Three Things the Current Crises Are Teaching Me
No one saw this coming. We came into 2020 thinking the main controversy would be the presidential election. And as polarized as our culture and politics are right now, that promised plenty of drama.
Then the pandemic hit, and our sensibilities about our social interactions changed overnight. We suddenly had to reconsider social conventions that had long gone unquestioned, and now everything from salad bars to public transit to handshakes must all be reimagined from the ground up.
Then, just as we were emerging from quarantine, we came to the George Floyd tipping point, and long-simmering unrest about racial injustice erupted all over the world. Our awareness of racial tension suddenly peaked, and now we’re asking ourselves questions about race and class and privilege and tradition.
There’s no question that life as we know it is changing forever. There are aspects of our daily lives from 2019 that will never be the same again. What we’re learning about both infectious disease and race relations will bring about fundamental changes in our culture.
But for my own part, I was thinking about what these tandem crises are teaching me about sin, about myself, about the way I think about the future.
1. My own sense of my well-being is not entirely reliable.
I’ve long known that the most dangerous lies I tell are the ones I tell myself, but the pandemic and our national discussion about race have driven that point home.
The pandemic has reminded me that I can deceive myself about my own health and my impact on those around me. It’s unnerving to think that even if I don’t feel sick, I could be a carrier of a contagion that could kill people close to me, people whom I love dearly. My sense of my own well-being is not a sure indicator of my status as a healthy person.
Just so, I have had to reexamine my attitudes about race and class. In what ways have I benefited from racial inequalities that I am not aware of? I’ve never thought of myself as a racist, but most racists would never use that word to describe themselves. I am, like most people, blind to most of my assumptions; have assumptions about race and class affected my ability to think clearly about myself and about people not like me?
Both the coronavirus and racism are both effects of the Fall; one infects our bodies, the other our souls. Sin has just that sort of entangling, deceiving effect in my heart, leaving me afflicted with a deadly contagion yet unable to detect that contagion.
This is why I need God’s Spirit and God’s Word and God’s people to help me see about myself what is opaque to me. I need to be engaging with and reflecting on Scripture, where God’s Spirit can use God’s Word to unmask the idolatry of my heart; and I need to be with God’s people, where a brother or sister in Christ can ask me hard questions about my attitudes and assumptions.
2. Sin has a social dimension.
We’ve all learned more about public health in these past few months. Public health is a different kind of health care.
My family doctor is concerned with my well-being; she reads charts and graphs that tell her about me and my well-being. Public health officials are concerned with the overall health of the community; they read charts and graphs that speak of the overall well-being of the community.
The pandemic has forced us all to think in terms of public health and to think more carefully about the role that the actions of individuals plays in containing the virus. Because of the possibility of spreading a deadly contagion, healthy people everywhere have been asked to refrain from behaviors that wouldn’t threaten them but could endanger others.
But some people, even some Christians, have stubbornly held on to a privatized, individualized viewpoint on questions of exposure. They’ve mimicked the popular mindset that prioritizes personal liberty over the obligation to love our neighbors.
Personal liberty might be the priority for people who don’t know Jesus. But for Christ-followers, our rights must always take a back seat to love of neighbor.
For people who follow a Savior who gave himself up to the cross for our sake, giving up our convenience for the sake of others isn’t asking much.
The sin of racial is to our culture what Covid-19 is our public health. It is a contagion that contaminates not our bodies but our social interactions.
Like most white Americans, I’m coming to grips with the way racial bigotry affects others, even if it doesn’t touch me. And I’ve had to think carefully about how the sin of racism has affected my way of life and the way others must live their lives.
It’s easy to take a family doctor approach to the sin of racism and imagine that it is only a personal matter. But the truth is that racism, like all sin, is never just about me; sin always has a social dimension.
Because sin always has a social dimension, if we want to understand the impact of sin, we need to think not only in terms of our own lives but also our families, our community, our nation.
3. Our ultimate hope lies elsewhere.
Events of the past weeks have reminded me of the old hymn, where Martin Luther meditates on the power and cunning of our enemy:
For still our ancient foe
Doth seek to work us woe;
His craft and power are great
And armed with cruel hate.
On earth is not his equal.
A survey of the headlines would suggest that our enemy is working hard to kill, steal, and destroy. And by all appearances, he seems to be succeeding. Before we were protesting about racial injustice, we were arguing how to respond to the pandemic. Now both the streets and our social media are filled with rage about both issues.
Without a worldview that looks toward Christ’s Day of Restoration, we wouldn’t have much reason to hope. Apart from the Second Coming, our options seems to fall somewhere between bleak despair at one end of the spectrum and raging fury at the other, with dark cynicism somewhere in between.
But that is a worldly, time-bound perspective, not the perspective of Christ-followers who know that every knee will someday bow to the Lord of the cosmos, Jesus Christ. We who follow Jesus know that someday, in the coming Kingdom, disease will be a thing of the past. And we know that the day of reckoning is coming, and he will weigh the actions and motives of all men and deliver the final verdict on our lives.
For now, we must take a balanced, realistic approach. Because we the whole world is broken, we can’t have confidence that our efforts will ultimately be successful; we must live with the fact that we will probably not finally succeed in eradicating either Covid-19 or racism.
Yet, even while we acknowledge the limitations of all our efforts, we must be careful about physical contact in public, we must wash our hands thoroughly, and we must work for healing and justice and reconciliation.
All the while, we put our ultimate hope not in our social distancing protocols, not in our activism or policy reforms but in the love and wisdom and power of our sovereign God, who is still working out all things according to His good pleasure.
Someday this upheaval will be behind us and we will settle into the new normal. We all look forward to the day when everyone can feel a little safer, a little more confident that we are all free from the threat of disease and harm.
In the meantime, we will do all we can to love our neighbor well, and we look forward to the Day when Jesus finally sets everything right.
Persevere.
Paul Pyle
Discipleship Pastor
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