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As Christians prepare anew to celebrate the Incarnation, I revisit early church history as a reminder of the devotion to the common good Jesus can inspire and lament how this has been, to a distressing degree, an ignominious year for the church in America. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/an-advent-lament-in-the-pandemic
This is the fourth Sunday of Advent. The sense of weighty expectation feels heightened this year. The collect in the Book of Common Prayer reads as a collective yearning: “O Lord, raise up (we pray thee) thy power, and come among us, and with great might succour us.”
Many Christians certainly took seriously Jesus’ parable in the Gospel of Matthew about how he would separate believers from unbelievers on Judgment Day. My colleague @JonathanBlitzer profiled Juan Carlos Ruiz, a 50 yo Mexican pastor in Bay Ridge. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/24/the-renegade-priest-helping-undocumented-people-survive-the-pandemic
Legions of Roman Catholic priests donned personal protective equipment and ventured, at great personal risk, into hospital rooms to anoint the dying with oil. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/06/us/coronavirus-priests-last-rites.html
But the lasting image of the church in the pandemic may very well be that of an unmasked choir at First Baptist Church, in Dallas, singing in front of VP Mike Pence, as the county where the church is located reported a record high for covid-19 cases. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/28/politics/mike-pence-dallas-choir-no-masks-church-event/index.html
In the year 165, a horrible pandemic struck the Roman Empire. By some estimates, a quarter to a third of the population died. Nearly a century later, another pestilence devastated the region, killing as many as five thousand people a day in Rome.
Dionysius, the bishop of Alexandria, where two-thirds of the population may have died, mounted a broad effort to tend to the sick. “Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another,” he wrote.
Emperor Julian, seeking to bolster paganism, urged the high priest of Galatia to emulate Christians, attributing their growth to “benevolence toward strangers and care for the graves of the dead” and how they “support not only their poor, but ours as well.”
The historian Timothy S. Miller, in his book “The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire,” documents how the first public hospitals began to spring up in the fourth and fifth centuries as an expression of Christian charity. https://www.amazon.com/Hospital-Byzantine-Supplement-Bulletin-Medicine/dp/0801856574?ots=1&slotNum=0&imprToken=f6bb4011-d2a1-f2a6-e6e&tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50
In “The Rise of Christianity,” Rodney Stark, a sociologist of religion, writes that the early Christians’ response to epidemics helps to explain the extraordinary spread of their movement. https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Christianity-Marginal-Religious-Centuries/dp/0060677015/ref=sr_1_1?ots=1&slotNum=1&imprToken=f6bb4011-d2a1-f2a6-e6e&tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50&crid=2LRLJHRBA654A&dchild=1&keywords=the+rise+of+christianity+by+rodney+stark&qid=1607699381&s=books&sprefix=the+rise+of+christian%2Cstripbooks%2C150&sr=1-1
In 2020, many churches realized that the best way they could love their neighbors was to temporarily shut their doors. “Shepherds (that’s what ‘pastor’ means) are called to protect God’s Flock not expose it to danger," @rickwarren of @saddleback told me.
But other church leaders resumed in-person services, even as infections surged, often while waving the banner of religious freedom.
The story of Christmas is an enthralling one: a baby born of humble parentage, swaddled in cloths and cradled in a manger, is the Messiah.
Toward the end of his life, Jesus was challenged by a Pharisee to name the greatest commandment. He said that it was to love God “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” and that the second greatest commandment was to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
The early followers of Jesus realized that these admonitions were intertwined, that one led to the other.
In a new book, “God and the Pandemic,” N. T. Wright, a New Testament scholar and retired Anglican bishop, urges the church, as it considers its role in the aftermath of the coronavirus, to champion the priorities of Psalm 72. https://www.amazon.com/God-Pandemic-Christian-Reflection-Coronavirus/dp/0310120802?ots=1&slotNum=2&imprToken=f6bb4011-d2a1-f2a6-e6e&tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50
Wright admits that such a vision for society might be wishful thinking, but he writes that this is “what the Church at its best has always believed and taught, and what the Church on the front lines has always practiced.” It is also what an ailing nation needs.
