a love letter to my Evangelical neighbors in the time of COVID-19
Dear you, dear me, dear us standing arm in arm together—at least in spirit,
Two weeks ago, I finally broke down. I cried and cried as I watched on Twitter as Ben Rector played the Doxology from his empty house. Praise Him, all creatures here below. All I could think about was how this valley feels so very low and so very dark. Surely, anyone who tells you that praising in the darkness of the valley is easy is either lying or selling something. These are not easy days. Life as we know it has changed, indefinitely if not permanently. I can’t open my social media feeds without being inundated with countless posts from people who have lost loved ones. Their mourning mingles with posts from people complaining about needing to get their eyebrows done, inadvertently having to fill the roles of teachers and guidance counselors and lunch ladies as their kids have transitioned to e-learning, arguing over politics, sharing fake cures, and preaching about the end times.
I have said it before, but it always bears repeating: I see us. I’m committed to seeing us, even when it breaks my heart, because I am committed to loving us. And I’ve never been more convinced that one cannot exist without the other.
Last week was Holy Week for the church. When I was a little girl, I sort of dreaded Holy Week, to be honest. Palm Sunday would come, and without fail, the ladies in our Pentecostal church would all but force branches on folks as they came through the doors, and things were always, well, more pentecostal than normal (think rowdy conga lines and hour-long altar calls). It always felt too showy for my highly sensitive and painfully introverted capacity. But I digress. As I’ve gotten older, the rhythm of the liturgical calendar has offered rootedness and something resembling comfort—but the Lenten season remains complicated, always requiring me to wrestle. This one, in particular, has been difficult.
Lent, as I have come to understand it in recent years, is less about shaming us for desiring comfort and pleasure and more about considering how we can order those affections beneath our affection and desire for Christ and his kingdom. Can I be honest? On any given day, there are a lot of things that I want more than Jesus. I want to be popular. I want approving pats on the back. I want to be seen as smart and independent. Certainly, I want to give that person on Facebook a piece of my mind.
All of that to say that we have all staked claim to our own spot in the same rickety boat. Many of us have swallowed the lie that it has to be this way, that as long as we achieve the high we’re looking for, the ends will somehow justify the means.
Many of us are afraid to let go, and I can’t help but think that we’re forfeiting our souls in the process of trying to hold on.
The American way is to never say we’re afraid, but I see the evidence of this scarcity mentality everywhere I turn. The relative who won’t quit shouting about how staying at home during a pandemic violates his rights. The friend of a friend who boasts in the comments that his stimulus check will be spent on an AR-15. The corporation whose owner continues to put his employees at risk of contracting the virus because he “had a vision from God.” The politician who keeps showing up to the gym. The churchgoer who continues showing up to corporate worship because “the blood of Jesus protects her” from contracting the virus or passing it to someone else.
I get it, sort of. We’re all trying to hang on to some semblance of normalcy these days, and sacrifice is nothing if not uncomfortable. But when we’re willing to sacrifice the health and wellbeing of our neighbors for the sake of our own wealth, power, and comfort, it is a sure sign that our affections are grossly out of order. We’ve heard it said that we have to fight for our rights, but might there be another way to live? A shalom built from addition, rather than subtraction—loving our neighbor as we love ourselves, rather than living in isolation?
To borrow from Mother Teresa, “if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to one another.”
Since reading more about the myth of the American dream, I’ve been doing a lot of meditating on the ever-popular (and perpetually taken out of context) verse in Jeremiah 29, the one that talks about God’s plans to prosper instead of harm. I wonder if we believe God has the same plans for our neighbors? Plainly speaking, I believe we have two choices: we can choose to be co-conspirators with God in the prospering of our neighbors, with whom our own prosperity is inextricably tied, or we can choose to fight for and grab what we believe is rightfully ours and never really be satisfied.
Slowly but surely, our infatuations are killing us—and our neighbors.
This is not the death we are called to as followers of the Way. It isn’t the legacy I want to leave for my children. I suspect it isn’t how you want to be remembered, either.
One of my favorite writers, Emily P. Freeman, once penned some words about the other, often forgotten, death that took place on Good Friday: the death of our egos. Upon his resurrection, Jesus asks a question that I’ve never been able to shake myself free from.
Why do you look for the living among the dead?
I can hear him asking, even now.
Why hunt for and hoard that which will bring momentary comfort or power only to leave us slaves to the rat race? Why spend all of our time and our energy attempting to resuscitate our own imagined sufficiency, only to find that we will never be able to outrun the pain of isolation? After all, we are ashes to ashes and dust to dust, but right now, we are here. Together, for better or worse.
Tonight, as we enter the season known as Eastertide, I find myself praying along with that old familiar hymn, “and the things of earth will grow strangely dim.”
Death to life. We can choose to walk out of the grave and not look back.
May it be so in the world. May it be so, even in us.