Grace Episcopal Church, Radford VA

March 15, 2020

Lent 3 Year A

Rev. Jon Greene, Deacon

What does the Lord require of us? What does the Lord require of us?

What does the Lord require of us? What does the Lord require of us?

Justice, kindness, walk humbly with your God.

Justice, kindness, walk humbly with your God.

(This is from the “Music that Makes Community” program.  I sang it a Capella, which is scary on a whole number of levels.)

I’ve been a little nervous about singing this for a number of reasons.

Number one, I don’t have Kathy or Mason’s voice.

Number two, at the early service they looked at me like I was crazy.  “Dude, this is the 8 o’clock service, we don’t sing here!

Number three, we have some wonderful lectionary readings today and I always try to study the lectionary and bring you back the message from the Holy Spirit that I discern.

But this week, I have been haunted by this song that comes from Music that Makes Community (which we are going to do a little of later).  This is an adaptation of the words from Micah 6:8

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;

    and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

    and to walk humbly with your God?

What does the Lord require of us in these days?  These days of pandemic.

I believe there are two things:  to take care of ourselves and take care of each other.

In taking care of ourselves, we need to recognize that the threat is real, and that those of us over 60 or with underlying conditions, need to take the steps to keep ourselves safe.  To maintain that social distance of 6 feet whenever possible and a minimum of 3 feet.  To replace shaking hands with the elbow bump or, the one I love, placing our hand over our heart.  To wash our hands often and to frequently clean surfaces that could become infected. 

We need to assume that anything we touch has been infected and ensure we wash our hands before we move on to the next place, eat, touch our face, etc.

And we make deliberate decisions about risk.

More important than taking care of ourselves is we need to take care of each other.  This has two aspects.  The first having to do with the disease.

We need to recognize that there are folks that are more at risk than ourselves and we need to do everything we can to protect them.  But, we also need to think about our responsibility to our community and our society.

Today, the health care system in Italy is overwhelmed and doctors are being made to choose who gets the treatment they need…and who does not.  That is not a situation we want to happen here, but it could.

This virus is moving through populations like wildfire and we could see it show up here and infect a significant portion of the population.  It would be easy to consider a time when we could have 1000 people in Radford infected.

Of that 1000, we would expect 10 to die.  That’s scary enough, but that seems to be dependent on appropriate care and the number could be much higher.  We would expect 20% (200 people) to need hospitalization and there are only 146 beds at Carillion Radford.  And half of those, or 100 people, would need an ICU and a mechanical ventilator.  There are 6 ICU rooms at Radford, I think…and only about 50 at Roanoke Memorial.

You can see that we need to “flatten the curve” as you may have heard.

But there’s another aspect of taking care of others that we can’t forget.  We need to figure out how we can be God’s Church in these conditions?

How will we feed ourselves and each other spiritually when we can’t meet?

Some people find that the only time they experience touch is at church.  How can we fill that need when we can’t physically touch?

How will the kids that depend on school meals for nutrition be fed?

How will families suddenly without daycare cope?

How will folks that have lost their jobs make ends meet?

We will need to be flexible and creative and make smart decisions about our risks to ourselves and others.

(We then sang the Music that Makes Community song together.  This was much less scary for me, but I think terrifying for some of the folks at 8 o’clock.  At 10:30 we even tried to sing it as a round, but Mason’s group kind of petered out. J)

What does the Lord require of us? What does the Lord require of us?

What does the Lord require of us? What does the Lord require of us?

Justice, kindness, walk humbly with your God.

Justice, kindness, walk humbly with your God.

What does the Lord require of us?

Amen.

 

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