Easter 2020, picture by Chris Cos
None of us need a prophet to tell us this
is going to be known as the year of the COVID-19 virus: a year unlike any in
recent memory. But I think what’s going to be unique about it is not the
pandemic quality of it. No, I think what is ultimately going to stand out and
be highlighted as people look back on this year is the concentrated effort of
international cooperation to control, avoid, and conquer this disorder. This is
a pan-global compliance we’ve seen all too rarely, if ever on this scale.
Why do I focus here and not on the disease
itself? Because in my past I’ve lived through several global epidemics, some of
them as ravaging as this deadly virus. In fact, right before I was born, my
sister, as a small child, nearly died in the Scarlet Fever epidemic.
I arrived a healthy little infant. Then
the measles pandemic hit when I was 3 and nearly took my life as it killed so
many other children. I emerged with a shaken auto-immune system which didn’t
know when to stop attacking the measles. So, I was ever after beset with a
variety of residual auto-immune diseases right up until today – my body
attacking an illness now long gone. In my youth, it settled on attacking my
skin and my lungs. So many nights I could not lie down but slept sitting up,
wheezing. No inhalers in those days, just a machine called a Puritron,
attempting to condition the air free of impurities, or breathing menthol under
blankets, along with other attempts to improve the air and ease the lungs – but
all of it mostly ineffective to quiet down the extreme policing activity
happening inside me. The skin attack was called eczema, a skin condition blamed
on not enough oil glands, and the lung attack was called asthma and attributed
to allergies, so, as a little child, missing school a lot, I wheezed and scratched
and read a lot of books. I also stopped growing for several years because of
the worthless diets the doctor put me on for a myriad of probably mythical
“allergies.”
But the really terrifying pandemic in
those days was Poliomyelitis, a devastating, highly infectious disease that
attacked the central nervous system and particularly the spinal cord mainly of
children and young adults, leaving those it did not kill maimed for life with
twisted limbs or worse, paralyzed in an iron lung, a machine where only the
head of the victim was exposed for 23 of 24 hours each day. Life Magazine
would run pictures of children in iron lungs and all us tots were filled with
morbid dread. I, the little kid for weeks on end unable to leave the house and in
contact with no one but my family, was spared that horror.
Eventually, with God’s grace, like
everything else, it passed. I think the main thing that happened is that God’s
beneficence gave the intelligence and the grace and the tools to spare us so
that Jonas Salk and his colleagues could produce a working vaccine to protect
us and the generations that have come since, to our lasting gratitude.
Finally, in my case, my mom and the doctor
in a classic miscommunication managed to pock-mark my face from a Chicken Pox
epidemic, after which my folks stopped taking me to seek his medical help for
several years. I just waited it out. The asthma lessened with age. The pock
marks faded away slowly over the decades. The eczema I still have and a short
bout of skin lupus a few years ago reminded me my immune system is still on the
alert to attack me in lieu of the absent measles whenever I appear to it to be
sick.
Today, every one of these diseases that
plagued the children of my era now has a vaccine to protect our youth and a
concentrated effort is being made around the world to do the same for all of us
with COVID-19. My bio-tech employed neighbor tells me (from a social distance)
that doctors, studying the genome of this protein virus, have identified to
which proteins in our body it is attracted, and, at this writing, are already
trying extant medicines to see if they can kill it.
But dealing with the onset of this disease
is only the first step. Coronavirus is thought to damage lungs permanently and may
leave behind Chronic lung disease and other conditions. One who contracts it
may always have to live on the alert.
In my case, such a residual problem kicked
in decades later when Crohn’s disease, a late chronic auto immune reaction, set
in to my body during a tough ministry I was doing in 1972 in Philadelphia – in a
neighborhood, frightened not from plague this time, but a different kind of
pandemic: prejudice.
I had just graduated from Princeton
Theological Seminary, had a shoe-string job as a college chaplain lined up,
where I would be earning a mere $350 a month upcoming in the fall, and I wanted
to get married. The Presbytery of Philadelphia had summer internships for $300
a month, $900 for the summer, and I figured: Wow. I can get a little more
seasoning in ministry and earn a nest egg so Aίda and I could have a little
starting boost, since she was still finishing her degree in the summer and
would have to look for a call when she finished.
That was the summer that really changed my
life.
