When I think about what we are having to do now to slow this COVID-19 thing down, a certain movie comes to mind and it’s not a Zombie apocalypse or a pandemic movie. It’s ‘The Martian’ with Matt Damon in it.” It’s about a Mars expedition that had to abort when a massive storm blew up on the surface of Mars. The crew had started to build a base, but things got bad and they had to evacuate. On the way back to the lander Matt Damon’s character, botanist Mark Watney, had an encounter with a radio tower that came tumbling by due to the wind. It punctured his suit and carried him off a ways. The crew couldn’t find him in all the blowing dust and figured he was dead because the computer system said his suit got punctured and he was not answering his com. So they boarded the lander and left for Earth. But, don’t you know it. Watney winds up not dead, not even mostly dead. He’s alive. His blood had plugged the hole in his suit. He has no way to communicate with the ship because the radios are destroyed. So he has to figure out how to stay alive on Mars for a couple of years until the next planned manned mission can arrive.
He got the shelter working, inventoried his food, and assessed the tech gear he had to work with. He found some raw potatoes in the food packs and being a botanist he knew what to do with those but how do you make water and dirt suitable for growing potatoes on Mars. The scene that sticks out to me is of Watney sitting at a desk making his video log hold those potatoes and he says, “Well, I’m just going to have to science the hell out this thing.”
To me that moment in the movie describes where we are at with COVID-19. We are having to stay fairly isolated, holed up in our homes with our families, and it’s worrisome because we don’t know how long this is going to take. We don’t know what’s going to happen to the economy and to our jobs. There’s a lot of misinformation floating around stoking our anxieties and some of it is intentionally engineered to cause panic and worse. There are those who are playing down the severity of this virus and not sticking to the social distancing protocols. There is so much we don’t know. Meanwhile, some of the brightest minds in epidemiology are busy “sciencing the hell” out of this thing and there are already vaccine trials going on.
I saw a thing on Facebook about two weeks ago after the NHL shut down. It was praising Canadian ingenuity and making fun of the Canadian love for hockey. It said, “They cancel hockey in Canada and immediately three Canadians manage to identify the virus responsible for COVID-19.” Our scientists have a lot more available to them to work with than they did in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. We need to give them the time to do their work while we ourselves exercise patience, kindness, and compassion and keep our distance to hopefully keep our health system from backing up. My grandfather’s generation was asked to go to war. We are being asked to find a way to turn this time of social distancing into a time of personal and family growth and even community growth.
I hope we all understand why we have to cancel public gatherings including church services. First, as our congregations consist largely of the people for whom the virus is especially dangerous, we simply have to take every precaution. Second, we are hoping that social distancing will keep our medical system from being overloaded as it has become in Europe. And let me take a moment to say thanks to all those people in medical and human service professions who are the front line of all this.
Looking at all this, I believe we people of faith have a distinct advantage. We know that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ. We know that God does indeed work all things to the good for those who love him and are called according to his purposes. Our God deals in hope and in compassion. Our God is the living God who gives new life in Christ. God deals in resurrection. When we walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, He makes us know that he is personally with us. He protects us, provides for us, ensures us that we have what we need. Therefore, we need not fear. In troubled times we do not need to be ruled by fear and anxiety and fall into a panic. Instead, being free from fear means we can use our energy and efforts in other ways. Being free from fear, we are free to be faithful, free to be the people of God.
You know, there is something very symbolic, almost prophetically symbolic that in the midst of this crisis we are not meeting behind closed doors for worship. The church experts have been telling us for decades that for us to overcome the demise of the institutional church in these days of the collapse of cultural Christianity, we have to be the church out there, the church out among the people of our communities; the church out in our neighbourhoods among our neighbours. Jesus commanded us to love our neighbour as we love ourselves and by neighbour he means our actual next-door neighbours. These are days when we need to be checking in with our neighbours, by phone or even knocking on the door being sure to keep that 1m+ social distance. Keeping in contact with our elderly neighbours just goes without saying.
To wind it down here, the last verse of Psalm 23 reads, “Surely, goodness and mercy, shall follow me all the days of my life.” We read that and our inclination is to say that it means, “I’m just going to be so blessed.” Well, maybe, but, the Hebrew word for follow here is the word that everywhere else in the Old Testament it means being followed in the sense of your enemies pursuing you, hunting you down to beat you up or to kill you. It seems like a pretty strong metaphor to say that Goodness and Loving Kindness are pursuing me as if they were my enemies out to get me. And so I say maybe David is saying something else here. Maybe its when you look over you shoulder to see what’s following you, it is Goodness and Loving Kindness that you leave behind you in your wake.
I’ve been in a canoe many times on lakes where people with big, loud, motorized boats go zinging by. The faster they go, the bigger the waves they leave in their wake. I find those big waves quite scary from my seat in my little canoe that is suddenly being violently rocked about by that rude boater who didn’t have enough Canadian politeness to slow it down around the paddlers.
Maybe what David is saying is that when we look over our shoulders to see what we leave in our wake, that because the Lord is our Shepherd and is with us, Goodness and Loving Kindness are the waves in our wake that follow behind us. These are days we slow our boats down and gently rock people by blessing them with the Goodness and the Loving Kindness of God. Amen.
