting further to offend to their sensibilities. That is understandable, but it may have been a major mistake. The former president and a host of anti-government-mandate social-media-misinformation producers have led millions of Americans to avoid being vaccinated. This has resulted in the USA having the second-highest death rate from the virus, after India. But India has four times the population we have. Our national battle against the virus is deplorable, not because the nation has failed, but because so many citizens have selfishly refused to protect themselves from becoming carriers.
China has succeeded far better than any other developed nation in combatting the disease. But it took the heavy-handed machinations of Xi Jinping, the world’s most dangerous autocrat, who ordered everyone in China to be vaccinated soon after COVID appeared there in November of 2019. No one dared to ignore the man who gave them “an offer they can’t refuse.”
The rapid rise of anti-government sentiment since 2016 had resulted in a situation America has never faced before. Up until COVID, everybody, both adults and children, were vaccinated to ward off whatever communicable diseases came along that threatened the body politic. Seventy-five years ago I distinctly remember those who were afflicted with any highly communicable diseases were quarantined with signs on their doors, and they readily accepted their isolation. Now people feel free to do whatever they choose to do, with little or no regard for the wellbeing of everyone else. Exercising “personal choice” is no way to fight a pandemic.
In biblical times, pestilences were considered to be the judgment of God against a rebellious people who rejected the mandates of God. We saw instances of that in our responsive reading for today and in the readings from Jeremiah and Amos. Back then, nearly every calamity that happened was thought to illustrate the wrath of God.
Now it seems inconceivable that pandemics have anything to do with God’s will. God created the universe, and with it He also created a natural order. Nature clearly manifests God in certain respects, especially in the productivity of the planet on which we live. But in other respects nature is free to do whatever it does without God controlling the process. Thus it is that periodically various kinds of epidemics sweep over the earth. Viruses do not possess a will. They do whatever they do with no purpose in mind, because they have no minds. Many scientists claim they aren’t even alive. As we have discovered with COVID, it has reproduced itself in many variations. A few months ago I read an article which listed about three-quarters of the letters in the Greek alphabet, each letter describing outbreaks of particular kinds of COVID here and there all over the globe. This may be the most versatile plague that has ever assaulted the world, but it has nothing to do with the wrath of God. Rather it is nature’s utter apathy which has unleashed this deadly grip on millions of people, while far more millions have survived their infections, but at incalculable medical and personal cost.
On April 9 USA Today told of a 104-year-old Columbian woman who survived two bouts of COVID in one year. It also reported a 109-year-old who recovered just before her 110th birthday. Then it told of another 109-year-old woman who beat COVID in late 2020, having defeated Spanish flu a century earlier. There is no explanation for such astonishing recoveries, or for the appalling incidence of COVID in the first place.
Decades ago the TV comedy show Laugh In often referred to “the fickle finger of fate.” Anyone who tries to explain every factor behind COVID with a rational explanation is bound to be severely disappointed. Ten thousand Anthony Faucis will never dispel all the frightened questions we have about this insidious illness. On the other hand, we cannot let it determine life for the rest of our lives. Nevertheless that is what, at the current time, it seems to be doing. Without being aware of it, we have become victims of COVIDTERROR, even if the virus might never actually afflict us. Life as we knew it pre-COVID has changed into something entirely different, and we need to try to figure out how to live with COVID without being socially and psychologically paralyzed by it. But we are nowhere close to that yet. The world population has allowed itself to feel permanently victimized by this remorseless disease.
We have become accustomed to masks, reclusive living, avoidance of sizeable groups of people, and assuming that obsessive-compulsive behavior is necessary for survival. People are leaving cities in droves, millions are working online, and yet few seem to realize that society as it has been understood for at least five thousand years is unravelling.
The survival of every religion, including Christianity, is being seriously tested by the plague.
If the world’s reaction to COVID continues as it has for several more years, a quarter to half of the adherents of all religions may have vanished, not because they died, although many will have died, but because they gave up the group involvement without which religion cannot thrive. To state it in churchy terms, too few people in too many places have become too fearful to attend corporate worship, because they are terrified of what it may do to their own personal corpus.
A few months ago David Leininger and I were talking about the effects of COVID on the Church, meaning not The Chapel Without Walls, but the worldwide Church of Jesus Christ. As you know, David is the minister I turn to for leading services when I am out of town. I was predicting that thousands of American congregations of a hundred members or less may cease to exist because the plague will have eroded their financial ability to continue. I would say parenthetically that there will also be hundreds of churches with five hundred to a thousand or more members that also will fail, and for the same reason. David made a statement that I wrote down, knowing that at some point I was going to preach this sermon. He said, “COVID represents ecclesiastical Darwinism for Christianity.”
What a sagacious observation! “COVID represents ecclesiastical Darwinism for Christianity.” We are now in a mode of congregational survival of the fittest. The churches where a sufficient number of people will brave attending church will weather the plague, and those where too many stay away for too long will perish, because they will have given up the habit of attending worship.
