Fear
So how was your week? Everything pretty normal?
Good grief. How fast can things go from strange to bizarre.
I was talking with my dad about this Sunday and the whole Coronavirus thing, he told me that Bill and Carol and the other Carol weren’t going to come this week because they were in the age group that makes them highly vulnerable to the virus. I asked what he was gonna do. He said, “about what?” I said, “You’re 82 years old, you’re in the vulnerable demographic too.” He was like, “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about that. You think I should stay home?” Bob Hart, ladies and gentlemen. He’s not here this morning. Not going to work until this thing blows over, either. It’s called a “Coronavacation.”
But it’s a serious deal. It’s not a joke. The virus is bad news but I think our reaction to it is even worse.
One group of people seem to be scared senseless, buying enough toilet paper to clog the hole in the ozone layer. This is definitely one of the details that movies about the zombie apocalypse get wrong—because in those shows, the grocery stores still have things in stock. Dang. Have you seen how empty the shelves are? How am I supposed to sit on the roof eating cans of chocolate pudding watching the world come to an end if you people hoard all the canned goods in the first week? Talk about escalating quickly!
Then you got another group who are just annoyed at the overreaction. The mass hysteria. They feel manipulated by the fear-mongering of the media. I mean, they canceled sportsball for goodness sake! It’s a good thing this pandemic didn’t happen in the fall, right? That would have been truly tragic. This other group of people think it’s all a big hoax, a big conspiracy. They want to go around licking everyone’s hands just to make a point.
Too afraid or not afraid enough.
Most of us are somewhere in the middle. We recognize that a terrible thing is happening and we want to do what we can to not make it worse. But how are we supposed to do that? Wash our hands? Stay home for the next six months? Paint our windows white and put a blanket over our heads? Trust the CDC? Trust the medical community? Trust the government?
Trust is a hard one. Especially with the media. We have absolutely no reason to trust the people who have been lying to us about the world coming to an end in one way or another for years. Why should we trust the politicians and the experts now? They lie, and then they lie some more, and then every time, someone gets a lot richer off our fear and misery. What’s 50 billion dollars among friends, right? But just because they’re liars doesn’t mean they’re not right. Like Doug Wilson said, “At the same time, having read a book of history before, I know that the Spanish flu killed upwards of 25 million people at the beginning of the twentieth century, and that such things can and do happen. They happen even if a liar agrees that they happen.”
So, trust is hard. But trust is just another word for faith.
It’s always going to go bad for us when we put our trust, our faith, in anything other than God. When we put our trust in governments, or well-stocked grocery stores, or our fears. Or even our skeptical cynicism that it’s all just an elaborate manipulation for political purposes. Did I cover everyone there? I don’t want to leave anyone out. I want to call us all back to putting our trust in the LORD. To not let our minds wander from putting our faith in Him.
C.S. Lewis wrote about a new hysteria that was sweeping across England in his day—everyone was in a panic over this new pestilence, this new threat to life and peace of mind. I’m going to read from his essay on the atomic bomb but I’m going to replace the word “atomic bomb” with the word “Coronavirus.”
In one way we think a great deal too much of the Coronavirus. “How are we to live in an pandemic age?” I am tempted to reply: “The same way you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, you and everyone you love were already sentenced to death before the coronavirus was discovered: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. ...
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by a virus, let that virus when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting with our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about viruses. They may kill our bodies but they need not dominate our minds
You think he might be onto something there? We need to live our lives, love our families, do our work, and take care of the people around us that need our attention.
When I saw how people ran out and stripped the stores in a desperate attempt to make sure they had more than they needed at the expense of whatever anyone else needs—I couldn’t help but think we, as a society, have lost our way.
In dealing with the Black Death Plague Martin Luther wrote this, he said, “Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. IF God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely, as stated above.”
This is what it means to be a Christian in a time such as this.
Psalm 91 says:
Do not be afraid of the terrors of the night,
nor the arrow that flies in the day.
