Faith, suffering, and sacrifice in a time of Coronavirus

The world is fluttering with fear just now; I feel it in my own heartbeat, in my own wobbly insides. There is constant news of COVID-19, of community spread, of death rates, of disaster. Everything is shutting down; everything is cancelled. Changes that seemed unimaginable two days ago are real and here (for me, here is Saskatchewan; for many people I love, here is the United States or other parts of the world).

Amid this chaos, I have been hearing some of my friends of faith insist that this is a media frenzy, a collective panic that's making us lose our heads and our trust in God. In conversations and online posts, I've been hearing folks insist, I'm carrying on with life as usual, because I trust God to protect me. God is in control. I will not fear. 

I commend their faith. But I wonder about our theology of illness and pain, our imagination of God's provision. Now more than ever, I think we need a robust shared theology of suffering and sacrifice, of neighbour-love and divine concern. I think about these things a lot (a lifetime ago I wrote a dissertation about suffering and sacrifice, and then a book). Here are some preliminary thoughts for such a time as this. 

Suffering

Those of us in North America live in a culture and time that is uniquely uncomfortable with human discomfort: we seek to medicate it, fix it, deny it. We like to believe that we can control it, as we like to believe that we control everything. This is the backdrop.

Yet suffering is inevitable, and control is an illusion. Despite all our deeply internalized if/then logic that God's favour equals happy, safe life (sometimes we see this logic in the Psalms and Proverbs), the Bible doesn't consistently promise that God will protect the faithful from all suffering. See: Job. See: John the Baptist. See: the witness of the early church, especially the martyrs. See: contemporary believers experiencing famine, tsunamis, persecution. 

See: Jesus. 

The good news isn't that God keeps us from all suffering ("In this world you will have trouble"). The good news is that God promises to be with us in it ("and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world"). 

When we spread the word that God will protect Christians from illness, we set people up with a false promise: and when that promise is inevitably broken, their faith may be devastated, their ties to community fractured at precisely the moment they need it most. 

The good news isn't that we don't get sick, that we don't experience excruciating loss, that we don't face uncertainty. The good news is that the One Who Created also Re-Creates, bringing life out of death, again and again and again. 

Sacrifice

One of the beautiful witnesses of the early church is that they showed up during epidemics, during times of crisis, to care for the most vulnerable. They sacrificed themselves for their fellow humans. 

Some of us who are people of faith will be called to this kind of sacrifice right now: some folks who are young and hardy may find themselves risking their health to set up best-practice daycare centres in church basements for healthcare workers' children, to serve food and find shelter for folks living without homes. Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers are being asked to sacrifice themselves in ways the rest of us can only imagine, not just risking infection but giving up time with family, working without rest, making painful decisions with patients' lives in their hands. 

But this particular pandemic inverts some of the dynamics of sacrifice. The thing about COVID-19 is that it can spread before we know we have it. This means that folks who choose to carry on with business as usual may unknowingly infect many others. This is another sense of sacrifice: where our refusal to follow experts' direction on how best to prevent this virus from spreading endangers the most vulnerable in our society, not just those vulnerable due to age or illness but those who need to keep working to make ends meet. We sacrifice their health--even their lives--on the alter of our own convenience.

I know these are hard words. 

My own family is keeping to ourselves right now because several of us are down with cold symptoms. Public health experts have asked people with such symptoms to stay home. I know that if we were all healthy we would have to be making some hard decisions about how we should show up for our community, which risks we're willing to take given our own vulnerabilities and small children. Yet just as crucial as the measures we would take to prevent ourselves from infection would be the measures we'd take to prevent others from becoming infected, given the possibility that any of us could be carriers without knowing it. 

All of this is to say, sometimes sacrifice looks not like dramatic acts of heroism but like self-limiting. It looks like retracting the scope of our lives from the wide freedoms we're used to, contracting into the space of our homes in this bizarre experiment of social distancing, because the people who have the best evidence tell us this is the best way to care for our neighbours. It is counter-intuitive. It is demanding. It is hard and at points even painful. 

We have a word for this in the Christian tradition: kenosis. It means Jesus's self-constriction, the way he emptied himself to become human, to join us in this exquisitely vulnerable flesh. 

What I am saying is: sometimes trusting God looks like showing up at the front lines. Sometimes it looks like creative acts of mutual aid, community networks, and calculated risks. And sometimes it looks like staying home, even if you don't fully understand the logic, because you've been asked to do this hard thing by people who know far better than you do, and you've been asked to do it for the sake of your neighbour. 

And what you did for the least of these my brothers and sisters, Jesus said, you did for me. 

This is faith.