Acts 2 and its description of the mighty rushing wind of the Holy Spirit that changed the world is that way. It took strangers and brought them together, not simply so that they could understand each other’s languages but knit them into a new family, a new humanity…God has gathered us to be revived and refreshed. We need that because our work as witnesses, spiritual warriors, and ambassadors of our king is not done yet.

Remembering the road traveled

We are living in a jarring time. Those under 45 struggle to think of anything like it. That would have meant they were born the year Vietnam ended. Rosa Parks had already been jailed for riding in the front of a Montgomery bus. They would not have huddled under school desks, scared to death by blaring air raid sirens practicing for nuclear war. They would have missed the Cuban missile crisis, John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King’s assassinations. Native Americans out here in Montana remember the second battle of Wounded Knee waged by the FBI and the American Indian Movement (AIM). I stumbled into the very first war protest as a nine year old visiting Washington DC. The race riots of the late 60s and early 70s had passed, Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon, and Roe V Wade had already passed. They would have been in high school when the Berlin Wall and the Iron curtain came down. They were born into a different world.

Most people were born after WWII. I was born on the 10th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge. The period following the war resulted in a stabilizing in American culture. My generation never endured what our parents went through, the Great Depression and global war. The America of our birth was the world’s greatest superpower with a vibrant, growing economy and a rising standard of living, at least for people like me. The economy was in full gear and the industrial apparatus that produced victory snapped in high gear.

GIs came to Levitowns, and new work; dealt with PTSD while they made babies. The GI bill recreated American society as middle class, highly educated Americans took the cultural lead in society. We launched the nuclear age, the computer age, the information age, cured polio. Immigrants migrated out of the large coastal cities and salted the rest of the country. My world was the world of European immigrants. We had few minorities in my neighborhood and we also had no white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants either. This is the world I was born into. I did not know there was another.

There was another America I knew nothing about. African Americans came home from service in Europe and Asia but their lives did not change in the same way. They had endured service in segregated units under white officers. Back home, their families, North and South, endured the stifling weight of systematic, institutional racism. Things slowly changed at the larger, national level. Brown vs Board of Education, confirmed unanimously by the Supreme Court in 1954 declared that school children could not be segregated by race. Thurgood Marshall, long before becoming a Supreme Court Justice fought and won cases that chipped away at the edifice of open racism. Great African American and Asian scholars took their degrees and places in the best schools. Separate but equal was being forced to give way to an integrated society whether everyone wanted to or not. Many didn’t.

My New York neighborhood was thoroughly segregated right up through my high school graduation in 1973. The civil rights movement had begun after the war and climaxed with needless deaths, water cannons, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, the Voting Rights Act and the chipping away of open segregation. My parents lectured me on the burdens of marrying interracially. For them, it was more trouble than it was worth. On the other hand, my friend and fellow football player, Eric, self-described as black and Cherokee, saved my life when a race riot broke out in our school. People like Eric and I were on the cusp of change. It was obvious that real changes were taking place from a bird’s view, but not necessarily from the ground. The changes were inconsistent and often unpredictable.

When I went to the Citadel in 1973, our class had a small group of black cadets. It was hell for me and it was worse for them. The military had changed a great deal since 1945, not that it had changed enough, but young officers were entering during the Vietnam War that eventually rose to the top of their services, regardless of race. Things never changed enough and they never changed fast enough, but change was undeniable. We were desegregating.

When I went to Birmingham in the early 90s to attend seminary, I ran into the sort of racism I thought I had left behind in New York. Things were changing there too, but I was still shocked at the open racism I heard and saw as a young preacher visiting the rural South. I was the first white pastor in our Alabama county to introduce a black person to the church, other than a slave. It was 1996. I had my life and the lives of my family threatened. I know that kind of hate is real.

I learned a lot when I moved to Montana and began to work with a Native American-led church plant. We have many tribes represented in our church, not to mention white people and Latinos. Two things: first, I find it inconceivable to imagine our church a few decades ago. That comforts me and confirms that God is at work doing the impossible.

