COVID/ week 6
This was originally shared with my team of worship volunteers, in the sixth week of the COVID lockdowns in our area, after the lockdowns had been extended.
In Isaiah 43, God says through the prophet Isaiah, “Behold! I am doing a new thing.” He was referring to the change from the old Jewish sacrificial system to a new sacrifice, a new covenant, a new people in Christ. But one truth this passage shows us is that God can interrupt the old way of doing things to inject new life, new purpose, new expectation among his people. New expectant soil, new opportunity to sew, new seed to bear new fruit to ultimately honor him, growing his kingdom. COVID has been a major life-interruption. I hope to God we’re seeing the very last of it, after over 56,000 deaths (that’s 19 individual 9/11’s—there is no minimizing the tragedy of what has taken place). God can take an evil like that and turn it into a good somehow. This we believe!
As I thought about this truth, the truth of Romans 8:28, “that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose,” it suddenly struck me. How often do we settle for balance? How often do we say, “If things would just calm down, or level out…” How often do we pray for peace, expecting peace to be just normalcy? And is this what’s really good for us? God wants to work all things for the good, not for the “back to normal."
There is a Buddhist idea called equanimity, which effectively means anchoredness, holding firm between two volatile states of unrest. The Buddha described the process of finding equanimity as “holding your seat" between, for example, “the winds of hope and fear.” In his view, equanimity was the anchoring of your self between, “I really hope this will work out,” and, “I’m afraid this won’t work out.” It’s more than just finding a peaceful balance, it’s a willful act of posturing yourself steady in the middle of two storms: The dark cloud of fear, and the restless, rustling winds of hope in a time of change.
There’s something we can learn from this dichotomy between hope and fear. How often are our hopes just hidden fears? For example, I often hope I’ll be able to stay on the right path to continue dieting and exercising—I hope to lose 100lbs—but if I’m being honest, this hope of mine is rooted in a deeply unsettling fear that I’ll grow old as the chubby guy I’ve always been! I hope things we can have church the way we used to before the quarantine, but I fear things will never be the same.
A truer hope is one that has no anxiety-modifier attached. When I say, “I hope I lose 100lbs”—knowing I’ll kinda hate myself until I do it—that’s not a true hope. A truer hope is, “I hope I can make some progress,” knowing that an upward trend-line can be traced over countless instances of individual successes and failures. A truer hope for our church right now might be, “I hope we’ve learned some lessons through this time of quarantine,” perhaps.
I believe there’s a lot to learn from Buddhism. I had a very evangelical Old Testament professor who said, “All truth is God’s truth,” and I believe that. Wherever there is truth, God is to be credited for it. But thankfully, we aren’t Buddhists—we’re believers. The only hope Buddhism offers is the possibility of equanimity—a seat in the storm. Christianity offers Jesus, who calms the storm.
As believers in Jesus, we’ve been given the greatest hope for life, in the words “All good.” As I quoted above, Romans 8:28 says, “All things work together for the good.” All good. We don’t have to find a seat in the balance between uncertain hopes and fears. We can trust that all hopes will work toward our good, as all fears will work toward our good! To add, even the spirit of hoping and fearing will work toward our good, along with the things gone un-hoped for out of modesty or out of ignorance. It will all work toward our good. All things, all good.
In Buddhism, there is no god (they believe that god is all and is in all, as all are in god—it’s called panentheism). The benefit of having God—the only God—as our god is that we can attach his promises to his name. God often swears by his own name as he makes a promise in Scripture. Hebrews 6:13 says, “Since he could swear by no one greater, he swore by himself.” As believers in Christ, we can go to God and say, “God, you promised this, you swore it by your name. I believe it, I’m claiming it, it is mine.” After all, as Paul says in his second letter to the Corinthians, “In Christ, all the promises of God find their ‘Yes,’ and through Christ we say ‘let it be’ to the glory of God.”