Do not dread the disease that stalks in darkness,
nor the disaster that strikes at midday.
Though a thousand fall at your side,
though ten thousand are dying around you,
these evils will not touch you. Psalm 91:5-7
When Christianity was young, most people on earth had never met a Christian or heard of Jesus Christ, around year 165, the Emperor of Rome was Marcus Aurelius and the first of two great plagues swept across the empire. The first was the Plague of Galen, it lasted about 15 years. A quarter to a third of the entire population died from it—no one really knows because they were too busy dying or trying not to die to keep good records. Medical historians think it might have been an early outbreak of smallpox. The second plague hit around 251 AD, it was just as bad, took out almost half the population, might have been the measles. No one knows for sure.
The doctors, the politicians, the philosophers—all the leaders of the Roman world—they ran for the hills. They left their families and friends and loved ones behind and got the heck out of dodge. It was considered virtuous and noble to run away and save their own neck.
But it’s not what the Christians did. This strange new group of religious weirdos stayed behind and took care of people. They risked their own life to help others. They weren’t afraid to die.
If a religion can’t provide a satisfactory explanation for all the troubles of the world, or offer hope in the face of it, then that religion is going to be dismissed. These plagues were the end of Roman and Greek gods—from then on, they wouldn’t be thought of as anything other than silly myths. Fun stories. Nothing more.
But these plagues were the beginning of the rise of Christianity as a world dominating force. It was the church’s reaction to these terrible plagues that really caused the church to grow as fast as it did.
One of the early church leaders, a man named Cyprian, seemed to almost welcome the epidemic. He said only non-Christians had anything to fear from the plague. He wasn’t delusional and I think his words are inspiring, he said:
“The just are dying with the unjust ... although this mortality has contributed nothing else, it has especially accomplished this for Christians and servants of God, that we … are learning not to fear death.”
Dionysus, another church leader, wrote about how Christians took care of the sick, fed them and nursed them back to health, or else gave them Christian burials. He said, “The heathens behaved in the very opposite way. At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead and treated unburied corpses as dirt, hoping thereby to avert the spread and contagion of the fatal disease; but do what they might, they found it difficult to escape.”
On the other hand, he said that Christians, “showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ... Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their death to themselves and died in their place... The best of our brothers and sisters lost their lives in this manner… the result of strong faith, seems in every way the equal of martyrdom.”
The Roman magistrate Julian took great offense at the nobility of the Christians and ordered a decree that Roman citizens must start acting with greater virtue than those barbaric Galileans. It didn’t work but that’s what politicians do, they make laws that demand citizens to be better people, they try to legislate compassion. We see a lot of that these days.
Why did the Christians react to the pandemic the way they did? What was it about the teaching of Jesus that caused them to risk their own life to help strangers?
We don’t have to guess. They died quoting the words of Jesus, “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me… Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”
The Roman world had never seen anything like this before. No one had ever seen anything like this before. These people worshiped their God by serving other people. They showed devotion to their God, Jesus Christ, by caring for poor people, sick people, dying people—they were even considered martyrs if they got sick and died feeding pagans chicken soup.
I’ve heard the phrase, “this is a world changer” during this last week when people were talking about the Coronavirus—but the world has seen plenty of plagues before. The Coronavirus is not a world changer. The thing the world had never seen before, the true world changer, was the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Another early church leader, a man named Tertullian was talking about the same thing and he claimed, “It is our care of the helpless, our practice of loving kindness that brands us in the eyes of our opponents. ‘Only look,’ they say, ‘look how they love one another.”
So the Roman pagans left their family members to die, and the Christians stayed behind and took care of them. A lot of people died, but most of them didn’t. Once a person survived the virus, they usually had immunity to it. Imagine how that looked in a world that didn’t know anything about germs and microbes—kinda looked like the Christians had miraculous superpowers—like their God was the real deal. Also to the people they took care of, they had saved their life, how hard do you think it was to convert them to Jesus after that? This was their new family now, their old family had left them to die. New networks were created, new communities. And as Rome was rebuilt from the ruins left behind by the plagues, it was rebuilt in the light of the Gospel. This is how Christianity grew and became what it is.
