None of us have ever had to face a pandemic before. This is new territory for everyone. They certainly don't teach you about them in seminary or discuss how to best navigate your way through one as a faith community.Which really, is quite strange when you consider plagues and pandemics have been periodic threats throughout history. It's never a question of if one will hit, but when and how hard.
That means this is also not the first time places of worship have had to suspend their worship services or shutter their sanctuaries in order to reduce the spread. Because let's face it, especially with an airborne virus, churches are the perfect super-spreader with lots of singing, hugging, shaking of hands, and spending a prolonged period of time in an enclosed space with a lot of other people. Places of worship were closed in America during the Spanish Flu. The black plague silenced the ancient streets and holy sites of Jerusalem during the fourteenth century the same way they are silenced today.
As churches by and large remain closed but face increasing peer-pressure to open back up, the debate has become about "fear vs. faith." If you're Christian, the argument goes, you should have faith and not be worried or concerned about gathering. Christians, after all, shouldn't fear death. Thus we shouldn't fear re-opening our sanctuaries.
As I've ruminated on this theology, I've found it to be lacking in a lot of ways. While no, a Christian does not necessarily fear their own death and are always willing to face death in the face of oppression, or sacrificing themselves if it means helping or saving another, we still have an obligation and responsibility to care for the vulnerable among us.
For the core message of the Christian faith is love your neighbor, and ensure that no harm comes to them. It's one thing to be willing to wade into the midst of those who are sick and contagious in order to help them and bring them either healing or comfort, and risk your own life in the process. It's quite another to be the individual who is carrying the disease and spreading it to otherwise healthy individuals.
Jesus was indeed willing to enter into the communities of the sick to offer them that healing and inclusion back into wider society. What he didn't do was walk into healthy communities and infect them all with a plague. Not once did that happen. Not once does he ask that we do that or risk that. Primarily because it flies in the face of his command to love our neighbors.
Jesus also wasn't willing to tempt God with stunts to "prove" his faith. In fact, when he was driven into the wilderness and the devil tempted him to do something stupid like throw himself off the pinnacle of the Temple just to show that God would send his angels and not allow harm to come to him in that manner, Jesus' response was "don't tempt God." The sad reality is that those pastors who claimed God would protect them, wound up falling ill and dying themselves - never mind the additional people they infected along the way.
Don't tempt God.
That's not to say that this whole having to avoid corporate worship together thing doesn't absolutely suck. Or that for some, they need the in-person worship experience to feel connected to God and we aren't to downplay the real and tangible connection people have in the midst of worship. That was, after all, precisely what it was designed for. To help us connect to the divine - and one another.
And yet, this is not the first time God's people have been forced out of their worship spaces. The ancient Israelites faced the destruction of their temple not just once, but twice. They were forced to abandon the place they believed God was present and met them, and it was devastating. Out of that, however, grew the rabbinic movement and led to the many forms of Judaism that exist today. Because as it turned out... God was not relegated to the Temple.
By no means are we undergoing the same kind of devastation and suffering. We are not being oppressed no matter what anyone tells you. Suffering a loss of connection? Absolutely. But we also know it's temporary. Theologically, however, we know that the church is not the place we gather. Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, because Christ lives within each and every one of us. And while it is true that we were not meant to live in isolation, Jesus gives us the comfort and knowledge that when as few as two people are gathered in his name - He is there with them. (And interestingly, what that "gathering" looks like is never defined.)
Trust me, in all my years as a pastor I never once contemplated a time when I would encourage people NOT to come to worship. It's the exact opposite of what a pastor typically does.
I was struck today, however, by an image of being in the wilderness. In the Bible the wilderness is a place of temptation, trial, testing and training. It’s a place where ordinary life is suspended. A place of isolation and uncertainty. It's where we find out who we are and what we're made of. It instills patience and endurance.
And yet, it is also a place to experience God. That place where God provides in the most trying of circumstances, though rarely provides in the ways we may want or desire. Yet, He still provides what we need.
Is any of this what we want? Of course not. No one goes into the wilderness without being driven there for one reason or another.
Online worship is hardly a substitute for the experience of in-person worship with our fellow Christians. But playing Russian roulette with my parishioners isn't exactly what I think God is calling us to do, either. That isn't a lack of faith on our part. In fact, our impatience with the process and trying to rush back to services and to what is comfortable and "normal" is perhaps what another pastor said was possibly "showing a shallowness in our faith." That rushing back may, in fact, do the opposite of what we want and wind up prolonging our ability to truly gather together should people fall ill and we are forced to shutter once again. Only now - without certain members of the body of Christ.
Not to mention, worship when we return will not be the worship we are all yearning for. There will be no hugging, no shaking of hands, no getting near other people, no singing, no corporate responses. It will be so sterile and distant - people aren't going to like it any more than they like the online version.
Instead, maybe this actually is a time for the church to reflect on the ways in which we can do ministry in these times. How many of us have given little thought to the people who can't come to worship normally when there isn't a pandemic?
Maybe this is a time for patient endurance. A time of waiting. As Ecclesiastes says, "to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven." Faith sometimes involves living into your season, patiently and enduringly.
