Monday Morning Music Ministry

1-4-21

Regarding the pandemic that has been plaguing the world, many references are made to the Spanish flu of 1918-19. That wave of influenza devastated Europe and North America, overlapping the devastation of history’s bloodiest war to date.

We can note two things. One, as with the Spanish flu, many of the world’s most horrible plagues, epidemics, infections, pandemics, and deadly forms of death, have been accompanied by wars and violent societal dislocations. It is grim logic to suggest that plagues can precipitate disruptions among populations, and just as easy to suppose that, say, the de-populations caused by some wars (more than half of some towns during the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, for instance) brought about changes to arable land, differences in public health, even reforestation and climate change.

Then, some of history’s most famous plagues and diseases (many with bizarre, color-related names like Black Death, Yellow Fever, “Ring Around the Rosy…”) proceeded in some years to kill half the people in Europe.

The other aspect we may note, after the gruesome partnership of malignant effects on physical health and societal health, is the relatively few respites the world has enjoyed from these plagues. When the Spanish flu of a century ago is mentioned, few people realize what a blessing it has been – relatively speaking, of course – for the world to have been spared major health disasters for a century. The swine flu, the bird flu, the Asian flu, and few “Biblical” or Medieval-type epidemics, have been visited upon us for a century.

A very long list of major plagues, mostly in the northern hemisphere, mostly emanating in the Far East and moving westward, can be compiled starting in the 1300s. Some were localized to mere wide swaths of land; some covered entire continents. The effects on people? Obviously, adjustments in migration and living patterns. Clearly, books like Boccaccio’s Decameron and Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. Less clear is whether waves of religiosity and piety, or skepticism and humanism, were peoples’ direct reactions.

A history lesson is salubrious, no? There will be no quiz next week, but knowledge is power. I am not a fear-monger, and after almost a millennium we should as desperate for lessons as we are for cures.

On the brink of vaccines whose palliative properties, and side effects, we can in no wise predict, I am persuaded that a look backward, and not only forward, is healthy too. The future is hazy; the past is clear. 2020 vision, I am tempted to invite… except farther back. In fact we may profitably adopt some manners of inquiry that have been considered outré for a long time; regarded as anti-science, even superstitious. But scientists generally ask how something started and how it might be treated; doctors ask how to treat and cure things.

But students of the Bible, believers in God, and theologians ask (or they should ask) why. Many of the judgments of God – I should say the laws and requirements that brought judgments under the Old Testament – were answered by the Person and the work of Jesus at Calvary.

Yet we are not free to sin. Although the law has been fulfilled, the commandments were not made to be broken.

Which mean that I think it is legitimate – no, imperative – for Christians to ask whether God can bring punishments, warnings, lessons, on His children. And the answer is “of course.” The Bible even tell us that God chastises especially those whom He loves.

Uh-oh.

Have we, in the Christian West, plausibly have earned His disappointment, His anger, even His wrath? In this generation, this century, the “advancement” of civilization? Are we serving Him better, are we more faithful… or less so? Has society – has the Church itself – grown closer to the Word; or more secular, more humanist, more relativist?

Do we, perhaps, deserve His chastisement?

Can you picture that a Holy God might grieve over a perverse and lost generation? Wouldn’t you? God has not threatened us, as much as explained to us, that chastisement will come in the case of spiritual infidelity. And as Lincoln quoted and believed to his core, quoting Scripture, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Can something as horrible as COVID be sent by God as a judgment?

The answer has to be found in another citation by Lincoln that “the Almighty has His own purposes.” And we remember the very plausible fact  that humans often bring problems upon ourselves.

Whether we ever find a cure for that tendency… leaves us wondering. We have not learned yet. Have we learned, alternatively, that when such problems come, as they will, that our first tendency should not be to look to governments, or drug laboratories, for help, but upward to our Heavenly Father, for forgiveness?

And inward, to our flawed souls. To this lost and perverse generation.

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A friend came around, Tried to clean up this town; His ideas made some people mad. He trusted his crowd, So he spoke right out loud; And they lost the best friend they had.

Click: Sin City