Daily Lesson for May 5, 2020

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Psalms 33 verses 13 through 17:

13

The Lord looks down from heaven;

    he sees all humankind.

14

From where he sits enthroned he watches

    all the inhabitants of the earth—

15

he who fashions the hearts of them all,

    and observes all their deeds.

16

A king is not saved by his great army;

    a warrior is not delivered by his great strength.

17

The war horse is a vain hope for victory,

    and by its great might it cannot save.

One thing this virus has done to all of us is unmask our illusions of power and control.

We have the mightiest army on the earth; yet we will not defeat it by the gun the of a ship or the release of a bomb.  And Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of England herself, almost succumbed. That should have been a wake up call for all heads of state everywhere.

Yes; those with better access to healthcare and less crowded living conditions are much more likely to survive.  That is a kind of control -- predictively so. And that is why both William Barber and the Alliance of Baptists have called this an "apocalyptic moment".  Apocalypse in the Bible means "showing" or "unveiling".  COVID-19 has unveiled the inequities within our world and shown our disparities.

But the Psalm says, "The Lord looks down from heaven" and "sees all humankind". For God made all the "inhabitants of the earth" and all their lives are visible and of value.

"No man is and island," John Donne said in a devotion following his own duel with during the Plague of 1623.  We are all connected.  And so long as there is danger and threat of this virus even in the most remote part of the earth then it is not under control and none of us is truly safe.

So, then, a vaccine must be created.  And it must be given to all the world that we might all be saved, not by war, but by connection.