I had done tough ministries before. Two
summers earlier I had worked next to the burned-out streets of Newark, trying
to help a church relate to the neighborhood after riots tore up the city and
left everyone in shock. Mainly, we went door to door to the houses still
standing, recruiting little kids for a daily vacation Bible school program.
That was our in and the way we could meet their parents. One night we went
bowling with some faithful young black men from the church and on the way drove
into the immediate results of a knife fight with a stabbing victim staggering
out of a house and falling down before us in the middle of the street. We piled
out of the van, threw the victim into the back, started running through red lights,
blowing the horn, picked up a police cruiser, who simply pulled alongside and
asked, “What’s up?” and then provided us an escort, leading us to the nearest
hospital. All the while we were doing this kind of street work, the pastor was
hiding in the locked manse, keeping the window shades all at the same level as
a witness to the neighborhood of neatness next to godliness. Seriously!
Sadly, after we finished and handed the
ministry over to him, the pastor continued to hide in his house and did not
follow up with these children and their parents.
But the Newark ministry turned out to be
nothing in terms of trouble compared to what I experienced in Philadelphia in
the summer of 1972. I had gone to school at Conwell School of Theology at Broad
Street and Girard Avenue in Philadelphia and lived just off Girard in a
peaceful neighborhood near the art museum just over Center City in the lower
reaches of North Philly and it was a wonderful experience. I loved Philadelphia
and looked forward to returning to this art-filled city. But the neighborhood
the presbytery put me in was another matter entirely. It was a beautiful area
of West Philadelphia that had been traumatized by a gang calling itself “The
Breed,” holed up directly across the street from the church where I was
assigned. A month before, we soon learned, the gang had stomped a teenager to
death, so some were in jail and some momentarily lying low.
Nobody in that neighborhood was out on the
empty streets. Everybody was hiding in their houses. A little like today, only
more so, and as it turned out, for an even more endemic reason than a renegade
gang.
I was hired to co-lead a team of college
kids to visit the neighborhood, but only one of them showed up and he had no
interest in visiting the neighborhood, being convinced the world was ending
shortly and so he was off to Campus Crusade’s EXPLO ’72 (where, in retrospect,
I wish I had gone…) As for the rest of the “team,” apparently, the parents
would not allow them to participate because of fear. Only my co-leader, a young
Messianic Jewish student named Herb from Westminster Seminary, came. He and I
were assigned the work of the entire team, as the new pastor of the church,
freshly retired from the military chaplaincy, heaped the whole job of the whole
team on the two of us.
He snapped out the plan to us: The
problem? Racial estrangement. The solution: Step 1: go block to block, house to
house and interview the neighbors. Step 2: Find a home in the center of each
block willing to hold a meeting. Step 3: Bring the neighbors together. Step 4: Mobilize
the block to solve some social problem (his example, garbage wasn’t being
picked up; we contact the city and fix it). Step 5: Once we’ve solved the
problem, turn the meeting into a Bible study. Step 6: Lead everybody to the
Lord. Step 7: get them into his church. That was the plan.
Well, okay. I’d done door to door already
in Newark and I knew one thing clearly. Nobody was going to open up a door to
two young empty-handed guys with nothing concrete to offer. So, we filched a
bunch of camp scholarships forms off the church information table and used
those as our lead-in, offering the parents free camp trips for their children.
The pastor, noticing the announcements were depleting, was furious when he
found out we were spreading them around to all and sundry, growling those were
only for church children, but the damage was done.
As a result, people welcomed us in their
homes, thinking it was a wonderful thing the church was doing for them. Here’s
what we found:
1.On one end of the block, the whites told
us: this used to be such a nice neighborhood, but, since these blacks moved in
from Center City, we’re afraid to let our children out.
2) On the other end of the block, the new
black neighbors told us: We saved up our money and moved out here to West
Philly for our children’s safety. But the way these whites glare at us, we’re
afraid for our children’s safety. We can’t let them out in the neighborhood,
but we can’t afford to move again.
3)So, the two of us would say: We were
just down the street talking to your neighbors, and they’re afraid too. If we
could find a place on the block where you could meet your neighbors and talk
this over, would you come? Everyone said yes. And, on our 1st block,
the one the church was on, in the center of the block, we found a young black
professional who had refurbished his home with a sunken living room with plenty
of space. He loved our idea and offered us his beautifully designed house as a
meeting place.
