Faith in the Age of Coronavirus

“I will ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I will fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I will avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infest 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 will not avoid place or person but will go freely…” See, this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy…

I read these words of advice this week. They were timely in light of the rise of COVID-19 to pandemic proportions. (Bonus if you know where these words are from without reading ahead.) They didn’t come from Twitter or Facebook. They aren’t from a blog or magazine. I didn’t hear them in a sermon or podcast. They came from a much older, much lower-tech age. They are the words of the great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, in an open letter with his thoughts about the proper response of Christians during an outbreak of the bubonic plague.

Admittedly, the stakes we are facing with the coronavirus are not as high as those of the black death, but I find that the major themes of Martin Luther’s advice still stand today.

1. Do not be consumed by fear. Luther prays—for God’s protection and intervention—and refuses to be controlled by fear. I’ve said often that as Christians our actions in such situations should be governed by faith plus facts, not by fear. We can face the world with realism (facts) but not be dominated by fear because we have faith in a good and powerful God. This does not mean we don’t take appropriate precautions (see more below), but it does mean we do not need to succumb to panic. This rejection of fear may be easier for some of us than others, but even for those of us who suffer from anxiety, it is the goal. We hold the steadfastness of God’s faithfulness and grace in front of our eyes, and we cling to the resurrection hope he offers us, even if we must remind ourselves of these things moment by moment.

2. Love your neighbor. Luther hinges his entire argument on the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” In his day, that meant a willingness to risk contracting the plague yourself if your neighbor was in need of spiritual comfort or of physical care. Today, it may still mean those things or may take other forms. It may mean running errands or going to the store for a “neighbor” who is of higher risk. It may mean supporting families with children or college students who have had their schools shut down. It may mean speaking up against a hateful or racist comment or act toward an Asian or Asian-American (yes, it’s happening). It may mean checking in on someone who lives alone during a quarantine. It may be a note or a phone call to someone who is ill or anxious.

Think about your situation, your neighborhood, your church community, and use your imagination. As we walk through the next days, weeks, and months, let this be what shapes your thoughts and your actions: how can I love my neighbor today?

Luther mentions one other way to love your neighbor that remains particularly pertinent today:

3. Love your neighbor by taking care of yourself. I have heard people shrug off concern over the coronavirus outbreak because it’s only dangerous for the elderly or immunocompromised. I have heard them downplay its significance because it won’t do much harm to someone young and relatively healthy—like them, like me. This is not driven by a love of neighbor. We are given an opportunity to suffer inconvenience for the sake of caring for those who may be vulnerable. We are given a simple way to protect and affirm the dignity of their lives and health.

So, we follow the advice given to us by the medical community at the moment. For starters, we wash our hands (seriously, please do this). We don’t go out if there’s a possibility we’re sick. As they come, we honor the recommendations and restrictions put in place for “social distancing” to slow the spread of the virus enough for the medical community to not become overloaded, putting even more people unnecessarily at risk. (If you haven’t seen the “flattening the curve” chart yet, you can look at it here. It gives a good visual for why this is necessary.) We do these things not out of fear or hysteria. We do them because it is a simple way to love our neighbors who could suffer “as a result of [our] negligence,” in Luther’s words.

Each day, we face a new onslaught of news reports, statistics, diagrams, and hot takes about the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s easy to get swept up in it all. But this is my adopted approach, and I would encourage you to put it into practice as well. Faith and facts, not fear. This means I spend time praying. It means I make sure I am getting good information (facts) to guide my understanding and actions related to this virus (unless you are an infectious disease specialist, it’s a time worth listening to the professionals). But above all it means I seek to love my neighbor as myself, just as Jesus commanded.

Neighbors Who Make Me Belong

We rounded the corner, and I felt victorious. I held a garishly orange spoon in my right hand and a waxy cup heaped with a creamy frozen delight in my left. The shop on our block was giving away free frozen yogurt. One of my favorite words—free. I would have walked down for nearly any free treat. But frozen yogurt? What a steal. 

We walked along the wide walkway. It was once a narrow lane, but they’d closed it off for pedestrians years ago. Now it was covered with carefully laid brick. We passed the gift shop with its nautical eccentricities and a clothing store with price tags I could hardly afford to look at. We passed the candy shop, which I somehow managed rarely to enter. We came to the stairwell that led up to our apartment. Our neighbors stood at the bottom: a thin woman with platinum hair and her sometimes live-in boyfriend. They were out for an evening smoke. 

I pointed excitedly at my bowl of frozen yogurt. “The shop around the corner is giving away frozen yogurt,” I said, eager to share our exciting discovery. “They’re open until eight.” 

They looked at me. They looked perplexed. Cautious. Concerned over my excitement perhaps. Or that I was speaking to them in complete sentences. 

“Huh,” our neighbor said. It was a glorified grunt. 

“Well, have a good night,” I said, as Scott and I started up the stairs. I wasn’t sure how to respond. 

We laugh about this now. (I mean, really, who grunts dismissively when told about free frozen yogurt within walking distance?) At the time, it only added to our feeling of isolation. We were newly married, in a new town, with neighbors who barely made eye contact. We were realizing how much we craved a place to belong, how much we missed our roots. 

In my childhood, our neighbor across the street raised sheep. In the spring, I would walk across the slow road to see the lambs. Their new wool stood out white against the grass’ spring growth. The older sheep were hardly so delicate or so white. Their coats were yellowed from dirt and age, and they would push against the decrepit rails of the fence until they collapsed. My dad would find them grazing along the road—the grass had been greener, or taller at least. He would help our neighbor, who was too frail to do all of the pushing, to get the stubborn sheep back into the pen. By then his wife had died, his daughter lived in the city, and his son was often away. He lived in a few rooms in the old brick farmhouse. 

Across the street was another elderly neighbor. In the summer, I jumped on the trampoline with her granddaughter, who was one of my only occasional playmates in the area. In the winters, my dad and I would trek over after each snowstorm to shovel her out. We’d scrape the snow from her car and clear a path to her door. Her front porch often got a layer as well, and I’d carefully clear the green-coated concrete. She would always appear a few days later with a plastic bag from the local market. It would be ice cream or a pie—some little treat to say thank you. 

Our driveway was cleared on those snowy days by the man who shared the border with our backyard. Our dogs would play together when I was small. He and his wife had two chocolate labs: Fred and Barney. I don’t remember what happened to them. He called me “Termite.” He still occasionally calls me Termite, in those few times Scott and I make a trip home in the summer. In the years when we still had a gravel driveway, he would come to plow us out when those snowstorms hit. He sat high on his John Deere as he pushed the snow into heaps in the turnaround. He would never take money. So we continued the train of culinary thanks and made him chocolate chip cookies. The smell of them baking under my mother’s watchful eye is so linked with a snowstorm that even today I instinctively have an urge to bake when the snow starts falling. 

We all took care of each other. It was a place I belonged. It made me from a place. 

About a year after the grunting incident, we moved to a New Hampshire town. Within a few days of moving in, our next door neighbors walked over while I was unloading the car. They introduced themselves. They shook my hand. We chatted about the neighborhood and about where we’d come from. In the years that have followed, we’ve watched out for each other. We’ve commiserated over the weather. I’ve walked over some of my snowstorm-cookies. She’s come over to make use of our printer. And we’ve kept talking. 

Some, I suppose, would find this intrusive. The chattiness might make them squirm. But me...it makes me feel at home.