Second, I hear the stories of people, old and young that continue to deal with racism and injustice. These make me mourn and grieve. Indians have lived through immense injustice. While boarding schools and forced Christianity are a thing of the past, their echoes can be experienced in all of their lives. Native life, at least as it looks to me from the outside, is a miracle in itself. It is no wonder why Native suicides and other curses are as prevalent as they are. The people I know mostly inspire me however. They struggle but they make life work. It is a fact we rejoice over when we greet each other on Sundays.

Dealing with the here and now

I heard a pastor and church planter say recently that he had never in his lifetime experienced anything like the present calamities. I think he meant specifically everything wrapped up in the Wuhan COVID-19 pandemic and the explosion of grief and anger after the murder of George Floyd by a malicious policeman, Derek Chauvin, in Minneapolis.

America endures some form of quarantine. Going out became a rarity, and until very recently, so was going to church. Toilet paper and hand-sanitizer became overnight sensations. Seniors like me were shielded from the virus, whether we wanted to be or not. Special hours for chain stores and groceries were established so that old folks could shop safely. Barber shops and hair salons, along with smaller restaurants and stores had to remain closed. We are waiting now to see which of these come back to life. A few have already folded up. Churches are meeting again in most states, but with heavy regulations to guarantee social distancing. Mostly, we became virtual churches, an oxymoron if I have ever heard one. You watch or listen to a worship service from a distance bridged by your computer or phone. Sacraments such as communion are cancelled. How can you have church without sacraments and human contact?

Since Floyd’s pointless death, a few facts emerge here and there, but none detract from the fact of the murder of a black man by one cop and complicity by three more. The death led to immediate cries of grief by some and violent outrage by others. Peaceful protests against racism started in communities all over America and, recently, in Europe.

Claims of white privilege, calls for eliminating police, savage acts of violence and the wanton destruction of inner city businesses, often minority-owned, abound as do attempts to ask forgiveness from the black community on the part of white Americans. The message of grief and reconciliation gets garbled with political ideology, extreme violence and calls for revolution. It seems as though the tragic life and death of one man disappears, hijacked by hatred and power struggles.

The two traumas: pandemic and racial unrest merge together. Protesters and rioters do not abide by social distancing guidelines. Local and state governments do not seem to mind the thousands of people cramming into the streets, virus or no virus. Churches do not seem to mind the interruption of their routine either. A few “extreme” congregations gather fines because too many people want to attend on Sunday but most Christians comply with government, believing that they are demonstrating their faith most clearly by not endangering others. The protests often merge with the riots. The exceptions show up on my Facebook page; with pictures of happy protesters, some marching and some kneeling before black people.

The rioters do what rioters do; they burn, destroy, kill. The news channels love them. We live in an entertainment culture. Nothing sells like accusations of hatred and hateful revenge as businesses burn in the background. White people on the screen all seem to either be impenitent racists or penitents waiting for their absolution. The economy has, in six months, tanked. Millions went out of work. The predictions for the future are generally worse than the reality, recharged with every news cycle. What we see every day, especially on the news, is chaos, anger, and hopelessness. Republics such as ours strive for societal harmony. Ours appears to be coming apart.

Trying to find perspective

I thought about that church planter nonplussed by the present. I am haunted by two kinds of memories. One of them is my personal lived past; the Vietnam war and the Gulf War (in which I was a participant), the abortion holocaust, AIDS, 9-11, the War on Terror, etc. The other memory is of the distant past, not my lived past, but the past I used to teach as a historian. It contains useful, if troubling, memories. Only old historians like me seem to expect catastrophic plagues. We never expect constant progress. History reveals too many ambushes to believe that. For younger people, the expectations may be different. The disease may come as a shock that is hard to adjust to. Some things such as racial division is expected and conforms to the ideology of “woke” people.

Postmoderns live essentially in the present. Millennials and cultural Marxists have little consciousness of history in general. Details do not matter anymore than they did to the film makers of 300 or Braveheart. The historical events they can even recall are there only as placeholders for ideological opinions. Like Marxists, everything comes down to essentializing wealth, class, or race. Everything in the past affirms that simple premise. So, the riots and the anger are a new experience, justified and very much to be expected. Ideology forged in that heat needs no evidence. Everything supports one’s position and convincing others is a matter of coercion to guilt not persuasion by logic or facts.