4)Next, we came across a home that had had
a Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Bible Study. The JWs had become too terrified to come
back and the people were disappointed, so we offered to take over the Bible
study and teach them accurately. The family was delighted.
We couldn’t wait until that night to tell
the pastor. He was not enthused. “You’ve got to stick to the plan,” he grumbled
at us. Oh, oh. We had skipped steps 3 and 4.
Well, I never saw the end of that
ministry. I was done in by the complications: 1)The church had been giving me
$6 a week for food, but when the pastor learned about the $300 a month from the
presbytery, he cut out my 6 bucks. He had other expenses more important than
feeding his workers. I was hungry.
2) The pastor, who never once went out on
the street with us, had fortified the church with a hurricane fence topped with
barbed wire to protect its perimeter, its parking lot patrolled by two vicious
guard dogs. Maybe he didn’t have any money to spare because the dogs, who were busy
all day terrorizing any neighbor who dared pass by on all four sides, worked up
big appetites and ate a lot.
3) The pastor’s church office was set up like
a command post. At dawn, he would march into the Sunday school room where Herb and
I slept on cots, bark at us to wake up, get us out on the street and then let
the dogs loose until 9:00 p.m. at night. So these were at least 12 hour days of
ministry where we had to fend for ourselves because the dogs would charge us
when we approached the locked gate. I also had no key. I was stressed.
4) Each weekend I took the subways across
Philly and then the train to New Jersey, so on Saturdays I could see Aίda and
help her research a class she was creating for the YWCA on available social
programs for Hispanics. On Sundays, I was still serving as a kind of student
assistant minister at our home church in Dunellen, N.J., then back to Philly
for the week.
I was losing weight, exhausted, starting
to cough. The pastor in Philly began to stay away in case it was catching, and
poor Herb, my ministry partner, bought some Vick’s cough syrup to help my
so-called “cold.” Then I started to bleed internally. I had no idea what was
happening to me: that I had become so depleted that my immune system had been
triggered and it was on the attack once again. I called up my supervisor and
said, “Get me out of here.” I had him take me to Princeton, where Aίda found a
house-sitting friend who let me stay at an absent professor’s house. I went in
to Princeton Hospital and my life changed.
Back in Philadelphia, the pastor assigned
poor Herb the final details of the plan: invite everyone with whom we were
working to have a big day of celebration in the church parking lot. He’d lock
up the dogs for the day, open up the gates, food would be prepared by the
church people, who would meet the neighbors on their turf, and church
attendance would swell.
Of course, the kids from the church had
never joined us and the pastor had neither gone out himself nor brought any elder,
deacon, lay leader, Sunday School teacher or any church folks out on the street
with us to meet these neighbors. Instead, he blanketed the congregation with
announcements and fliers. As I’ve matured, I realize I should have urged the
pastor to come out with us, but our communication was unilaterally
hierarchical. Our job was to report our progress. We were not encouraged to
dialogue with him.
Herb reported to me later that on the big
day few if anybody from the church showed up. The leaders from the neighborhood
were furious and soon stormed out of the empty parking lot. Shortly afterwards,
the pastor left the church and the pastoral ministry. The church was left more
estranged from its neighbors and worse off than it had been before.
What happened? I realized that this was a
ministry done without love. At its heart, neither the pastor nor the church
really cared about the neighborhood. Instead, everyone – black neighbors, white
neighbors, pastor, and parishioners (many of whom had moved from the neighborhood
and now drove in from the outside) – were all in terror.
*But 1 John 4:18 assures us: Perfect love
casts out fear. Clearly, in this case, perfect love had not been allowed to
cast out fear.
Thinking about all this, I’ve come to realize
that Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13 lays the foundational
basis of all ministry. Everything we do in the name of the Lord has to be
motivated and done with love. These ministries failed to propagate because love
was cast out by fear. All the plans and strategies of all the experts in church
growth are worthless if they are not fueled by love. That car won’t move. Lack
of love is a terminal illness. A disease like COVID-19 can damage and kill the
body, but a malady like lack of love can still the soul and kill the spirit.
