Seventh Thursday after Pentecost
First, I got four more survey responses yesterday, including two from people I didn't know were readers. Many thanks for your responses and suggestions. That brings the number of survey responses to 12. One more and I'll be satisfied (although I would like more than that).
Second, today's blog title contains a literary allusion. The first person to correctly identify the allusion gets a point in the quiz. 5 points wins a candy bar.
Now to the subject. In my 75 years this is the strangest time I have ever lived through. A couple of months ago on a Wednesday theology day, I wrote that God did not afflict us with this virus, that it is the result of some harmful things that have happened in the course of nature. I stated my belief that God set up the universe on the basis of natural law and allows it to run on that basis, although God can intervene at any point to change the course of nature or to change things in our lives. Our prayers of petition are our asking, perhaps I can even say our efforts to persuade, God to intervene, to change things. I did note that in the Bible God does sometimes use nature to inflict punishment. There is of course the possibility that the Biblical writers simply interpreted natural disasters as God's punishments. I'm slightly, only slightly less sure about all of this now. As most of you know, I can readily change my theology on just about anything.
At times I wonder, ever so slightly, whether we are feeling something of the legendary wrath of God. Why is the U.S. being hit with this virus harder than anyone else? There are the obvious answers, like people not wearing masks and not social distancing. But could there be something more? Why is this happening at the same time that the Black Lives Matter movement is making the beneficiaries of white privilege, like me, much more aware of systemic racism in our country than we ever were before? Perhaps the retort to that question is that the punishment of Coronavirus is hitting minorities even worse than white people. If God is punishing us, God is not doing a very good job of selection.
Why is Coronavirus happening at a time when we are rescinding environmental laws with terrible results for biological life and diversity, and for our progeny? Are the two coincidental? Is there a scientific explanation we just don't know yet? God wouldn't have anything to do with this, would God?
It seems like only in the last couple of decades have preachers and scholars come to realize a fuller meaning of the story of Noah's ark. It's a story about ecology, God punishes the evil of humans with a natural disaster. The animals are innocent of human evil. God uses as human family to save all the species, all of them. God values the animal species. We seem not to.
Is the coronavirus our flood? Animals aren't getting it (with a few very minor exceptions). Do we, the current human family, need to start building a new global ark to save species rather than drive them to extinction?
The cliche is, "Prayer changes things." Moses persuaded God not to destroy the Israelites, and God listened (Exodus 32). Let us pray for God to use whatever means God will for us to escape the utter destruction of this viral flood.
Faithfully,
Christian
1 comment:
The questions in your blog led me to think of Psalm 8 and I don’t think the Psalmist was even remotely aware of the vastness and different components of the universe. We could equate natural disasters with human evils, but which disaster is caused by evil and which is not. Was aids the result of homosexual activity as thought by some a few decades ago? Another example would be the 1918 flu pandemic. Thus, how to consider the Coronavirus as connected to current environmental practices is unclear to me. Perhaps you can expand on several points of this blog.
Post a Comment