Pondering the Pandemic V: Superstitions

I am grateful to have grown under the loving care of two godly parents that shaped my imagination about God and his world. 

Unfortunately, too many others like me grew up with other Christian pastors, teachers, friends, and mentors who taught that when things were going wrong in our lives or the lives of others—if life was not one moment of glory followed by another—there were two possible answers: either we were not doing all of the right things or we were not believing all the right things.

A lack of faith, a misstep here or there, results in hardships and divine disfavor. Meanwhile, material blessing and convenience was a "sign" from God that we were walking in step with his purposes.  This conception of God has been showing up routinely in evangelical responses to the COVID pandemic. 

Most people would call this superstition. It is certainly not the gospel.

It’s ironic that for many like me, this kind of superstitious theology was not all that different from the transactional relationship between the pagan people of antiquity and their gods, the same gods to whom our human ancestors sacrificed children, whose dispositions toward humanity changed from moment to moment, who demanded appeasement, and whose favor could be lost. 

Even as many churches proclaimed a God of grace who loved the world and reconciled the cosmos to himself, who acted for we who cannot help ourselves, who had redeemed humanity in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, our day-to-day assumptions about God, ourselves, and others have betrayed a practical belief that God changes his mind about us, changes his disposition toward humanity, in a way not unlike how we humans are inconstant and waver.

This is not the classic Christian understanding of God.

God’s love is a constant, his loving faithfulness to us and to all humanity and creation does not give off even a shadow of turning. Our God is ever the same, a self-sacrificial, overflowing fountain of grace and forgiveness and deliverance and reconciliation from age to age.

It is we who are inconstant and faithless. It is this world that fallen, upside down, broken.

God’s answer to our ungodliness is a human who embodies the divine hesed, who reveals in flesh the permanence of an eternal community of lovingkindness, who groans alongside us like a laboring mother.

Someone can be looking always for where God is at work in the world, join God in that sacred work, and go on to live a life of profound suffering. It is also true that people who evidence no love for God or neighbor, who live only for themselves and their tribe, seem to thrive in comfort and without any setback.

Jesus promises his disciples that we will have a hard go of it in this world. The scriptures teach plainly that those who follow Him also suffer with him—the God who does not stand outside our suffering but, in the humanity of Jesus, endures the pain of the world with all who inhabit the world.

If you, like me, were raised to believe a version of this transactional God--whose love can be measured, whose moods shift, who abandons us in our folly--I want to encourage myself, and you, that this is not the God made known to us by Mary’s son, he who even now in his resurrected glory seated by the Father is not a ghost but flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. And we are seated with this Suffering Servant.

His love is measureless. His regard for humanity inalterable.

Hardships will come and some is of our making, some is visited upon us by our ancestors, and some has its origin in the powers and principalities opposed to God and God’s image bearers. Fallen reality is often cruel and unkind and has no origin in God.

May we discard these troubling lies for the God who clothes himself in human frailty, who wears our nature well, whose sacrificial love is a promise and foretaste of transfigured humanity’s participation in the divine life.

God is with us. God is for us. God never changes. This is the gospel. So, let's leave behind the superstition together.