“Social distancing” and “flattening the curve” has rocked our world, hasn’t it? I’m no prophet nor the son of a prophet, but the fallout is likely to be much more severe than a cancelled spring break trip to a favorite Florida theme park or no state title games. In our church are those who have already lost their jobs and more who are fearful of how COVID-19 will fundamentally change life as they now know it. As I preached on Sunday, we are not fatalists; we are providentialists. We hope in the Lord.
We’ve lived with communally transmitted diseases all our lives. Remember chickenpox? I contracted chickenpox as a kid, maybe you did too. To relieve the itching my mom coated me with calamine lotion, and I stayed home from school for more than a week. That was 1971. The chickenpox vaccine became available in the United States in 1995. Prior to then, the CDC reports, “in the early 1990s, an average of 4 million people got chickenpox, 10,500 to 13,000 were hospitalized, and 100 to 150 died each year.” But that didn’t stop some parents from doing the unthinkable.
Believe it or not, some moms intentionally exposed their littles to another child who was contagious. For some parents the thinking was, “Let’s get this over with and manage it in a time and way that minimizes the consequences.” If a child contracted chickenpox before school age, she wouldn’t have to miss school and in many cases, the symptoms were less severe. Other parents practiced social-distancing while more practiced self-quarantine.
Chickenpox and the coronavirus are not the same thing, so please do not conclude I’m headed that direction. By all accounts, the virus for COVID-19 is far more serious than the virus for chickenpox.
In the Bible the general name given for a communally transmitted disease was leprosy. In some cases, the disease was deadly while in other cases it was a mild irritation. In all cases leprosy carried significant consequences including social distancing, self-quarantine, mandatory isolation, and loss of the joy of corporate worship.
The gospels record a number of occasions where Jesus interacted with a leper. As you navigate the reality of the coronavirus, you can decide for yourself if there is something pragmatic you should learn from Jesus’s interaction with a diseased person. I just want to express how much Jesus loves us.
In Mark 1 Jesus meets a man with leprosy. Mark records the man came on his knees to Jesus, begging Jesus to heal him. Jesus, of course, heals him by the authority of his word, “‘Be made clean.’ Immediately the leprosy left him (1:41-42)”
Between the begging and the healing Mark informs us that Jesus, “Moved with compassion…reached out his hand and touched him.” I wonder, When was the last time that man had been touched by another human being? When was the last time he felt the love of another as flesh pressed against flesh? And I see in our Lord that he knows nothing of social distancing.
John writes about Jesus, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” There is no reason for him to live with us, and there is every reason for him not to come to us. Our sin makes us filthy, diseased, corrupt, vile, repulsive, odorous, and abhorrent. And yet, he comes to us. He becomes one of us. He lives among us, and then he dies for us. And soon he will take us to be with him. Some of us he will take to himself via COVID-19. Others will come to him from old age, congestive heart failure, a stroke, a car accident, or a still birth. But go to him we will because he first came to us.
Jesus loves you, Christian. He has not distanced himself from you in the past. He is not distancing himself from you in the present, and he will not distance himself from you in the future.
None of us knows what is going to happen to our churches, our jobs, our schools, our health, our finances, or our futures. And, yeah, it's more than a little scary and more than a little disruptive to our lives. But we are Christians, and we are loved by Jesus. And we know that whether we live or we die, we are the Lord's.
May you rest in Christ in the crazy times.
As always I welcome your feedback and any suggestions you might have for an upcoming Lunchtime Musing.
Mike VerWay
Pastor for Preaching & Vision