Excerpt from a message given at Durham Friends Meeting, May 10, 2020
…….It turns out we aren’t so different from the virus. It can’t exist by itself/on its own. But neither can we.
This is one lesson we’ve all been learning as we have been shut up in our homes, distancing ourselves from one another: that we need one another. But it’s more than that: we need each other in a relationship of love that connects us with God because that is what gives us life. The Gospel of John expresses this in a powerful metaphor: Jesus says:
4 Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.5 I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. 6 If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. …
But there is another lesson, harder, but at least as important about ‘being alive.’ In this time of virus, in this time of dying, it is easy to fall into thinking that ‘all living things are good.’ What lives is all part of God’s glory, all to be nurtured, all to be celebrated, all to be saved. It’s easy to think that — especially easy as spring blooms around us.
As we gather here separated from one another, however, we know this is not so. There are bits of creation that are not so good, and this virus is one of them. The cancers that afflict too many of us: they are another. Murder wasps: we’ve just started hearing about them. Black flies. Typhus and typhoid and smallpox. I mean all these things, but there’s more.
There are also bits of ourselves that live all too commonly within us, things that are not good: selfishness, pride, envy, greed, wrath – things like that. These things become a part of us all too easily, and they are things that should not live within us. We might think of them as like a virus. They live within us, become a part of us, even take over our lives. They infect us.
They are little bits of us – within us – that should not be living.
Jesus asks us to let these things die within us so that we can live a new and transformed life. Some of the hardest parts of the New Testament are about this.
Says Paul in Colossians: 5 Therefore put to death the parts of your earthly nature. In his letters to the Romans, Paul says: 13 For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.
And in Ephesians, Paul reminds us: 22 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24 and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
Can we think of these things, our “deceitful desires” that too easily become a part of us, as like a virus, having life only because they latch onto us and work their own purposes? Can we think of these things as parts of us that must die so we can truly live? Can we think of them as infections – even infections we carelessly pass from one to another? If we can, we know the cure: to love one another in the vine.
Can we find ourselves a new life by ridding ourselves of these, by loving one another? This is the transformed life to which we are called.
The entire message can be found on Riverview Friend.