So what does this all mean for us in this crazy time of the whole world shutting down and turning our lives inside out? When things are so unpredictable and uncertain?
It means we don’t give in to anxiety. Anxiety is when we’re afraid of something that hasn’t happened yet, and might not happen. It could happen, though. That’s why we’re anxious.
This isn’t going away anytime soon. We may be in the grips of this thing for weeks or months. It might cause bigger complications to our lives than a shortage of toilet paper. Everything is so uncertain. Everything about this virus and this situation is uncertain. And uncertainty creates fear. Sickness, death, discomfort—sure. Economic decline, job security, business viability—these are things we worry about. Interruptions to school, events, sports, music, theatre, travel—these things take a toll on us, they slowly erode our confidence and joy.
But what should be the Christian response to all this? Are we just supposed to freak out and complain along with all the other Romans? The pagans, the heathens, the unbelievers?
What difference does our faith make? We’re going to suffer the same consequences and trouble that everyone else suffers.
As Christians we don’t have some kind of silver bullet or magic cure. Jesus never promised that we wouldn’t suffer or have problems in this life. He never promised that He’d spare us from sickness or pain or disease or death.
But He did promise us something. He promised us a lot of things. He gave us His Word—we have the sure promises of Christ.
When we, as Christians, serve our neighbor in times of sickness and death, we’re reminded that we’re not called to heal the entire world. It’s not our job to save the world—that’s something that can only be done by Jesus. He’s the one who faced the sin of the world for all of us. It killed Him, too. But that’s not the end of the story.
Death won’t be the end of our story either. Or the end of the story for the people we comfort until the hour of their dying.
This virus, like all disease, like all sickness and pain and death—is rooted in sin. Not any particular sin. Just sin. Adam’s sin, your sin, my sin.
And sin is not the end of our story. Because of Jesus, because He took all that weight on Himself and died, and because He broke the chains of death and rose again—this virus isn’t gonna get the last word on any of us. Because Jesus rose from the dead, you will too.
Do not be afraid of the terrors of the night,
nor the arrow that flies in the day.
What’s the worst that can happen? That you might die? Jesus promises that death will not be the end of you.
Do not dread the disease that stalks in darkness,
nor the disaster that strikes at midday.
Nor the pandemic that is blasted 24/7 on news media. Nor the fear-mongerors who fill you with doubt and panic, and cry out to you through your social media feed, “Where is your God? Has He abandoned you?”
Though a thousand fall at your side,
though ten thousand are dying around you,
these evils will not touch you. Psalm 91:5-7
Jesus never promises that we won’t get sick from COVID-19 or any other fancy named pestilence, now or in the future. But He does promise to be a place of sure hope that stands against the uncertainty of this world. A place to rest when the world around is in a panic. A place of comfort and peace when our soul aches with anxiety.
Trust that the LORD is Good In the midst of all this fear and uncertainty, embrace the light of the Gospel and hold firmly to the hope of the LORD Jesus Christ. Trust Him. Be fervent in prayer. Show Jesus’ compassion to everyone in your life, whether you know them or not—serve people selflessly, and tell them about the hope you have in Jesus. The faith you have in Jesus. We have a lot of certain hope to offer people during this time of uncertain anxiety. As we talk with people who may feel panicked, remember that we have the gift of the Gospel to share.
Jesus said,
"Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid" (John 14:27).
This is the only sure place to find rest and refuge from all this madness. It’s the most important thing we can share with others. As God’s people, we know that there is no need to panic—even if
"the earth gives way and the mountains are moved into the heart of the sea" (Psalm 46:2).
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in time of need (Psalm 46:1)!
May these promises fill you with strength, guide you in life and shine brightly through you as a worried world stands in need of this hope. Trust in this. AMEN