So, we have surreal violence filling our screens but it is selective and it comes with a custom-built narrative that blames the violence on the status quo. What rioters mean by status quo and what protesters mean are two very different things. Rioters go back to 1619 propaganda, to white privilege, to institutional racism, and class warfare. Protesters have overlapping complaints, but with a difference. The rioters are fueled by envy, hatred, and a destructive ideology that requires a burning down of structures, the people that inhabit them, and history itself. For them, nothing but the year zero and a radical utopia will do. You can see that thinking budding in autonomous zones in some of our largest cities run by the radicals. There, the rule of law is shelved and the power of the mob rules.

If you do not really know the history, you cannot gain perspective. You have to stand somewhere else in order to understand where you are now. I do not blame the young for the mess. They had to learn it from others. The nation is divided into factions and these factions are fed by ideology, not history. History has been hijacked by political narratives and different people follow different narratives. History disappears, in fact, as it becomes the stepchild of politics and power. As far as I can see right now, we have a divided country at war with itself.

Before I attempt to reconnect us with objective history that can bring needed perspective, I need to highlight a few things that makes 2020 not exactly like anything we have seen in our lifetimes. One is the long period of systematically enforced and popularly supported quarantine. The numbers of deaths still fall well below the apocalyptic predictions (but this is a virus that mutates, so who knows?), but the social damage is considerable. No one knows how it will change the world. When I say that this is new, I mean primarily that it is not within anyone’s living memory. It is new for us.

Quarantining and sheltering in-place has also led to the beginnings of what may be something new for our time; a moving back into the countryside from the city. Montanans like me are ambivalent about that sort of immigration. I was born in Queens but I love this place just as it is and I bought before it was fashionable. This brings up another question. Is globalism going to die out?

Globalism has been a growing ethos in the world for nearly all of my life. In most of the places I have lived in in America and Europe, populism has given way to internationalism. It is hard to see that change given the web of multinationals linked in insidious relations with governments. Will the travel industry fall apart? I suppose no one knows for sure as we have not yet experienced any death blows.

So, the disease and quarantine have introduced instability and uncertainty. People are more afraid now. It is possible now for me to see people who stay put more. At the very least, it may seem safer. Higher education, along with its championing of radical ideology, may be falling into disrepute. Degrees mean much less than they did and we definitely need more skilled carpenters, electricians, and plumbers. None of them need to relocate into urban centers. There is plenty of work to be had out in the country. The reversal of urbanization is not exactly new anyway. Rome experienced it at the start of the Middle Ages. It is not unheard of. It is just new to us.

American society also has a weaker moral and cultural fabric uniting us than any time since the American Civil War. In the first half of my life, nearly all the Americans I knew were anti-communists. Some were attracted to socialism and others continued to embrace capitalism in one form or other. At the very least, we were democratic in our sympathies and supported the republican framework of government, whether we were democrat, republican, black, white, Asian, or Latino. Most people at least said they were Christian, and many went to church.

The New Deal and Great Society ushered in what people hoped would be an age of social levelling, a reduction of the distance between classes and races. It appears now that we are moving further apart in the wake of these great social programs. Boom periods added greater affluence, greed, and envy. They have been a mixed bag. The dissenters were always a small minority located among academia or within elites that ordinary Americans had little contact with but that is changing quickly. Fringe players, like Black Lives Matter, now appear to have real political clout.

When I hear people say that either nothing has changed or nothing can because of some biological divide within humanity, the signs of which we can see on our skin or anatomy, I have to say “no.” No to racism, anti-racism, critical theory, and the entire circus of socially and psychologically constructed sins. There are no “people of color,” since it would create an ontological break between white and everything else. There is no science that supports it.

