From a Distance

I have been dealing with a lot of thoughts about how to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic as a pastor.  There have been some difficult decisions to make for sure.  At the end of last week, I asked the Session to vote to suspend all "in person" activities of the Church.  They agreed unanimously, for this I was grateful, because as of that moment we were ahead of the curve on this issue.  Our Presbytery had given us a recommendation, but as of the end of last week government had not provided the leadership we really need in moments like this.
Over the weekend I kept feeling more strongly that our decision had been the right one.  Every time I saw a doctor or an epidemiologist say that this "social distancing" practice is the only way we currently have to prevent the pandemic from becoming an event of tragic proportions.  There is no cure, there is no treatment really, we don't even have adequate testing capability (again thanks to denial and an attempt to minimize this crisis by our almost unbelievably inept administration).  The only thing we can do is to bring everything to a screeching halt in the hopes of physically preventing the transmission of the COVID-19 virus.
I often joke that my undergraduate education served only one function: to give me a piece of paper that was necessary for admission to Seminary.  However, in the past week the things I know about biology, and (Lord help me) statistics were pretty useful in analyzing what data we have available.  I know what an exponential growth curve looks like on paper, and in instances of contagion like this one, you get to see it in full horror-show mode.  The science of this thing was pretty clear a while ago, unfortunately we have made rather a habit of ignoring science when it comes to areas where we hold certain pathological "beliefs."  Our economic interest has been strangling our scientific response to climate change for 20 years.  COVID-19 just raised our temperature in a much more immediate and undeniable way than greenhouse gasses.
Even though it is not terribly scientific, it was the cancellation of the NCAA tournament that really snapped me out of the "keep calm and wash your hands" mentality.  It was the notion that something that stood to generate revenue in excess of one billion dollars would just be flat called off that made me think that maybe this wasn't just another chicken little moment.  I will admit that when it comes to weather events and other such impending doom I tend towards skepticism.  I was going down that road with this one too, but thankfully something told me to avoid that trap.
This virus has actually weaponized our own ability to keep calm and carry on against us.  It uses our greatest strength as a species: our social nature, as a tool to propagate itself as surely as the virus hijacks our cells to procreate.  Most of our strategies for survival involve banding together into communal structures and institutions that can give us the collective resources we need to surmount challenges.  This requires that as well, but somehow we must figure out how to do that from a distance.  So while in the face of wars and famines the church has often been a place of sanctuary and rallying together, in this crisis we have to tell people to stay away.  It seems wrong, but it's not.
The word pastor is derived from the pastoral role of a shepherd.  Everything in a shepherd's world would indicate that keeping the sheep together is the best way to keep them safe, except for in this case that's the opposite of the truth.  In the face of this, some new things are necessary, and maybe they have been necessary for a while.  We need to learn to use all the communications tools we have available, we need to consider what community really looks like in the face of a challenge like this, because something tells me this won't be the last time we face a problem like this.