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Since the Lutherans in the ELCA are in communion with us, and since I was a Lutheran myself for 35 years of my life, I enjoy reading and sharing the writings of Martin Luther. Luther was not a mellow personality. He did not inspire neutral responses in people. People tended to love or hate him. He was forceful. He liked to fight for a good cause. He was not always moderate in his anger. But he also had a good head on his shoulders, and like St. Augustine—fun fact, Luther was an Augustinian monk—like Augustine, Luther was a prolific writer and he loved to apply the faith, to address the many concerns of his day with the help of Scripture, doctrine, and tradition.
And so today I will share with you what Martin Luther had to say about how to behave in a pandemic. He wrote these words some 200 years after the bubonic plague, a pandemic that killed as many as 200 million people in Europe and Asia. He may have written these words before anyone had trained a microscope on a slide and seen microorganisms. He wrote these words in a time when germ theory—the now universally-held theory that disease is caused by microorganisms transmitted from host to host—competed with “miasma theory,” or the theory that disease is caused by “bad air” or other environmental conditions. You may have seen Luther’s quotation on social media over the last couple of weeks: it is meme-ready. Lots of church folk on my Facebook feed have liked it and shared it. Here is what Luther has to say about how to behave in a pandemic:
“I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance inflict and pollute others and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me however I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely as stated above. See this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God.”
Not bad, huh? The “fumigate the air” bit is probably grounded in “miasma theory,” but notice Luther’s good practice as a person of faith. He prays, but he knows that prayer is always in relationship with action. We pray today for all who are affected by the novel coronavirus, which includes us, and nearly every human person on the planet. But our prayers rise to God in the context of our many actions. We are isolating from one another, even painfully so. The cancellations came this week without pause, without mercy: no Holy Week or Easter in this room, together; no graduations for our high-school students and college students (or for me); no weddings or funerals until we are sure we have made it to the other side of this health crisis. We hear these new rules and we obey. We do not pray blindly for God to save us. No, we take action.
We wash our hands, oh, how we wash our hands. Aaron and I are steering clear of each other this morning, coming no closer than six feet in this makeshift mini-sanctuary assembled by vestry member Darren Williams to fit on your screens. We all are doing a hundred and one things to respond well to this crisis. I love to go on long runs outside, so I posted something on a Facebook running page asking if people in San Francisco and other shelter-in-place regions are allowed to run outside… If they’re not, then I know it’s only a matter of days when I too will be closed up indoors, and I dare not disobey. I’m glad to know that nowhere in the country are people restricted from walking, running, and hiking outdoors, provided they faithfully observe physical distancing guidelines.
We do all these things as expressions of our prayer life, manifest signs of our identity. We do all these things for the reason Luther himself did all these things: this is who we are.
Today we find Jesus once again getting himself into controversy with the Pharisees, and this long scene in John’s Gospel has a lot to say about our situation now, and about who we are, in addition to who Jesus is.
But first, a word about those Pharisees. Often enough, the Pharisees are flat, stock characters in our Bible studies. They are the usual, not-very-interesting bad guys. They are oppositional to Jesus in a way that seems just plain dumb: they oppose him because they oppose him. We sometimes look at the Pharisees the way we might look at a fan of an opposing football team: I’m from Seattle, so I am a Seahawks fan. I instinctively, unthinkingly take sides with the Hawks when they’re playing against your team. When my guys score, I will cheer. When your guys score, I will get up and get more nachos. But the Pharisees are far more interesting than this. They are worthy of our study, and our reflection. Some scholars even speculate that Jesus himself was a Pharisee, which makes sense when you reflect on it: only someone a lot like me can make me this mad.
The Pharisees had eyes to see. They were educated; they earnestly studied their Scriptures; they took seriously their identity as children of Abraham. You and I, we may be Pharisees of a sort, in one way or another. We are good at what we do, and we care about what we do. We take very seriously the vocations to which God calls us, whether it’s the vocation of a parent, or a child of an aging parent; or the vocation of a teacher, an engineer, a member of the armed forces, a healthcare worker, or someone who serves a community. Some of us find our vocation here at St. Andrew’s, supporting and building up this community. In all this, we are like the good Pharisees.
But Jesus pushes the Pharisees. He goads them. He confronts them in their secure place of privilege in their society. They have access to the means of production; they are the interpreters of their age; they, like Luther, like us, they can see. But what is in their blind spot? What is it that they cannot see, but this blind man from birth can see? At one point the blind man (who now has sight, so maybe we need to call him something else)—he gets a little snarky with the Pharisees. He says to them, “I have told you [what happened] already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become [Jesus’] disciples?” Make no mistake: this is sarcasm. It is maybe a hint in John’s Gospel text of the resentment his community felt after being thrown out of their synagogues. They can see things that the established leaders cannot see, and this story of the wise-guy blind man is a little bit of passive-aggressive payback to them. The Pharisees can hear the sarcasm: they are not stupid. They throw the guy out.
But then the blind man meets up with Jesus again, who gives him a little faith test: “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Jesus asks. The Son of Man: this is the majestic figure we meet in the book of Daniel. This question may ring a bell for us. It sounds a lot like the questions we ask of baptismal candidates. Before we baptize people into our identity as the Body of Christ, we ask them several questions, and we have them make important vows. Do they believe in God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit? Do they renounce the forces of evil? Will they take up our work to share and share alike, to respect the dignity of all persons, to not just pray, but to take action? “I will, with God’s help,” the baptismal candidates say, over and over.
And so we see that this long story of the healing of the blind man is a baptismal story, a story about identity, a story about how, in baptism, we come to see things. We take off our blinders. This can often be the hardest lesson for people who know a lot, for the experts, for the Pharisees, for many of us. The learned scholar has to unlearn things, particularly prejudices that blind him to the dignity of people his culture says don’t matter: children, the elderly, women, people who have different abilities, people who are vulnerable to disease. (Which is everyone: yes, baptism opens our eyes to the dignity of everyone.)
In this time of great anxiety and upheaval, of physical isolation and cancelled celebrations and disrupted plans and economic crisis: in this time, our eyes are opened to who we are beneath and beyond our easy assumptions about faith, about church, about community, and about Jesus. Our eyes are opened to how Christianity is at its heart a household faith, a faith that binds families together, and knits households together as one Body, even and perhaps especially when we cannot be together in one big room.
Can you see the person in your life who needs not only your prayers but your action? She may be physically distancing right now. Maybe he’s in this congregation; maybe she’s just down the hall from you in your apartment building. Can you see your neighbor? For it is your neighbor that we gather today. We gather to pray for your neighbor, and to take action for your neighbor. “If my neighbor needs me,” Luther says. “If my neighbor needs me,” the Christian says. This is our vocation: to meet our neighbor where they have their deepest need, and share with them the the light of the Gospel, the love of God. No grand celebration in one room can compare with the deep joy of this work, this calling, this life we share together as the baptized children of God.
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1 Samuel 16:1-13
Psalm 23
Ephesians 5:8-14
John 9:1-41