Another week begins, and the topic is universally the
same in coffee shops (if you still frequent those), the workplace and worship
spaces. The #Coronavirus is trending more frequently than your
favorite five celebrities put together. Our culture has exchanged TMZ stories
for the primacy of the geeks who once made their living in the privacy of their
laboratory. These are now our modern-day celebrities. It’s safe to say the
experts surrounding this topic will probably consume the news cycle for the
foreseeable future.
Since this is the general trend, Christians must ask,
“How now shall we live?” Recently, I encouraged pastors to preach the Word on
the Lord’s Day without allowing the trends to dictate the church’s agenda. The
Church should be the last place where people come to educate themselves about
any virus or plague. The church should be that one place where we immunize
ourselves against such cultural ubiquity. What the church must provide in this
time is a heavenly normalcy that affords Christians a glimpse into the holy as
they experience the unholy of disease and death in the world.
Whatever the future holds, and I forbid myself from
acting like a prophetic epidemiologist, we know that the future belongs to
Jesus. After all, he has lived and reigned over every imaginable pestilence and
plague throughout history. He was Lord then and is Lord now. Christians often
forget that reality in times of crisis. It is a real danger. There is no more
excellent opportunity to flex our monergistic muscles than a scenario where we
envision ourselves as experts and when we can quietly act as lords over human
despair.
Of course, it is right and prudent to take measures,
but it is even more crucial to take good and necessary measures towards our
daily actions and reactions; to honestly examine ourselves in Lenten fashion to
see if we are living as Christ would have us in our day. One inevitable
temptation is the predicament of tomorrow. The anxious person will worry about
everything until he gets one thing right. He will worry about a thousand
things, and when that worry is finally validated, he will use that event to
justify his fears about the next thousand things. It’s an unhappy cycle. If the
things of today are sufficient (Mat. 6), then there are sufficient things to
occupy our faith today. In sum, opportunities abound in living out our faith in
times of peril. Our habits and rituals can be changed; our view of the world
and others can change, and we can discover in such a time of transition that
our priorities have been wrong for a long time.
In many ways, we lived exilically before any of this
came into being. But back then, there was no all-consuming Corona-Virus news;
there was just the mundane. Back then, many of us lived flippantly and
apathetic toward our Christian rituals. Times of peace more often than not
provide rationales for complacency. Thus, in times of uncertainty, we must remember
that usually, the best period for the church to sharpen and hone her worship
skills and practices is now. Biblical history bears this out. We can think of
Israel’s wilderness wandering as a time of exile. Israel had left Egypt and was
preparing to enter the Promised Land. But what was Israel doing for those 40
years? She didn’t have any real cultural influence since she had no homeland.
She was just a nomadic community moving through the wilderness without the
certainty of tomorrow. Still, faithful Israelites carried the tabernacle with
them through the desert so that corporate worship became their constant focus.
While we may not know what
tomorrow brings, we do know who controls time and space and viruses. For the
Christian, this is truly an opportunity for communities to find refuge in one
true city. Whether we are worshipping together or in limited numbers in seven
days, God’s gift of worship is ours. Whether in exile, free from alarm or in
between the times, worship is always ultimate. So, let the Christian see that
the only worthy trend in this world is not the #Coronavirus but the worship of
the Triune God.
