As For You, Siblings
When I detect cultural furor over extremely uncommon occurrences, I smell scapegoating. Abortions beyond the first trimester — the sort the majority of Americans think unacceptable — are exceedingly rare. Transgender female athletes competing in high school and college sports are exceedingly rare.
Want to know what’s not rare? Dying of Covid-19. As we near the million-deaths mark, of which public health professionals warned us two years ago, and we couldn’t quite believe them, we have some hard conversations in front of us.
In his gripping memoir, The Emergency (Penguin Random House, 2022), South Side of Chicago ER doctor Thomas Fisher describes the disproportionately severe impact of Covid on our society’s most vulnerable as “our collective failure to take care of each other.”
During the same week I was reading Fisher’s account of entirely avoidable suffering in urban America resulting from a broken healthcare system, I attended a talk by my colleague, the brilliant Professor S. Mark Heim. He spoke to the trustees of the school I serve, Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School, on plagues and Christianity.
In his talk, Mark pointed out that when one takes a longitudinal look at pandemics, a pattern emerges where we see the true cost of isolation. In communities where sick people had someone to care for their basic needs — keeping them hydrated, fed, and relatively comfortable — survival rates went up 30–50%.
Yet around the world today, we see that our first response to Covid-19 is still to get as far away from each other as possible. Of course we need to slow the spread and flatten the curve. But we also need to have hard conversations about our obligations to one another. Weapons of mass distraction in the form of less urgent conversations, related to extreme examples of rare occurrences, cannot deter us from that conversation.
Yet there are no rewards in this life for having succeeded in carrying out hard conversations. Oh, how I wish there were! Early in my academic life, when I was trying like crazy to get my work published, while also blending research and teaching with administration, I often mused that I’d get tenure in a heartbeat if only one could get publication credit for carefully worded emails.
But maybe there’s a better way. The church where I’m a member celebrated 25 years of being what the United Church of Christ calls “Open and Affirming” last weekend. The designation applies to churches that wish to tell the world, especially the LGBTQ community who would quite reasonably wonder if they might be embraced by a church, that they not only welcome those who love in non-hetero ways, but they affirm them in their wholeness.
My pastor, in his opening words of praise in the anniversary service, said, “What hard conversations we have had!” I don’t remember another time I’ve heard an anniversary celebration for long, stressful meetings where everyone was at some point angry at everyone else. In those O & A deliberations, tears were likely shed, and some members surely left, while those who remained invited the leave-takers not to let the door hit them on the way out — easier said than done in a church family.
Perhaps an antecedent step, before we actually talk about our “collective failure to take care of each other” amidst Covid, we need to rethink the communal activities we reward, and how we reward them. Right now, those who stick with hard conversations are rewarded with… more hard conversations. And scapegoating. And burnout. But God cheers for us when we stick with that which is difficult, painful, and worthwhile. God honors the love we show to each other when we refuse to give up on what’s right, while also making every effort not to give up on each other.
In the stories of the early days of the Christian faith we find in the New Testament — the Book of Acts, and the epistles of Paul and other church-planters — the resounding theme that runs through them is perseverance. Romans, Thessalonians, Philippians, Hebrews: you name it. Patiently bearing with resistance to the Good News is lifted up enough to tell us that doing so was hard, even from the earliest days, and also pleasing to God.
Maybe today we need a new boost of encouragement as Christians to persevere. What does perseverance require of us? That we patiently stick with relevant, difficult topics. That, when presented with a distraction from the true crisis by lesser crises whose exploration generates lots of heat and no light, we return home to the substance of Jesus’ message: love one another.
In the face of the present crisis, which we wish were over but most certainly is not, we aren’t loving each other well enough. We must stay strong, face facts, and fight the good fight.
2 Thessalonians 3:13: [A]s for you, siblings, do not grow weary of doing good.
