What I Learned during the Great 2020 Quarantine

 

Thing three: There is no “i” in community. (ok there is, just shut up and read)

The pandemic and the protests have made this frightening clear: individualism is fatal. Individuality, the amazing diversity of God’s creation, is an amazing gift that makes the world alive. Individualism, the worship of me and the denial of my responsibility, my interconnectedness, to others, is sin. And, as Paul reminded us, the wage of sin is death. When the entire population of the planet was asked to alter their behavior for the sake of others, many people said “no.” No to masks, no to avoiding large crowds, even no to reporting symptoms or cooperating with contact tracers. Millions have and will get sick and hundreds of thousands have and will die because of that. People have done and continue to do what they want, despite the expert’s warnings, and consequently they have proved the experts right. Some ignored the warnings to take precautions, some rallied against it. Politicians denied the seriousness of the pandemic and refused to lead. People were and are more worried about their economic status than about their neighbor’s well-being. People are more grieved over the displacement of a character on a box of pancake mix than public lynching of a black man by a police officer.

This is our primary spiritual problem: we have an enormous capacity to harm ourselves and each other, and we just don’t care. We think that we are good beings who occasionally do wrong. We aren’t. We are lost and broken creatures whom God by his grace uses to do good. The math is not complicated. Imagine if we had to make a full accounting of the black men, women and children have been murdered for the color of their skin – even just in our own lifetimes. A herculean task. It is possible to count the number of people who have suffered and died from CoVid-19, assuming that honest and accurate information is available. Which it isn’t. What would happen to us if we were required to confront the outcome of our works? What if we were actually held accountable for what we have done? What would we come to think of ourselves? What would we say then?

Individualism is not a victimless crime.

How do we solve it? We commit to doing community. Not merely being community - by spreading niceness and civility or sharing pious memes on social media. “Show me your faith apart from your works,” says the Epistle to James, “and I by my works will show you my faith.” (James 2:18 NRSV.) These words are not intended that we should boast in our choices or seek refuge in pride as if this was somehow still about us. It is the clarion call to have faith beyond the time we are sitting in the pew on Sunday morning. The gospel calls us to embody Christ in the world, not that we might earn salvation, but that we might fulfill his calling to make grace genuine, tangible, true.

Jesus told his followers that their discipleship would be visible in the love they brought into the world, in acts that would be even greater than his own. Here is the heart of discipleship: following Jesus is a life and not merely a lifestyle, living out faith is a daily hope-filled struggle to serve others as we have been served ourselves. We fulfill our purpose by acts that create the shared moments and gifts that fully bind us together as community. Faith is our identity because it breaks the bondage of free will and relocates our life into the Kingdom of God, where we all do life together as one body of Christ in the world.

The challenge of discipleship is to find the place where that Kingdom impacts this world. Too much of religion is focused on anticipation of a world to come and in neglect of the world that actually exists. That is how religion kills faith. We are so invested in earning our place in the afterlife we that we make no investment in the life we have been given, in the neighbor who’s needs confront us daily, in the difference we could make with even the slightest effort. Some say the bible is an acronym for “Basic Instruction Before You Leave Earth.” God’s word is a lesson on how we should live while we are still here.

The selling out of the church to worldly powers is the mechanism of this failure, and it’s not the first time this has happened either. Throughout history the church has sought to align itself with worldly authorities in order to advance its own agenda, becoming a tool of the status quo, preaching a gospel of not causing too much trouble for those authorities even when (as especially when) trouble was needed. When the faithful are practicing a moralistic, self-serving piety they are not practicing the acts of Jesus, the works that enact justice in the way of the Kingdom of God. And the troubles of this day are a testament to the lack of discipleship in the world.

Luckily, God knows when to send his prophets. If only we could listen before we got so far down the wrong path. Jeremiah came to Judah on the eve of its collapse and conquest. Two-and-a-half millennia later those words still ring true:

For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever. (Jeremiah 7:5-7 NRSV)

In the way that prophets speak, Jeremiah’s words challenge God’s people to surrender their comfortable piety and live out their faith in ways that impact the world in the lives of the people around them. The people whose lives needed to be impacted. God promises to be with us in this place, not the next.

Luther was a prophet. He came to help a world and a church that had lost its mission. Medieval religion was focused on behaviors that served life after it was over, on the threat of purgatory and the potential reward of the Kingdom of Heaven. Luther strove to re-focus the work of the faithful on the here-and-now, translating the Bible and the worship liturgy into the common vernacular, bringing the teaching of faith to the dining room table, freeing people from the terrors of eternal damnation that they might live every day in the freedom of grace. And Luther did not stop there. He challenged the princes and political leaders to do things that dramatically affected daily life – building public schools, regulating commerce, providing for the public welfare. Their voices call to us now across the ages.

The catastrophes of 2020 are an opportunity to recover the blessing of doing community.

Can we find the way?

Let us pray that we can. We must prioritize community in our world, we must keep it and honor it as the ultimate good by naming the sin of individualism wherever we find it and encouraging, exhorting, challenging, even demanding more from ourselves and our neighbors. Dare we hold such high expectations? Is it possible to require community? Can morality be legislated? Well, God seems to think so. And whether we call it commandment or instruction, covenant or law, its effect is the same. There is a right way to be, a better way to live, a brighter path to walk. We cannot take for ourselves the label “pro-life” until we demonstrate in word and deed that the “life” we are “for” is the life of those others with whom we share community. As our life was given to us by another, so we are made to give life back to others. We do not exist outside of community. This is the great lesson of faith. This is the great lesson we must embody in the world right now.