Praying for People During the Outbreak

ht to Adam for this wonderful Instagram post from Mockingbird Ministries – actually it is from @mamascondon but her account is private. This is a beautiful list that I find very compelling and challenging.

Tapestry & COVID-19

Below is the letter concerning Tapestry & COVID-19 that the Leadership Team & I are conveying to Tapestry right now. I’m posting this to as many church-related places as possible. Technically my blog isn’t a church thing but I figured I would post it here too just in case it reaches one more person.

The letter is below.

Hey ‘Threads”,

Just trying to keep you updated on Tapestry and COVID-19. We will attempt to keep everyone informed through the church website (sptapestry.org) and Facebook page (facebook.com/sptapestry/). Here is the current information:

1. Remember the hope you have in Christ. While we need to be smart, we do not have to live in fear because we have hope in Christ. Therefore, we need to live in and demonstrate that hope, while we also should take normal safety precautions.

2. Take precautions.

  • Wash your hands for 20 seconds frequently 
  • Avoid touching your face.
  • As much as I hate to say it, avoid shaking hands and hugging. Show your love for one another in non-touching manners.
  • If you are sick or have symptoms please don’t come to church, but do please let someone on the Leadership Team know (Cory, Ellyn, Pete, and Robert) so that we can be there for you. You will be missed at church, but the most loving thing you can do is to not come to church if you are sick.
  • Avoid large gatherings of people in close proximity – right now the state recommendation is to avoid gatherings of 250 people or more, so this does not mean canceling our weekly gathering as of yet.

3. At this time we are still doing our regular meetings. If that changes we will notify everyone through the church webpage and Facebook page. If we have to cancel our normal weekly gatherings we will make other arrangements to keep each other focused on Christ, encouraged, and safe.

4. Check-in with someone – call them, message them, email them, etc. Loneliness is a real problem in our world and the coronavirus is going to glaringly reveal this already present problem. So be the bride of Christ and reach into each other’s loneliness and remind one another of the triune God, the God Who reveals Himself in relationship. Do this for others outside the church too.

5. PRAY – This is actually what I would like to recommend first, but I am placing it last because of the tendency to over-spiritualize things to the point that praying to our Holy God doesn’t change our daily actions and keeps us from making preparations. The theologian Karl Barth said about prayer that “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.” When we pray to our mighty God He changes things and that usually begins with us. In this situation I believe praying to God will keep us from giving in to the destructive behavior that often comes out of fear.

As a church, we will be sanitizing more than we normally do – wiping down often touched surfaces and following the CDC faith community recommendations (found HERE). If you would like to help sanitize Sunday morning we would love your help.

Otherwise, glorify God by being the awesome group of people you are and I’ll let you know if things change within Tapestry.

In His love and Mine,

Robert

Washing Hands to the Doxology … And COVID-19

First, a hat-tip to my friend Joy who posted the above video.

Second, since we end Tapestry‘s worship gatherings with the Doxology each week I am going to have a difficult time not thinking of this when we end our gatherings. 🙂

Third, let’s talk about COVID-19 again, because, well, everything is about it now. 🙂

Okay, not really but I do want to talk about being “so heavenly minded that you are no earthly good” for a second. You may have heard that phrase before. It was used a good bit when I was in seminary the first time. Not as much the second time but I hope that may have been because most of the students in the D.Min program were older and had already learned that lesson. What has sparked this subject in my mind is a tweet that has been making the rounds in the group of people I follow on Twitter. It is from Own Strachan, a professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary – one of our SBC seminaries I did not attend.

Here’s the tweet:

He goes only to listed 6 other actions that you should do in order to prepare for coronavirus. The problem is that NOT A SINGLE ONE of them involves washing your hands or doing anything that would actually help you prepare for, or more importantly avoid, infection from the COVID-19 virus. Obviously he gets roasted for not mentioning hand washing.

I think my favorite response is this snarky use of scripture.

I mean seriously, that is a pretty awesome snarky scriptural response.

I don’t really have a problem with Strachan’s use of the COVID-19 virus to encourage us to ask deeper questions about our lives. In my opinion, the challenges we face should cause us to think more about what our lives are all about, and I believe our lives are all about connecting with God and through Him connecting with those created in His image. So I like the fact that he uses this moment to encourage us to think deeper, it is just that his encouragement pretty much divorces people from our lives here rather than recognizing that God wants to start that eternal relationship with us now in the nitty-gritty of everyday life. Jesus healed people in the present while preaching the eternal.