What should we all have done? Before we
ever stepped out in the neighborhood, we should have brought together the
elders and deacons and active lay leaders of the church and done a week or at
least a retreat of prayer-soaked Bible study on 1 Corinthians 13, backed up by
sermons and plans for all-church forays to spread that spirit of God’s love
into the neighborhood. And then we should have gone out together, pastor,
people, and us workers.
What should we have studied with them? 1
Corinthians 13. So, if you have your Bible handy, you might want to turn to 1
Corinthians 13, starting with verse 1. I will give you Aida’s and my literal translation from the
original Greek and you can compare it with the translation you have in your
Bible:
1)“If in the tongues of humans I speak
and of angels, but love I do not have, I have become a ringing bronze gong, or a
cymbal clashing” (this last is an onomatopoeic word where the sound is like
the referent: kum-ba-lon!) THIS MEANS:
Mellifluous communicators who
have the gift of gab or can speak beautifully like angels but have no love are
just a loud noise that communicates nothing.
2)“And, if I have prophecy and I know
all mysteries, and say all knowledge and, if I have all faith, so as to remove
mountains, but love I do not have, nothing I am.” THIS MEANS:
If I have discovered secret
knowledge, the inside word that I claim I’m getting directly from the BOSS [and
we don’t mean Bruce Springsteen], but there’s no love behind it, even if I can
cause a big sensation, I am zero – ¡nada!
3)“And, if I will give away all the
things belonging to me and if I might hand over [or deliver] my body in order
that I might boast, but love I do not have, I myself benefit nothing.” IN
OTHER WORDS:
If I am generous to a fault,
even starving myself (like a guy we had at Pilgrim Church years ago who used to
“fast” until our minister of evangelism, the Rev. Paul Bricker, put him in the
hospital because he was starving himself to the point of danger in the name of
piety), no action that is not truly love-driven, no matter how pious we think
it makes us look, is anything other than a fault.
Okay, we’re baffled. If all these
impressive pious actions are not an end in themselves and are not
love-motivated, then what is love???
Paul must have been anticipating this
response, for now he gives us a description: love is known by its actions.
4) “Love is long-suffering, love is
kind, not jealous, not boastful, not puffed up [or proud],” THIS MEANS:
Love is not controlling like the
obsessive husband who put a tracer on his wife’s cell phone to check every
place she went and then grilled her on all her whereabouts until she fled to
the safety of our police department’s chief dispatcher’s home. Love also does
not boast about its accomplishments. As Proverbs 25:27 warns, eating too much
honey is bad, as is going around all the time promoting all the good things
we’ve done. Instead, we should be sharing promotion as Paul explained in the
previous chapter, 1 Corinthians 12: 26, rejoicing together whenever any of us
is honored (see also Prov. 27:2).
5) “Not behaving disgracefully [or
dishonorably], not seeking its own, not irritable, does not count up evil.”
Disgraceful is the notorious
report of church people away at conferences, punching up porn movies in their
hotel rooms, scandalizing the staff who prepare their bills and see those
charges on them. Or the megachurch assistant pastor who was recently charged by
victimized women, encouraged by the Me Too Movement, with decades of assaulting
them wherever the church had not installed a security camera. Seven evangelical
church leaders we have known in our area here have fallen into sexual sin: six
had affairs and one was arrested as a peeping Tom! How the 3 parts of this
verse fit together is that they are all about self-centeredness, all about me
and what I want: So what ends up in using people includes being irritated when
we don’t get our way, which is a way of controlling others, keeping a mental
record of perceived slights so we can pay them back, and other such failings that
end in fertilizing the root of bitterness we are not supposed to cultivate according
to Hebrews 12:15.
Being me-centered in a
different way, I think, is also why both these specific Newark and Philadelphia
ministries I mentioned failed to flourish after we workers handed them over,
when other ministries we established and handed on have continued to thrive.
Both pastors and churches had become consumed by their own fears. In Philly the
pastor had put his own plan in front of the prompting of the Holy Spirit and
the desires of the neighborhood. He wanted their bodies in church. They wanted
Bible Study, which he could have led, and bonding up with Christian people, not
just rote church attendance. Also, they didn’t need help with garbage
collection. The neighborhood was neat and clean (except, of course, for the dog
droppings in the church parking lot).
6) “[Love] does not rejoice upon unrighteousness
but rejoices with the truth.”
As you’ve no doubt heard,
righteousness and justice are the same word in Greek. Justice is brought about
by truth. Love loves righteousness. And love loves truth. It hates seeing people
victimized and it hates when abuse is simply covered up.
