Making Meaning out of Pandemic: When the World Turns Topsy-Turvy
It was Thursday March 12, 2020 when my eldest deacon said the last words I ever thought would come out of his mouth.
“Pastor, I think we need to close the church.”
We stood by and watched, powerless to do anything, as the world turned upside-down and inside-out in the span of just one phone call, one executive order, and one hospital admittance. The world turned topsy-turvy for the coronavirus.
What We Lost
Suddenly, we lost the one thing that many of us in the United States thought was certain: our sense of safety. No amount of power, privilege, money, or hand sanitizer would be enough to help us find it again. We learned how vulnerable we are to the whims of the natural world, and how defenseless we are when we are left alone. We were suspended in state of horrified awe while a mysterious, deadly, invisible force quietly stopped human activity. This all begs the questions: “How could a God who claims to be just, good, and loving allow this suffering?” “How could God put us at risk and leave us afraid and alone?” “How could God allow evil people to profit, while good people lose their jobs, their housing, and even their daily bread?”
…we have an understanding of justice where the good and the evil receive their just rewards that is written on our bones.
These questions are a perfectly natural response to what we have witnessed over the last year. They sprout up because we have an understanding of justice where the good and the evil receive their just rewards that is written on our bones. Our understanding of justice is born out of a Holy Covenant between God and humanity where God has ordered for the world around the pillars of love, justice, and mercy. God agrees to protect this order, but the Holy Covenant comes with a condition. In order for God to uphold God’s part, the people need to do our part. We are held accountable to God’s order of love, justice, and mercy, and when we don’t do our part, the world turns topsy-turvy.
Divine Intervention
Divine intervention is rarely a pleasant experience in the bible.
As a clergy person, who belongs to a people who call themselves Methodist, I am a person of the Book. When things happen that don’t make sense, I turn to scripture to see what happened in the past, and to discern where God is at work in the present. Divine intervention is rarely a pleasant experience in the bible. It can be violent, destructive, and extremely uncomfortable. Often times, God intercedes in human activity to humble us, and to reveal how far off the mark we have gone. Divine intervention is a moment of holy judgment meant to put us in our place by making us realize the that we are finite, interdependent, and fragile. The trouble is that we rarely understand God’s intercessions in the moment. God upsets our rational understanding of the status quo. After all, this is the same God who promises to remove the powerful from their thrones, and that the meek will inherit the earth. Reversing these power dynamics is an uncomfortable, even painful process.
Remember the Exodus Story
The Hebrew people are held captive in Egypt. Life is the kind of manual labor that built the pyramids. Children are being murdered under the Pharaoh’s orders because he believes the people are exceeding controllable numbers. The people suffer in the chains of servitude. There is no justice. There is no peace. From the depths of communal suffering, the people call out to God: to save them, to liberate them, to create a new way for them even though they can’t imagine life outside of what they know. And then, God answers the call of the people by sending a pandemic to the Egyptian people.
It is not enough for God to save the Hebrew people; God needs the Egyptian people to see the harm that they have caused.
It is not enough for God to simply wave a magic wand and free the captives from Egypt. When God is moved to intercede in human affairs, God uses purposeful force to bring about a specific response from us. God acts to move us to act on behalf of love, justice, and mercy for others. Divine intervention holds us responsible for the things we have done. It is not enough for God to save the Hebrew people; God needs the Egyptian people to see the harm that they have caused. When they do, the Egyptians are compelled to release their slaves into the wilderness. Then, the newly free have no other option but to create a new way of living together that does not lead to the servitude, death, and destruction that they have known in the past. This is the story of salvation. You have been saved, and so you are charged with the responsibility to created a world where others will not need to be saved.
Which Side are We on?
When we look to holy history to understand the present, we need to be clear which side of the story we are on. Everyone thinks that God is on their side, but if we feel like God has just pulled the rug out from underneath our feet, then we are likely not innocent. We might be the modern-day Egypt, and God is swooping in to wake us up. God breaks into our world to pull the blindfold off our eyes. God forces us to look at the deeply uncomfortable, painful truths of suffering that have been going on under our watch, and that we have been ignoring.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest nation in the world can’t organize itself to care for its people.
Pandemic revealed several cracks in the pillars of our community life that we have only seen grow. People forced onto unemployment learned that they could make more on public assistance than they did working. Fears of civil war ran through our minds, like unsung melodies that we couldn’t escape from, as we stock piled our freezers. Meat-packers, an occupation filled by some documented and some undocumented immigrants, received a federal pass on health and safety liability guidelines to fill the empty grocery store shelves. Children left school, families lost children care, and the boundary between work and home life disappeared. White folks took machine guns to federal buildings to wave signs demanding massages, haircuts, and freedom from masks; while people of color bear the burdens of essential work, and infection rates. Then there were the murders by police officers: one caught on film in broad daylight, the other in the dead of night, and they didn’t even bother to knock before they fired bullets through the wall. Meanwhile, the whole world holds its breath, as our elderly are infected in care-facilities, and their bodies are piled into refrigerated trucks. Meanwhile, the wealthiest nation in the world can’t organize itself to care for its people. We did not do our part, and the world spun topsy-turvy.
But Through it All…We are Never Alone
God does not abandon us.
There is hope in this Holy Covenant that God has made with humanity. Even when we fail to live up to our end of the bargain, we are still made in God’s image. God does not abandon us. God the holy creator is ever watching in the rafters, checking on the pulse of this holy creation. When the world turns all topsy-turvy, the Spirit is brooding over the Holy Waters of Divine Creation. God is like a mother hen watching over her nest. God is like a ship-based hospital deployed in the stitch of time. The Spirit rests just beyond an arm’s length away, waiting for the right moment to swoop in, swiftly, righteously, and lovingly, to reveal what has been hidden from sight, heal what is broken, and recreate us with the inspiration to set things right again.
Written indebted to Walter Brueggemann for his biblical scholarship in “The Virus as a Summons to Faith” which planted the first seeds from which this article sprung.