Our institutions are not institutionally racist and unjust. Injustice can be found but that does not mean it permeates the very fabric of things, like poison dropped down a well. Black Lives Matter, an instance of black humor if you will, picked up the idea that white people are irredeemable in some ways. We were once called “white devils” judo-flipping white stereotypes of blacks. BLM picks up the backlash and extends it. What changed between the 1960s and the present is that BLM now has power. It, like LGBT, is no longer a fringe player. For the first time in my life, I begin to wonder if the nation, its laws, and institutions will outlive me. The news yesterday had pictures of monuments back East either being destroyed or removed. History, apparently, must be erased in order to make room for the revolution.

So, if some things change positively but others continue to demonstrate the injustices of a fallen society, how do we live? How do Christians, specifically, respond to a world where practices, institutions, and even freedoms are suddenly very tenuous? How should we respond to the continuing travesty of innocents murdered? How long do we have to endure crooked cops? Do black people have to always get questioned and frisked more than lighter skinned folk? What about the massacres of inner-city black people by one another? Worse still, what of the genocide of black America by willing abortionists and crooked politicians? When I read my Bible and come face to face with the Day of Pentecost, I have to say, it is not supposed to be this way. What then do we do now?

Lamentation

A word coming back into popular use lately is “lament.” Three Old Testament books came to mind: Judges, Job, and Lamentations. I have dabbled in Judges, preached straight through Job, but avoided Lamentations, dare I say it, like the plague. I finally got over my angst, but two scholars beat me to it. I received a copy of John Piper’s Coronavirus and Christ through my subscription to World Magazine.^⁠1  Then a pastor mentioned that N.T. Wright was also publishing his own take on the coronavirus, God and the Pandemic.^⁠2 Both men applied their faith and understanding to counselling the church, but in very different ways.

Both works are somewhat unbalanced treatments and both bring some rewards. There were a few points that Wright made that helped my understanding. He focused on the here and now. He underscored the Christian’s responsibility to live out our faith as we struggle with the pandemic. He illustrated the importance of Christians living out their faith publicly by reminding us of Rodney Stark’s description of Christians as those who, during Roman plagues, risked their own lives to save others, Christian and pagan, regardless of the risks to themselves. His point is well-taken. Fear looms large now in the Christian population. Wright’s, therefore, is a welcome reminder. He also takes a balanced perspective between honoring our Christian commitments with trying to cooperate with governments.

Critical to his approach is serving alongside Jesus as we minister to the poor and suffering. In doing so, we reflect our collective heritage as Christ-followers rather than reflecting the fear and perversity of the surrounding culture. From what I can see, the evidence from the present is mixed.

Wright is also keen about emphasizing certain Christian actions and all of them are based on theological presuppositions. For example, he denies any suggestion that the disease can be explained, even by God. His desire to diffuse second-guessing and false prophecy is good. He takes it too far. Lamenting, weeping along with the rest of suffering world is commended. According to Wright, God does it, so we should too. We were not created to be God’s “answer men.” All of that is true. The idea that God either does not know what happens next or does not direct the future is quite another thing, however.

His explanation does not ring true for me. “It is altogether more appropriate, then, to recognize that God has in fact delegated the running of many aspects of his world to human beings. In doing so, he has run the risk that they will grieve him to his heart or shock him out of his mind.” God is shocked? He cannot be shocked by what he really expects. To be shocked is to not know in advance. The problem in the book, for me, is that Wright seems to trade away sovereignty and control for compassion. If I am correct, Wright is yet another theologian bowing to the need for therapeutic, moral Christianity. People want a God that is nice. They want a leading man with feminine qualities.

Wright resists every effort to rationalize suffering. There is much to commend that approach, but I believe he also erodes the Christians’ biblical basis for hope. We are left with a God that loves us and holds our hand through everything, but future grace (to use John Piper’s phrase) is sacrificed. So is any call to repentance. Repentance requires connecting sin to what is going on in our lives and in the world and Wright wants no part of it. We see this in his denial of the Reformers’ understanding of Paul, sin, self-righteousness and justification. The idea of human sin and its consequences for eternal life seem to me to be subordinate in Wright’s thinking to living in one’s covenantal identity in the here and now. According to him, the gospel is not about getting saved. The gospel is about the Lordship of Christ in this life.^⁠3 This is why he hates prognosticating or getting ready for the second coming. He is about the present, not the future.