7) “Everything [love] overcomes,
everything it believes, everything it hopes, everything it endures [it
perseveres].”
You see, love is in
relationships for the long run. This means it puts up with a lot of stuff,
persevering for a higher reason. It is working for transformation and
reconciliation with enduring faith and hope.
8) “Love never falls [or fails], but
whether gifts of prophecy, they will be wiped out, if tongues, they will cease themselves,
if knowledge, it will be wiped out.”
In the eschaton, that is, at
the end of time, all these means of information and all our speculations will
be ended. We will be with the source of all knowledge. We won’t need revelation
or a special prayer language: we will know. Why? Because of God’s enduring
love.
9) “For from a part we know and from a
part we prophesy.”
Because our knowledge is limited,
we are only on a need-to-know basis. Then we won’t need to know. We will know!
10) “But when perfection may come, what
is from [or out of] the part, will be wiped out.”
As perfect love wipes out
fear, perfect love will wipe away partial knowledge. In heaven we will be
mature in our knowledge.
11) “When I was an infant, I spoke as
an infant, I thought as an infant, I reasoned as an infant. When I became a
man, I have wiped out the things of an infant.”
Now Paul gives an example
from his own maturing. I’ll cite one of my mom’s favorite memories from my
sister’s early childhood. My precious compassionate little sister had heard the
fire trucks and was told they were “firemen” and she was scandalized: “those
mean old firemen,” she complained, “going around making fires and burning
everything up!” So, she was given a big picture book about fire fighters so her
thinking could mature. I inherited that book and learned early to have a high
regard for fire fighters. As we mature, this kind of compassion should be permeating
all our developing thought. The mature Christian emphasizes loving. Ultimately,
only love not reason will take us to God. Our connection to Jesus is not simply
through knowledge; it is God’s compassionate love that gives us true knowledge
of salvation and helps us mature in wisdom.
12) “For we see now through a mirror in
a riddle [or enigma], but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I
will know for myself [or clearly], just as also I was known” [that being a
past tense].
Ancient mirrors were
polished bronze. You could see your reflection in color, but it was vague –
like a riddle or an enigma. But, when we are perfected, we will know clearly,
as God has always known us exactly. So, this passage is comforting. We don’t
know all the answers. We’re still infants in our knowledge. But God knows
everything about us and still loves us and helps us mature. That maturing is
called sanctification.
13) “But now remains faith, hope, love,
these three, but the greatest of these is love.”
Now we believe, and we hope,
and we love and the last is the greatest. When we see God face to face, we
won’t need faith, only obedience and gratitude. And we won’t need hope, we will
have complete assurance. But we will always have love, because we will be
eternally in a perfect relationship of love with God and each other.
So, what can we learn from all this?
Right now, we’re locked down. We can’t do
too much. But we can do something by telephone, and letter, and email, and Linked-in,
and phone, and Zoom meetings (if you have it), and Facebook (if you can brave
the harvesting), and shouted conversations (at a social distance) with
neighbors.
From our store-front Beverly, MA Pilgrim church,[1] every week Pastor Valerie’s
been in touch by email and for several weeks a different elder has called us:
Catherine, Genny, Joe. The Hamilton, MA contingent, Christine and Aίda and I
have been getting together in our face masks for Bible Study. Elaine, a deacon,
and several other Pilgrim people have sent out messages of encouragement to all
of us. We have personally received Easter cards and Chris and Aίda and I have sent
out Easter cards to our “shut-ins.” Pastor Bob keeps the Sunday service up and
working on Zoom and the Sunday School and a small group and a weekly prayer
meeting are on line. And we all have been praying regularly for each other.
This kind of fellowship is one manner in which God’s love spreads. All these
are simple ways we can be loving in lockdown mode (especially if we have
physical conditions that pit us at higher risk so we have to stay mainly
indoors). We can still be caring about each other and encouraging each other to
persevere, and holding each other up in prayer, as well as praying for the
safety of all those we know in the medical field who are working in different
ways to halt the virus for all of us.
So, here are my words of encouragement:
let’s hang in there together, sharing and holding on to God’s love, which is
the only thing that is truly enduring. It is finally our central message and
the only thing on which any of us can absolutely rely.
Bill