C.S. Lewis wrote:

The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven.

It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.

Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.”

Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 134.

Our faith should draw heaven into the present around us, not remove us from that present. Those of us who are believers that Jesus is Lord are ambassadors of His kingdom. We represent His kingdom while we live in the kingdoms around us. Because we believe in the Lord of Host we begin to live out His practices in our everyday lives. We don’t have to fear death from the COVID-19 virus, or anything else, because of the trust we have in Jesus, and therefore we can wash our hands and help those who might be afraid. We get to over them help in the present and the eternal. We get to run into the crisis because we are not afraid, rather than running away from it, and if you are running into a virus crisis you wash your hands regularly so that you can continue demonstrating hope in the midst of fear.

Therefore, let the COVID-19 virus lead you to wash your hands OFTEN and think about what life is all about. Be so heavenly minded that you WASH YOUR HANDS!

The Heretic Group & Responding to COVID-19

covid virus

Thanks to my friend Andy Lickel I belong to a coffee group on Tuesday mornings that is focused on the interaction of science and faith. They jokingly refer to themselves as “the Heretics”. I really enjoy the conversations each week because these are some people with significantly greater knowledge of science than I have and strong faith in Jesus Christ as Lord. We belong to various churches in town so that also makes for an interesting discussion. I cannot stress enough how much I like listening to these friends. In fact, the only problem I have with the group is that we meet at Starbucks, which isn’t my favorite coffee. We are talking about origins at present – a pretty consistent theme within this group.

Today, I repeated for discussion a statement/question that I know one of their pastors has asked during his current sermon series on origins. The statement/question was “you have to ask yourself ‘why did God put this into the text?'” I think it is a good question, primarily because of a verse from John’s gospel. John ends his gospel by telling us why certain things were included in the gospel and why certain things were not included (after all, we don’t really have any discussion in the gospels concerning Jesus’s favorite snack, and I assume He has one). John writes:

… but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.

John 20:31

So what is in scripture is there that we might believe in Jesus and “belief” in scripture isn’t just mental assent, A scriptural understanding of “belief” is more like trust that influences how we live. To use a Chuck Colson book title to explain this – when we read scripture we need to ask ourselves “‘ Why God put this into the text’ and ‘How Now We Shall Live‘ because of what God put into the text?” Reading scripture is like a call & response hymn, God places something in the text and we respond in our lives to what the Spirit has taught us.

Basically, If you profess Jesus as Lord I don’t really care what you believe about creation if it doesn’t cause you to better lead a life of trust in Jesus … and I don’t think God does either. I believe the creation story should cause us to live in a manner that reflects that we see God’s fingerprints all around us and we see and respond to the image of our Lord (the Imago Dei) in our fellow humans.

So if you are a Christian who says with the Apostles’ Creed ” I believe in God, the father almighty, creator of heaven and earth”, and therefore believe that God placed His image on humanity, it should affect how you respond to the current COVID-19 crisis and specifically those caught in the crisis.

But instead, many Christians are responding to the crisis in fear rather than seeing and responding to God’s image. We’ve been here before folks, at the precipice of fear or faith, and very often those who claim that Jesus is their Lord have responded poorly to the temptation to live out of fear instead of faith. Remember Ebola? We had the chance to respond in faith and many in the church gave into fear.

I posted about the Ebola fear here.

I’m not meaning by this that having faith means not taking appropriate precautions – having faith doesn’t mean that. It does, however, mean not allowing your fear of a danger to keeps you from responding to the image of God in your fellow human. This past Sunday we at Tapestry slightly changed our normal method of doing the Lord’s Supper so as to lower the risk of spreading anything infectious. It is okay to take precautions. It isn’t okay to be overcome by fear to the point that we fail to see and respond to the image of God in our fellow humans.

We are still called to be with the “least of these” in the midst of the danger of the COVID-19 danger because when we look at those who might be infected, or merely come from a region that we for some reason or another association with COVID-19, we see the eyes of our Lord and know that how we respond to them is how we respond to our Lord. Because what we believe is supposed to shape how we respond.

I believe and I preach at Tapestry that God created humanity as image-bearers. Therefore, when I look at my fellow human I see a reflection of my Lord and what I do or don’t do for them I do or don’t do for Him.