Corona Virus Kingdom of God

A few days ago, my pastor asked if I wanted to preach the sermon today.  I said sure.  He'll do the rest of the liturgy, the skeleton crew of a choir will sing, and I will preach.

The easy route would be to talk about Doubting Thomas, to be smug about how we didn't see Christ in person, but we believe, and we're so much better than Thomas.  I will not be taking that route.

What leapt out at me as I read it was verse 22, where Jesus breathes on the disciples.  How will we react to the lack of social distancing?

I've decided to create a parable; if Jesus walked among us right now, Jesus would use the virus as a teaching moment, a symbol.  I want to talk about the Kingdom of God as a virus.

Many of us will react the way that Jesus' contemporaries reacted to Jesus saying that believers are like yeast.  Today we love yeasted bread.  In fact, many of us are exploring the possibilities of yeasted bread in ways we haven't done since the 70's.  But to Jesus' contemporaries, they would see yeast as something wild, an outside influence, that contaminates the dough.

How might Jesus use the idea of a virus to teach us about God?  How can we be like a virus?

Many of the parables of Jesus start in a place of smallness.  Think of the mustard seed, or any seed--the tiny thing that grows at first with no one noticing, and then it becomes a huge tree.

When I first went to the Johns Hopkins website that tracks COVID-19 cases, there were just over 6,000 cases in the U.S.  This morning, there are 733, 287 cases.  Imagine what the world would look like if, instead of spreading sickness, the ethics of Jesus were sweeping across the planet.  Imagine how our world would be different.

The last few months have taught us a math lesson that some of us never learned.  We've seen the power of exponential growth.  But we've also learned a lesson about the power of personal contact.

The virus can't spread on its own.  It depends on human contact, on close proximity.  Likewise, the Kingdom of God depends on us to spread it.  And it's not necessarily just by words.  Like a sick person can spread the virus even before there are symptoms, we can spread the Good News that Jesus gives us just by living our lives according to those principals.

But just like a virus can be stopped, the Good News of God's Kingdom can be stopped too.  Some times, it's the actions of those who proclaim, when the behavior doesn't match the values professed.  Some times, the attractions of non-Kingdom life win our attention.  Some years, we're too steeped in grief, loss, and hard times for the Kingdom to bloom fully.

Let us return to the Easter message.  Let us remember that death doesn't have the final answer.  We'll learn a way to vanquish this virus.  But unlike the virus, the Kingdom of God expands, often in ways we don't see or don't understand when we do see them.  In this way, we're like Thomas with all his doubts.

But Thomas gets a second chance when he thrusts his hands into the wounds of Jesus.  God comes to be with us, in all of our human messiness.  We, too, get second and third and fourth chances, as many as we need.

Again and again, the Kingdom of God commits to resurrection.  We're invited to do that too.