I read Wright with empathy but concluded that he went too far with his approach and unfortunately drifted away from the thrust of Scripture. I think he was responding in a way to shield the church from its worst impulses. I wanted to get a better appreciation for what he was trying to achieve. I read Daniel Defoe’s, A Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe’s history of London during 1665. I also revisited a classic, Barbara Tuchman’s, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14^th Century and William Langland’s Piers the Plowman, written shortly after the end of the Black Plague.^⁠4 I wanted to find out how Christians have dealt historically with calamity and extreme paradigm shifts.

We need context. The more young men say that they had never seen anything like it, the more I want to listen to the past. These works of the past cite first-hand accounts of the horrors associated with the diseases themselves, the public reactions to them, and, to some extent, the Christian responses.

Of the two newer books, Piper expresses a better understanding of biblical content and the narrative flow of all of scripture. He interprets individual texts and the flow of scripture more reliably. Rather than severing the tie between suffering, lament, and repentance, as Wright certainly does, Piper doubles down on the connections. There is no severing lament from the consequences of the fall.

I wondered as I read his short book whether he and Wright were able to exchange manuscripts in advance. They both seem to have treated each other’s arguments closely. That made my job easier. I had to see how each presented his argument and then compare the merits of their words.

Piper places the issue of what the church should think and do about suffering in context by describing his own response to cancer and other health threats. He makes it personal and walks the reader through appropriate biblical responses based on what he himself experienced. Accordingly, he sees God, the Rock, as his foundation, for the present and the future. His is not a hands-off divine figure but a personal God who is totally involved in every aspect of human life. The thought that this might implicate God in evil is dealt with and dismissed by Piper. Wright deals with the need to confess sins as “blaming the victims.”^⁠6

Piper rejects the lampooning of calls to repentance as fresh knee-jerk reactions. He does not deny that people resort to that, but his focus is on its appropriate use rather than its misuse. I think he is right to do so. He cements his perspective by reminding us that all our suffering is not, in fact, inexplicable, but can be traced in a straight line back to sin. Citing Romans 5:12, he states, “Sin, in fact, is why all physical misery exists.”^⁠7 Piper’s personal misery, his cancer, exists because sin entered the world in the garden, not because Piper sinned in 2005, prompting God to take out his revenge. Piper is having none of that silliness.

He tries to bridge the pandemic and other calamities to God’s purposes. On one, we must say that we cannot know God’s secret will. On the other hand, God himself has given us enough information in his word to reach entirely reasonable and merited conclusions. “Physical horrors” are, accordingly, living pictures of sin’s horrors. I doubt Piper intended it, but I could see in this an analogy of what happens in the Lord’s Supper when physical signs and symbols explain heavenly realities.

Physical pain is God’s trumpet blast to tell us that something is dreadfully wrong in the world. Disease and deformity are God’s pictures in the physical realm of what sin is like in the spiritual realm. Calamities are warnings. They are wake-up calls to see the moral horror and spiritual ugliness of sin against God. God is mercifully shouting to us in these days: Wake up! Sin against God is like this! It is horrible and ugly. And far more dangerous than the coronavirus.^⁠8

God uses pain to wake us up to the reality of our present situation and our own lives. Because he is love and he is Lord, he wants us to snap out of our sin, our complacency and embrace him. This has a “now” and “not-yet” dimension. In the now, God wants us to get over our fear and self-pity and get to the work of the Lord. Wright’s reminder is appropriate here. The early saints of the church died disproportionately during Roman plagues precisely because they risked their lives by tending personally to the sick and destitute. Being compliant citizens took second place to rescuing the perishing. For that reason, the church according to Rodney Stark and others grew in respect and numbers, despite imperial hostility. In one sense, disaster did not inhibit the church from being the church.

Piper thinks this also serves another purpose. It prepares us for God’s return. It increases our hunger for it. I believe that both he and Wright examine the contemporary church and find in wanting, though often for different reasons. Wright wants to see the church live up to its calling to follow its Lord in the here and now. Piper wants to see it do so as well, but he thinks it needs to regain its perspective eschatologically. In other words, by viewing the present in relation to Christ’s triumphant return, we gain the needed vantage point from which to live today with integrity. I find his eschatological orientation convincing. It is easy to prove. Just look carefully at how the latter books such as Revelation are orientated. Christ is coming soon. Get ready now.

