The Spirituality of Quarantine
Matthew 4:1-11
Emmanuel Baptist Church
March 22, 2020; Rev. Kathy Donley
For the last two years, we have been trying to simplify our church life. We scaled down our governance structure. We wanted to be doing what was most important and not just perpetuating practices that didn’t serve us well any more. Coordinating Council and Exec Team have had a LOT of conversations about how to accomplish this. One idea came to us through the American Baptist Mission Summit, which several of you attended last summer when I was on sabbatical. It was suggested that we might try what another church did. For one year, I think it was, this church stopped all of their programming, all of their activities, except for Sunday morning worship. They quit having choir practice and business meetings and Bible study and youth group and Men’s and Women’s luncheons. They held on to just two things – weekly worship and a Friday night group that shared a meal and studied the parables together. That was it.
After a year of that simpler communal life, they emerged with a clearer vision of what was essential for their faith community, what God was calling them to be in this time. KM heard that story in a session that she attended at Biennial and shared it with us. We kicked it around a little bit, but ultimately it seemed that not enough people thought we should try it. We couldn’t see our way clear to stopping all the things that we were doing.
But that was then . . . and this is now. Now it seems that, ready or not, like it or not, we are doing what that church did. We did not choose this, but we have an opportunity to live in a radically different way for a season and to see what we can learn from it.
There are some parallels between our situation and that of the Christians in the fourth century. “It was a time when faithful Christians started leaving the cities for the deserts of Egypt and Syria. They lived alone in small dwellings they called cells. The movement gained momentum when the Emperor Constantine converted and Christians were no longer targets of persecution. These desert fathers and mothers were trying to preserve their faith from corruption. They saw the life of the Empire as a kind of infection, highly contagious and dangerous to those who wanted to follow in the way of Jesus. So, they placed themselves in quarantine, away from the influence of Roman life. They practiced solitude as a way of getting back to a pure sense of what it meant to be a people of faith. From this perspective and distance, they saw themselves and the world more clearly.”[1]
That description comes from my friend Vince Amlin who is calling it “the spirituality of quarantine” right now. In other times, we would probably call this the spiritual discipline of solitude. Those early Christians didn’t make it up. In much of scripture, the wilderness was a place of encounter and discovery, a place where God could be found and where identity and vocation might be revealed. Throughout his earthly ministry, Jesus practiced solitude. When the crowds pressed in on him, he responded with compassion, teaching, healing and feeding them, but over and over again, the gospels say that he withdrew to a lonely place to pray. Perhaps the best example is in the story we just read. Before launching his public ministry, Jesus spent 40 days alone in the desert. Mark’s version of this story includes the fact that he was with the wild animals.
All alone, in the heat of the day and the chill of the night, with wild animals, for 40 days. That would be challenging for most of us. Most of us would have taken along food and a camping stove. Most of us would need to speak to another human being before a week went by. Most of us would be afraid. At some point, our decision-making capabilities would not be very strong. And so, when the temptations came, it would be easier to just give in. In a longer sermon, I might have more to say about those temptations. Today, it seems to me that they are mostly about Jesus needing to exercise control over his situation. To feed his own hunger, to prove that he had some power, to demonstrate that the dangers in the desert weren’t really all that dangerous to him.
What we see here is the human Jesus wrestling with the limits of humanity. Our temptations most often come when we are tired or hungry or afraid. And we often respond by attempting to exercise control. That’s what happened in all the stores this week. We may not be able to contain the virus, but by gum, we can try to have enough toilet paper.
As the seriousness of the pandemic was becoming known, someone told me that he felt completely powerless without a vaccine or a known treatment. I sympathized, but I also thought that only recently have humans thought we could control so many things.
Donleys are particularly susceptible to ear infections. My brother and I got them repeatedly as children. So did my father. My father got them every winter of his life growing up before penicillin was developed. He has scars behind his ears from surgery for mastoiditis. His baby sister died from it. Because my brother and I had antibiotics, we never had the same sense of fear about those infections that my father and his siblings did, but we are only one generation removed from that time.
We are facing a pandemic and the fear is real and legitimate. Many of the daily activities that usually keep us busy and distracted aren’t available to us right now. For some of us, life has become too quiet. For others, there is too much family togetherness. And for many, the suspension of work has meant the suspension of income. All of that can be frightening. I won’t attempt to talk anyone out of your fear, but I do want to remind us that over and over and over again, the message of scripture is “do not be afraid.” I want to encourage us to hold on to our courage and confidence so that we can continue to offer hope and compassion to each other.
This season we have the opportunity to practice the spirituality of quarantine. In our solitude, let us resist the temptation to grasp for the illusion of control. Instead may we seek to live into the reality of our own powerlessness. “There are things we cannot change, cannot fix, cannot solve or predict; but instead of fear, we can learn the peace that comes from an openness to God’s care, God’s presence and God’s good purposes.” [2]
Solitude does not have to mean loneliness. Please let us love our neighbors by staying inside and not spreading the virus, but also by reaching out, not with our hands, but with our hearts and our words. We are a mostly a congregation of introverts. Maybe one good thing we can learn this Lent is how to use the telephone again. Look around and notice who is here and who is not. Tomorrow or Tuesday, call someone who is not here. Just let them know they were missed. Remember that the most apostolic duty of all is to keep one another’s courage up.
In other Lenten seasons, I have invoked the image of wilderness metaphorically. I have done it for good reason, but it often felt contrived to speak of wilderness when we were surrounded by busy abundance. This year it does not. This year the uncharted territory and the unknowns of wilderness seem to capture so much of our lived experience. It seems that we might know the deepest Lent ever if we can stay present to it. We have an opportunity to live in a radically different way for a season and to see what we can learn from it. I hope we will.
[1] As described by the Rev. Vince Amlin in his sermon on March 15, 2020 at Bethany UCC, Chicago https://www.facebook.com/BethanyChicagoUCC/videos/495939834646726/
[2] Brian Donst, in a sermon for March 22 shared to the Midrash list