In our hour of need will the Church of God stand up to the powers of this world, or will they be complicit in defining us as numbers in some “model” to be ordered about without regard to our inherent dignity as image bearers of the Most High?

There is so much going on and it all seems to make so little sense.

Businesses are closed. People out of work. Life routines disrupted. Dreams interrupted. Families disunited. That which makes us human is outlawed. The virus seems to have been overestimated. Our ability to kneel before governments as they take away our liberties seems to have been underestimated. We are forbidden to visit the old and infirm. We are forbidden to be with our loved ones as they struggle for life in hospitals. We are forbidden to hold their hand while they die.

Our governments have forgotten their role as civil servants to enable our human flourishing.  In a rush to avoid death they have forgotten what makes life worth living. They have reduced us to numbers in a mathematical formula. They order us to behave in a certain way in order to achieve a particular outcome without regard to our humanity.  One plus one may equal two, but one person in isolation does not equal living.

We know from experiences with solitary confinement, as in prisons, that the human mind cannot tolerate being truly alone.  Human interaction and human touch are not just important to us, they are necessary to our survival as humans. To live is to live with other people.

Every time a person is denied the ability to visit with their loved ones in hospital, the ill are deprived of one more reason to live, one more motivation to heal, one more reminder that someone cares.  Lost in a medical induces haze the touch of family and friends may be the last tenuous connection to life the person has.

Every time a person is denied the ability to be with a loved one while that person dies, we not only deprive the dying of solace but we wound the living. For the living know that it is part of their imperative to care for those they love. To not be able to care for our dying, hurts our sense of self.

From before all time, and before creation, God has always been three persons in one nature.  That is, God has always been, and always will be, an intimate loving relationship.  Humans, being created in God’s image, are made for intimate loving relationships.   We are not made to be alone. We are not created to be isolated. We are meant to interact with others. To talk with them, to touch them, to know them and be known by them.

We are not numbers. We are human beings. For the government to reduce us to mindless variables in their pandemic models is to treat us as less than human.

We were expecting our churches, the institutionalized visible outward forms of our faith, to guide us through these troubling times, reinforce our faltering faith, and to help us put the virus and physical death into perspective. We have been given; closed churches, online services, a voice on the other end of the phone. We have been deprived of the sacraments and even denied being shriven before dying.

Jesus, once healed a leper with a touch, although touching lepers was forbidden. Jesus walked among us, often in crowds too dense for social distancing. Jesus commanded us to visit the sick. Jesus has been reduced from a real active presence in the church to a feel good motivational story we hear of at a distance.

We seem bereft of the presence of God. We seem reduced to trying to remember God’s words. We are in a drought of God.  The very people who are meant to most remind us, and represent to us the active presence of God in our lives, seem almost complicit with the secular authorities. The same authorities that are so intent of reducing us from human children of God to mere numbers in a mathematical model.

Where is the church? It seems, over the last decades, the church has more and more abandoned the role of mediating the word and presence of God. Instead it seems to have chosen to mediate between the earthly powers that be and their subjects.  In the Church’s rush to be relevant to our current lives it has become more and more irrelevant to our eternal hopes. When our earthly masters tell us to isolate ourselves, to cut off part of our souls and make ourselves less than fully human, our churches do not push back they adapt. When our secular authorities tell us that in order to be “Good” we must stay at home, our spiritual leaders tells us that we no longer have to live out God’s command to visit the sick and those in prison.

I have heard expressions of regret but have not seen significant push back.  A leper came to Jesus and said, “Lord if you will you can heal me”. That is Lord if you want to heal me, even though it is against the law and you will suffer consequences for breaking the law, you can.  Blessed be God, who did not send His son to be incarnated of a Zoom conference, but to walk among us in our flesh and our nature. Blessed be God, that He did break the law and physically touch the untouchable, to bring mercy and healing.

Yet God’s most public followers, the modern church, when faced with its “If you will, you can help” moment chose to step back, close its doors and phone their compassion in.

There is so much going on and it all seems to make so little sense.

No one minister is to blame. No one should judge any particular Bishop, superintendent or senior pastor. This has not shown the world anything new about the weaknesses of any individual.  We all knew that to begin with.  Rather is the spirit of our time. A spirit of materialism which seeps into all of us making us think more of the things of men than the things of God.

The church as a whole must regain it way. Let this time of pandemic remind us all that no matter what our society says, physical life is not forever. Let our awakening awareness that we are dust and to dust we must return be in turn a wake up call. Let the church reclaim, with God’s grace, its role as being the outward symbol of God standing between this limited physical life and the life eternal won for us on the cross.