Pandemics, recessions and Ilam
I’m hugely indebted to Malcolm McKellar for his Facebook post a couple of weeks back mentioning Tom Wright’s book “God and the Pandemic” – which I had read about, but not obtained and read. It is a thoroughly worthwhile short book, and puts many things in perspective around our response to the current pandemic! (If you haven’t read anything from Tom Wright before, this is a good one to get a feel for how he makes the Bible make sense, cutting through a lot of religious garbage along the way.)
Earlier in the year, the theme of many of our services was around the Acts church – and we watched how the early Christian church had to be attentive to what was happening around them as their situation changed dramatically, and how they learned to be interpreters of the times and, from there, were able to be responsive to what was going on. I am convinced still that that is who we need to “be” as church in our 21st century well – attentive interpreters and responders.
However, I felt chastened reading Tom Wright. A few weeks back I got us to look at the Antioch church in Acts 11 and 13 – and I totally overlooked probably the best example of attentiveness and responsiveness in Acts. Right at the end of Acts 11, we read about a prophetic warning of a famine to come (a bit different from a pandemic, perhaps, but not that different in some ways from an economic recession). This is what Tom Wright writes:
It was around this time that travelling prophets arrived in Antioch from Jerusalem. One of them, named Agabus, stood up and told the assembly what the Spirit had revealed to him. There would, he announced, be a great famine over the whole world. These things happened from time to time, as they had done nearly two millennia earlier, bringing Jacob and his family to Egypt. Luke comments that the famine actually took place in the reign of Claudius (i.e. ad 41–54). We know from other historical sources of more than one serious famine in that period. So what do the Antioch Jesus-followers say? They do not say either ‘This must be a sign that the Lord is coming back soon!’ or ‘This must mean that we have sinned and need to repent’ –or even ‘this will give us a great opportunity to tell the wider world that everyone has sinned and needs to repent’. Nor do they start a blame-game, looking around at the civic authorities in Syria, or the wider region, or even the Roman empire, to see whose ill-treatment of the eco-system, or whose tampering with food distribution networks, might have contributed to this dangerous situation. They ask three simple questions: Who is going to be at special risk when this happens? What can we do to help? And who shall we send?
Some might look at this and think, Well, that’s pretty untheological as a response. It’s just pragmatic. But that would actually be the really ‘untheological’ response. Here we stumble upon one of the great principles of the kingdom of God –the principle that God’s kingdom, inaugurated through Jesus, is all about restoring creation the way it was meant to be. God always wanted to work in his world through loyal human beings. That is part of the point of being made ‘in God’s image’. So, just as when in John 9 Jesus says that the works of God are going to be revealed, and then goes to work himself, we can imagine the Antioch church figuring out prayerfully what God was doing –not why the famine was occurring but what was to be done to help –and realizing that what God was doing, he was going to do through them. That is part of believing in the work of the Holy Spirit. They were a busy and apparently prosperous church; the Jerusalem church was poor and (sporadically) persecuted. So the first two questions weren’t hard. Then it was just a matter of prayerfully considering who to send. This is the kind of thing that Paul has in mind, I think, when he later writes to the Roman Christians that God works with and through those who love him to bring all things to a good end (Romans 8.28).
What do we need to be attentive to right now? And how can we, as Ilam Baptist Church, best respond? How about we do some thinking – aloud?