A Christ for pandemic times

I hope you’ll excuse me. The thoughts that follow are new for me. Rather than present them to you on a plate with garnish and a glass of wine, I’m letting you watch me work in the kitchen.

In this pandemic, nature is giving us one hell of a laboratory for life. Everything is an experiment these days!

The changes that the pandemic forced on us are also forcing us to think about like never before. How much of our lives, and our thoughts about our lives, was on “autopilot”?

I think I said before that, God willing, I will look back on my life as “before the pandemic” and “after the pandemic.” I hate to say it, but I feel like the pandemic is the end of me being young and the start of me being old. That could explain the ache of the low-grade grief I feel all the time these days. The only world I ever knew is dead. What else can I do but feel grief?

This grief, like all strong feelings, thrusts me straight into prayer. When I can’t contain what I feel, I always end up alone out in nature. That’s where I go to meet with God.

When I was young, I used to go to God to solve my problems.

Part of being old, I think, is learning that we don’t go to God for solutions; we go to God to seek life, which I think is to seek meaning.

I do pray for healing, protection, and rescue. After all, I’m a dad.

But these days, I more often ask God to show me life in the midst of death.

I pray: “God, show me how to be hopeful even as dead bodies pile up in mobile morgues. Show me how to be joyful even as I carry so much grief. Show me how to be at peace even as a virus rages out of control.”

I want this to be plain: I’m not asking God to give me hope, joy, and peace in spite of what is happening around me. That would be like going through life in a divine bubble, rejoicing in being God’s favored while the world gets whatever is left.

The example I see in Jesus Christ is a man who had no “divine bubble” around him. Long before John the Baptist baptized Jesus of Nazareth into the Holy Spirit, God baptized Jesus in human flesh, human life. Jesus was born into human injustice, poverty, and tragedy. This baptism clung to Jesus his entire life. He was in the death, disability, and sickness of humanity. He was in the grief, heartbreak, and pain of humanity.

Jesus fed people as a person who was homeless, hungry, and poor.

He comforted people as one who was grieving his own heartbreak and loss.

He befriended people as one who was lonely and rejected.

He healed people as one who was sick.

He raised people from the dead as one who was dying and would soon die.

Too many Christians I know hold on to their Christianity as some kind of “immunity idol.” They want Christianity to be a double-pane window. They want to look out through that window at the suffering of the world while they live in comfort and safety.

Let’s not be too hard on them. They are human, after all. Being human is sad and scary and, from youth, we look for ways to manage our fear and hurt.

But growing old as a Christian means accepting the fact that Christ himself dove headfirst into the saddest and scariest parts of being human.

Christianity is not a window that protects us from the world; it is a baptism that soaks us in the dark depths of that world. To be Christian–to follow the Way of Jesus Christ–is not to rise above and stand apart from humanity.

It is to be as human as human can be.

Rather than keep us from all the bad things in the world, faith in the Christ redeems those things. Faith in Christ makes meaning out of things that seem so senseless. Faith in Christ gives us ears to hear and eyes to see life growing like a seed in the depths of death and despair.

This makes Christians who truly follow the Way of their Christ strange people indeed. We can mourn and rejoice at the same time. We can be calm and at peace while we struggle. We can feel full while we are hungry. We can feel loved while we are lonely. We can feel like we are coming alive while we are sick and dying.

To follow the Way of our Christ is to carry our divinity and our humanity at the same time in equal measure.

There is no better time to learn how to do this than Christmastime in a pandemic that is exhausting, impoverishing, separating, and killing people all around us.