A Reflection from the Rev. David Hoster
Dear People of St. James’,
The rising Covid graphs we see every day tell us that the virus is coming closer and closer to home. A few days ago, I learned that a beloved family friend I’ve known since I was four years old has died in her nursing home of Covid. I suspect that others in our congregation are having similar experience of personal connection to people suffering in the pandemic.
In March and April, it was celebrities or people in distant New York. In June and July, people we know. Soon, it might be you or me.
The closer mortality comes to our own door, the more urgent a single question becomes: What do I believe?
What do I believe that is strong enough to sustain me when sickness and death surround me? What do I believe that is not merely important, but essential to life itself? What do I believe, I mean really believe, when all my props and distractions are useless?
When Covid was more distant, we could believe in things that were, as I say, merely important—whether to wear a mask or not, whether to vote Republican or Democratic, whether a cause is critical enough to risk participating in a demonstration. When somebody with whom I share my soul has died, however, or when my own life is threatened, I am forced to ask a far more intimate and searching question—What do I believe God is to me? What do I believe I am to God? What are we, you and I, to one another?
Do I accept the evidence of my eyes that the universe cares nothing for me, that its virus sweeps away lives without remorse, that a God who would let this happen is no God at all? Or do I embrace the fierce evidence of my heart that my life, and the lives of those I love, really do matter to the warm, divine source of our lives and all that exists?
What do you believe?
What we know from the New Testament is that Jesus did not come to make us feel good, fix our problems, or smite our enemies. Jesus came to each of us to bring us alive in the fullness of our souls, to be people worthy to embrace life unbound by the narrow confines of earth.
Jesus wants to wake us up from our fixation on the death of the body to embrace the life of the soul.
Why else would God accept the lowest, meanest form of death there is, crucifixion, if not to show us how to believe that life is larger than death? Thus, even if I suffer modern day crucifixion—develop symptoms of Covid tonight, go to the hospital and die separated from my family and friends, end up mis-labeled in a refrigeration truck and buried anonymously in a mass grave—I believe that I am not lost because I am beloved by God and by you. I believe that your love for me is stronger than crucifixion itself, and I trust and pray you can believe the same of my love for you. Together, our love brings God alive within our bond.
Belief is investment. Love is investment. God is investment. We are being asked where we invest our lives. Thanks to Jesus’ mission and ministry we can invest ourselves in something stronger than our demoralization in the face of death. Can we love each other so fully that love will ignite our souls with a ferocity that will never let go, even if death tries to pry us apart from one another?
Today, right now, with death coming closer to our doors, it is the time to renew our investment in one another. We need to tell the people we love that we love them. We need to hear them when they return that love to us. Even if we can’t meet face to face, we need to be in communication, investing, loving, and never letting go. We’re not merely important to one another, as we thought in ordinary times. Pandemic conditions reveal that our love for each other is essential to our eternal life.
Love is the work of our lives as death comes near to our doors.
The Rev. David Hoster