There was an excellent article in Christian Century about the effects of the pandemic. It was written by a woman named Carrie Graham, who is the founder and pastor of something called The Church Lab in Austin, Texas. The title was Meaningful risks, and the subtitle was The challenges of ministry during crisis. She noted that church growth heavily depends on convincing visitors to churches to join, but almost no one is visiting any church with viruses fitfully flitting around. She said, “The prospect of attracting non-churchgoers to become regular tithing members disappeared almost entirely. So too the notion of being creatively ‘invitational’ grew dim in a world where church buildings could no longer stand in for being church.” (April 21,2021, p. 34)
COVID is affecting individuals as well as organizations and institutions. USA Today reported a study made by the peer-reviewed journal called The Lancet Psychiatry. They inspected 230,000 health records of people who had contracted COVID. Afterward, 13% of these patients had their first diagnosis of an obvious psychiatric disorder, 17% were diagnosed with anxiety, and 14% were found to have unhealthy mood swings. All of this is contributing to the growing social malaise the world is experiencing because of the pandemic. It isn’t just the virus that is making us sick. It is also our feeling of helplessness that is adding to our societal sickness.
Brian Bantum is a professor of theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. He wrote an essay called A Psalm of unknowing, in which he compared the world’s current situation with the onslaught of COVID to some of the Psalms of lament in the Bible. He said, “It feels a bit like we are in the first part of a psalm, where the narrator laments and cries out to God, against God, for God. We sing and sing, waiting for that but that turns the reader back to God, reminding us of what God has done, of what God’s presence might be. Deep down I know this. I know that we are not the only people to live in a moment when the world feels like it’s hurtling toward something terrible.” Christian Century, Oct. 6, 2021, p. 37)
There are two major factors that are impeding a much more rapid recovery from the COVID crisis. The first is the millions of people in the developed world who have refused to be vaccinated, and millions of others in the underdeveloped world have no access to vaccines, because their nations cannot produce them and because we have not supplied nearly enough vaccines to them. The second factor is the invention of Wilbur and Orville Wright. Commercial airplanes have guaranteed that every new variant of COVID that mutates is carried by many people flying from country to country, carrying the newly minted varieties within themselves. Omicron is the latest type, but there will be others. Long, enclosed metal tubes, packed with people, are ideal incubators for stealthy variants to move daily around the globe. Until nearly everyone flying anywhere is vaccinated and boosted, variants will inevitably be victorious.
If a much higher percentage of the world’s population were vaccinated, herd immunity against the virus would have kicked in much sooner. But they aren’t, so it hasn’t. It would pay wealthy nations to flood poor nations with vaccines and boosters. If we did that, we would spend hundreds of billions fewer dollars caring for our own unvaccinated and vaccinated citizens in well-equipped but grossly overworked hospitals and clinics, because far fewer of us would be infected.
Amos said, “’I sent among you a pestilence after the manner of Egypt, …yet you did not return to me,’ says the Lord” (4:10). Jeremiah said that God said of the people of Judah, “I will consume them by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence” (14:11). But Psalm 91 declares of God, “He will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence” (v. 3).
In biblical times, no one knew anything about bacteria or viruses or the causes of infections. Thus they attributed all health disasters to the anger of God. They couldn’t imagine that there could be any other cause. But they also trusted that even when epidemics struck, God was somehow there, and that He would see them through the hard times to a return of the good times. God will not stop COVID. Only humanity can do that. If we can, we should.
It is very easy to lose a reasonable sense of perspective in a time such as this. I need to remind myself of that frequently, and you may need a periodic jolt as well. Thousands of epidemics have swept over every part of the world through pre-history and history. Every one of them eventually dissipated into desperately desired oblivion. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-20 took three long years to disappear. COVID also shall become a thing of the past. It may not happen in 2022, but it will happen.
Since we first began to hear of a strange new virus that originated in China in the fall of 2019, the world went from “normal,” which is always a relative term, to abnormal, which is always unique unto itself. However, if the abnormality that is now normal becomes the new normal, human life will have lost much of its meaning. To live each day in constant fear of new strains of coronavirus is no way to live. Living in seclusion is not living; it is merely existing. Living only to eat and sleep and breathe is not what life is meant to be. There’s more to life than that.
Life is a risk. Life has always been a risk. To go out the front door is risky. To drive anywhere for any reason is risky. To go to the grocery store, to go to a movie, to go to church, is to take a risk. But to take no risks is to give up on life. Life without risks is life not worth living.
Wear your mask when that is necessary. Take precautions. But live; live.
Every prophet in the Bible always held out hope, because they were prophets of God, and God is a God of hope. God will deliver us from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence.
And as with everything else that ever was, this too shall pass.