So, Piper sees in lamentation the purpose of repenting of our lives (as we are all sinners) and embracing Christ and his purpose for us.  This need not fall into the obsessive second-guessing Wright fears. My concern, however, is that neither scholar has equipped us sufficiently to do what they suggest as ways forward.

Lament in God’s Word

The word “lament,” when it is used as a verb, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary means to “express or feel profound sorrow; to mourn the loss of; to bewail.” It also means “to feel sorry for oneself; to mourn passionately.” According to Wright, roughly 30% of the Psalms include lament. It casts a large shadow over Scripture. The Book of Lamentations comes to mind of course.  Lament and lamentation occur nearly 70 times in the Bible. Various forms of mourning, nearly 130 times. Weep and weeping, a little over 100. A lot of tears flow in the Word. A glance reveals that the act of lamenting is not its own justification. In other words, there are right reasons and wrong reasons to mourn. The Bible distinguishes these. Most obvious are the laments associated with sin and its consequences. The Book of Lamentations demonstrates that.

It begins with expressions of anguish over the shame and frustration over the betrayal of allies that led to the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. There is cause and effect in the description of ruin:

 Jerusalem sinned grievously;
therefore she became filthy;
all who honored her despise her,
for they have seen her nakedness;
she herself groans
and turns her face away.
Her uncleanness was in her skirts;
he took no thought of her future;
therefore her fall is terrible;
she has no comforter.
“O Lord, behold my affliction,
for the enemy has triumphed!” (Lam. 1:8-9)

Jerusalem was idolatrous so she fell. Jeremiah’s response was also important. He cried out as a believer caught up in the catastrophe and petitioned God. Interestingly, he owns sinful idolatry and license though he did not personally commit it. He speaks for Israel when he does so. He is not admitting some secret transgression. He is part of a people that have sinned and betrayed God and so he suffers along with everyone else. This was no masochism on his part. He was demonstrating the right response for a member of the covenant. This is instructive insight. When we lament, we do admit the fallenness of creation, a fallenness that we experience in our old covenant head, Adam, and we look to Christ, the Second Adam for our vindication. We experience deliverance as we are incorporated in Christ by the Spirit through faith, but we live in the world that fell. To lament therefore can involve appropriate acts of confession and repentance without falling into unnecessary, self-indulgent confession or, worse, finger-pointing.

Lamentations shows the white heat of God’s righteous judgment against his unfaithful covenant children. There is no way in this to achieve the sleight of hand where we erase God’s fingerprints from the results on the ground. The same God that made us his children, adopting us into his family, rebukes and judges with the same fierce love.

He has cut down in fierce anger
all the might of Israel;
he has withdrawn from them his right hand
in the face of the enemy;
he has burned like a flaming fire in Jacob,
consuming all around.
He has bent his bow like an enemy,
with his right hand set like a foe;
and he has killed all who were delightful in our eyes
in the tent of the daughter of Zion;
he has poured out his fury like fire. (Lam. 2:3-4)

The trajectory of lamentation is a righteous confession and repentance that increases faith and trust in God our redeemer. It reminds us to wait on his mercy rather than simply complain bitterly or take things into our own hands:

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”
The LORD is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul who seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the LORD.
It is good for a man that he bear
the yoke in his youth.
Let him sit alone in silence
when it is laid on him;
let him put his mouth in the dust—
there may yet be hope;
let him give his cheek to the one who strikes,
and let him be filled with insults.
For the Lord will not
cast off forever,
but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion
according to the abundance of his steadfast love;
for he does not afflict from his heart
or grieve the children of men. (Lam. 3:22-33)

Another feature of this lament not solely blaming others or things or God for our pain. There is a strange kind of light that intrudes the darkness that only faith can provide. When our 22 year old daughter died in London in 2004, a young lady who was part of our missions team went into a quiet rage. She loved Elizabeth. Everyone did and she could not understand why God would take her away from all of us; after all, we needed her. For Cheryl and I, we wept gratefully. God had blessed our family with her life, handicaps and all. Our hearts broke, as mine is breaking right now, but we knew she was a gift for sinners. So, we still weep sometimes, but we do it with thanksgiving. We also do it knowing we will be with her again rejoicing around the heavenly throne. That, I believe, is where lamentation should take us.

