Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Deuteronomy chapter 28, selected verses:
If you will only obey the Lord your God, by diligently observing all his commandments that I am commanding you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth; 2 all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the Lord your God: 3 Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field . . . 7 The Lord will cause your enemies who rise against you to be defeated before you; they shall come out against you one way, and flee before you seven ways. 8 The Lord will command the blessing upon you in your barns, and in all that you undertake; he will bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you . . .
15 But if you will not obey the Lord your God by diligently observing all his commandments and decrees, which I am commanding you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you: 16 Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field . . .
20 The Lord will send upon you disaster, panic, and frustration in everything you attempt to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly, on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken me. 21 The Lord will make the pestilence cling to you until it has consumed you off the land that you are entering to possess. 22 The Lord will afflict you with consumption, fever, inflammation, with fiery heat and drought, and with blight and mildew; they shall pursue you until you perish.
The writer of Deuteronomy lived in a fragile time. The world around him was very unsettled and unsure. He never knew what tomorrow might bring. Calamity might befall the community at any time.
I think we now understand better what kind of world this writer lived in.
The Deuteronomist’s answer was to seek control and order. So he ordered his world with rules and laws which he hoped could control what he thought of as God’s blessings and God’s curses. Do good get blessed. Do bad get cursed. Simple as that.
But what we are facing now we know is not so simple. The war, famine, and pestilences, the Deuteronomist imagined all had a kind of ethnic or national boundary to them. If the Jews did well they would be blessed above their neighbors, but if they did poorly then a pestilence might be sent and their neighbors come and attack them and strip them of their land.
But we now know pestilences do not respect national or international borders. And neither do storms of any kind. The illusion of control really doesn’t make sense in the face of bacterial science or meteorology or a world now so much more interconnected.
Here is the truth about the age we are living in. It is beyond our control now how or why this disease we are living in came along. Is it a judgment? Was there something we could have done to avert it? Who knows? It is here now. It is here everywhere. And in that sense it is beyond our control.
What is within our control is how we respond. Pointing fingers and blaming and trying to quell our anxieties by theologizing this disease’s meaning does nothing to help.
What does help — and is truly within our control — is staying home, not hoarding food and other essential goods, and demanding that our local and federal government do what is within its power to alleviate suffering, protect and defend the vulnerable, and finally create a true safety net for us all.
We’re all in this together — curses and blessings. We are here. And what the Deuteronomist says is basically true, if we do well now then perhaps we as a community will climb out, but if we do poorly we will all fall deeper and deeper into this terrible curse called COVID-19.
NOTE: We are reading the whole Bible together this year. As you can see, there is very relevant stuff here for the times we are living in. Tomorrow’s Lesson will come from Deuteronomy chapters 30 and 31.
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