The fire that is never quenched

The world seems to burn all around us. As I write, cities smolder. The righteous anger and sorrow that burst out across America as a consequence of George Floyd’s murder was understandable and in many ways appropriate. So are honest attempts at self-examination. Things need to change. We can no longer remain complacent when we honestly see patterns of injustice, so long as we do not prejudice some over others. The Christians I have heard and read seem to grasp this. I think many grasp the urgency and opportunity to reflect Christ into this troubled time. But there is a great dissonance I hear amid the weeping. It is the sound of bitterness, of envy, of hate, and of war.

The mourning has been hijacked by people who seek to destroy the country and our way of life. It is the bitter harvest of the postmodern age. Postmoderns are proving again their idiot-savant-like ability to destroy. We welcomed them in as a cure for modernism’s arrogance and cold certainty. They are good at finding the flaws in systems and thinking, but they only know how to tear down. When they began to co-opt the peaceful protests, they had no interest in co-opting George Floyd’s Christian values. They are at war with the nation, its laws, its structures, and its values to include democratic rule. I saw a Facebook post from someone who hoped that some “good” generals out there would do the right thing and overthrow the government. This is the language of insurrection, of war. It seems that Christian citizens of our country have two things we can do. First, we can remember our citizenship in this country and uphold it. Most of these violent people have not served in defense of their country. I have and I am not prepared to let people destroy it.

I will reflect my identity as a follower of Christ by honoring the nation’s laws and legally appointed officials.

Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor. (1 Pet. 2:13-17)

I honor Christ and reflect him when I do so. I also honor him when I love my neighbor as myself. My neighbors include those with whom I agree and disagree. They include family, friends, strangers and enemies. I took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic. I am duty bound by God and the oath I took to do so.

The mighty rushing wind

But I am a simple sinner who follows Christ with a limp. I am no paragon of virtue. While I live in this world, I sin. I have hated and envied. It invades my being like drops of poison in a well. I do not need virtue signaling and the unbiblical constructs of critical race theory, intersectionality, totalitarianism, ethnocentrism, secularism or Marxism to know that I am guilty.  Claims of white privilege are unnecessary and unconvincing. Critical theory is useful at least in emphasizing the structures and systems that promote sin and injustice. In doing so, it illustrates in vivid terms, what the Bible affirms. It, like the whole postmodern world, focuses on the primacy of power. That is after all the way of the world. I already know both the systematic and chaotic nature of evil. I have seen them with my own eyes and the bible opened them.

These tools of postmodern secularism are not only unnecessary, but they also distort the truth. They replace claims to truth with accusations of unfairness. The shift is more than insignificant. The accused in this world cannot defend themselves. They are oppressors after all, and oppressors do not have rights. Most harmful is the replacement of our God-given identities, as humans alike made in the image of God with antithetical relationships of victims and oppressors. This smacks more of Marx than Moses. It means that our birth identities in the clan, race, tongue and nation trump and will always trump everything else. There is a better way.

Acts 2 and its description of the mighty rushing wind of the Holy Spirit that changed the world is that way. It took strangers and brought them together, not simply so that they could understand each other’s languages but knit them into a new family, a new humanity. Our Native American pastor rightly grasped the wonder of God creating miraculous unity and diversity. It is a wonder especially living here in Indian country. The land is littered with destruction, division and hate, but God, the perfection of unity in diversity makes all things new. Acts 2 serves to remind me that we must have both at once. Privileging the diversity never creates unity and that is deadly, as there is only one body of Christ. To not be united is not to be in the body. That is a problem. To privilege the unity is a way of enforcing totalitarianism. I am a natural left-hander that was forced to write and eat with my right hand. God made me left-handed. When the force comes from anyone other than God, I have to question its goodness.

Feasting on the lamb

My struggling with the events of the week and recent months received its final answer during another worship we attended during the same weekend. It was in a larger church with more space allowing the Lord’s Supper to be observed without endangering anyone. As we filed up to the front to receive the bread and wine, symbolizing our real spiritual feeding on Christ, I could feel the healing working in my heart. We all came up. We all ate and drank Christ. All of us. My imagination soared and I floated over the earth and could see believers all over the world doing the same thing. Diverse people but the same bread and cup, the same ritual, the same words, the same faith, the same hope, the same joy.

It is only as we feed on Christ together that we understand. We know that it is the time of trial and suffering but that we eat and drink not only life but hope. God has gathered us to be revived and refreshed. We need that because our work as witnesses, spiritual warriors, and ambassadors of our king is not done yet. Defending the country I love is important to me and I have proved it. Justice is also important to me. But all of this is subsumed within the Christ that feeds me and gathers me into his family of love.

Piers the Plowman

We end back with history.  Written in the years after the plague crashed through England, in the 14th century, Piers Plowman describes a series of visions given to an honest, pious farmer. It does not describe the plague itself. Rather, it focuses on the life of an ostensibly Christian society, presumably during, but explicitly after the plague. The focus is explicitly 14^th century Roman Catholic Christian. The narrator, many characters, perspective etc., approve of Christianity. The work is full of references and quotations from the Bible. The practices of worship, feast days, doctrines, and fathers of the church are all held up as genuine and reliable guides for life.

What makes Piers Plowman compelling reading is how Langland demonstrates the authenticity of Christianity in a time of instability and adversity. He does it by demonstrating that there are genuine Christians and hypocritical or false ones. He is a realist and his work is not strewn with platitudes. Real Christians can be distinguished from pseudo-Christians by examining their lives as they are lived out in the real world. People live out their real identities in the drama of life. Stress, fear, and suffering are ways in which to test the genuineness of faith. That was true of plague-ravaged England and it is true in COVID-ravaged, socially torn America.

The experience of life lived in the raw circles us back to Piers Plowman living as a simple believer in the wake of unspeakable devastation. We suffer and many die. Injustices are perpetrated. It is not alright, at least not in the way it was and may not be so until we see Jesus face to face, but we must go on. We waken to the world that God wants us to see. That world includes our own fallenness as well as its consequences. It also includes, with greater clarity, an understanding of God’s presence, regardless of what the world says. As I prayed in the months before Elizabeth’s slow death from primary pulmonary hypertension, I began to sense in the utter silence a sense of God that I had not experienced before.

I think, too, that Piers and his simple, lived out, day to day faith reminds me of the Supper. The Supper brings us back to the necessity of constantly rehearsing our lives with Christ; in what he did to secure our salvation, in his continuing nourishment through the Spirit’s active presence along the way, and his promised future where we find rest and home. We call that perspective and it is what we need most right now. We practice reality in church week by week.

There is no substitute for that sort of learning. When I worked alongside of elite special operations warriors, I learned what they already knew. That is to trust their training and one another. We now are the warriors that huddle around our head, Jesus Christ, and we run the race with him. The hatred of a fallen world demonstrated in racism, murder and chaos must discipline us to carry out our callings, regardless of cost, for as long as it takes.

Ο Χριστός είναι η νίκη μας (Christ is our victory).

Bill Nikides is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is a missionary serving with Reformed Evangelistic Fellowship.

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¹ John Piper, Coronavirus and Christ. (Wheaton: Crossway, 2020).

² N.T. Wright, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Reflective, 2020).

³ N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997) 132f.

⁴ Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. (New York: Random House, 1978). All references to the Black plague are derived from Tuchman’s work. William Langland, The Book Concerning Piers the Plowman. Rendered into modern English by Donald and Rachel Attwater. Everyman’s Library. (London: Dent, 1957. For the ambitious, an edition in Middle English is William Langland, The vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman. Tenth Edition. Edited by Walter W. Skeat. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923).

⁵ Cited in Tuchman 138.

⁶ Wright, Pandemic 10.

⁷ Piper 61.

⁸ Piper 66f.