Pastor Rich Little sent this message to friends, family, and leaders in his Michigan community on April 9, 2020.
All Brothers & Sisters in Christ –
I have been trying very hard to “stick to my lane,” as I was told when I was in the Army, and concentrate on Christ and the Gospel as a pastor during this crisis.
Truly, the Lord and His Word is the one eternal thing that endures and matters, and will save us in the end – His promise of forgiveness and life are literally all we have.
However, as a human being, deeply flawed and self-serving and sinful as I am, I can’t help but being very upset and dismayed by what I see taking place around me. So I am going to take a bit of a risk, perhaps going “out of my lane” a bit, and speak from my heart now on what I see going on in the world, because what I saw today disturbed and saddened me greatly.
Mueller 64179 Adjustab...
Best Price: $25.36
Buy New $27.57
(as of 03:14 UTC - Details)
We live in a county in Upper Michigan that has zero cases of this virus. Yet, children are not only not legally permitted to play with one another outside of immediate family (by order of the Governor), but now our local officials have seen fit to put chains and locks on the playgrounds.
Think about that: chains and locks on the playgrounds!
As I have been taking my 10-year-old granddaughter, Lorelei, out daily, so she gets some fresh air and sunlight in God’s good creation, the playgrounds were the one place where we could play and have fun and be, well human again – no fear, no stress, just love and fun. Now, that’s gone too.
What next? Arresting people for walking too much? What price are we paying here when we become so myopically focused on “flattening the curve” or even “saving just one life” that, even if we are still physically alive at the end of all this, it now feels much more like death and hell than actual life? And make no mistake about it, this is a foretaste of what hell is like: being alone, afraid, suspicious of others, constantly in fear of others as a threat to your life – self-preservation above all.
Yes, this coronavirus is new and scary and some people are dying if not of, at least in part, from it. We can debate numbers and how many of this and that and what to do etc. We can even also debate if we are being short-term “wise” but being “long-term” foolish as the economic costs add up to many future lives lost too.
But I think that all of you have pretty much already formulated from whatever source you have gotten your information where you stand on all that stuff. I am not trying to talk you out of that as it’s almost an impossibility, as the one truly defining characteristic of sinners, that is to say humans, is that we are natural “self-justifiers” and we will go to great lengths to be “right,” even if wrong (all of us are both right and wrong on this factually to one degree or another).
Retevis RT20 Wearable ...
Buy New $46.99
(as of 03:08 UTC - Details)
So, again, I am not writing this paragraph of this message with the hopes of trying to talk you out of your opinions but I would just like to point out once more, as we are all sinners, none of us gets to claim to be righteous before God in their opinions or actions in all of this. To our sin, Christ says “I forgive you.” He alone makes us right before God. So where you stand on this is not a “right hand kingdom” or salvation issue. This is not a matter of the Gospel. It’s a matter of the law and how we live in the earthly or “left hand kingdom” for now until Christ’s return.
Having said that, one of the great gifts we receive from Christ, as His chosen, forgiven sinners (Christians) is that even as we patiently await Our Lord’s return, and with it the new age of grace, He alone will usher in. We do receive back this old creation (the earthly or “left hand kingdom”) for now to love and to care in our humanity for as it is still God’s good work too. In this regard, in our humanity, we work hard to care for God’s creation and our neighbors. In this capacity, we are all called to fight evil as we see it under the law. The law is for now God’s gift to preserve life and order in this age, and I can’t help but feel a great evil is at work here beyond whatever deaths or economic ruin this virus may bring. The evil is we are losing our humanity.
What truly saddens, and what I think is a great evil, is that we fail to recognize that we lose our humanity by not realizing that there are many other forms of dying we can experience before physical death.
Living in constant fear, not only of some virus, but of the people around you too – either that they may be carriers of the infection or informers to the police that you are a “violator” of the “orders” – so we go about our day, even the best of us who recognize the problem and try to fight off this urge to fear, suspicious of the intentions of others. Not that we didn’t have this tendency toward self-preservation before, as sinners, but now it is on the loose “on steroids,” as the expression goes.
This constant looking over one’s shoulders is a powerful form of dying before physical death, I think. We are now looking not with charity to our neighbors who actually simply want to get on with the business of being human, but are actually treating them as criminals, or somehow selfish, for somehow posing a hypothetical risk of being disease carriers.
Big Letter Tracing for...
Buy New $5.97
(as of 03:10 UTC - Details)
Were we not enjoined by Luther in the 8th Commandment to “think well of our neighbor, promote their good name, property, etc”? I know we fail in this regard routinely, but how can we even remotely attempt to do this under these circumstances?
Last night, as I was surfing the internet news late, as my sleep is not the best now either, I ran across this story that literally made me cry as it summed my personal experience today ironically and incredibly well.
As I acknowledged, yes, we all have our own opinions on this virus, the “lockdown”, etc and I know this person has a particular bias too; certainly politically he is biased toward personal liberty. But, then again, we all have our own biases. So yeah, there is stuff you may disagree with in the article – perhaps strongly disagree with or even say is “dangerous” and that’s okay.
I am not trying to impose an opinion on you, even if I am perhaps very poorly trying to express my own opinion. But I do think the author does capture what, from my perspective, is an important eternal, biblical truth quite well. In our never-ending quest for health, “safety,” and security in this world for our physical lives, are we not actually, in the process actually failing to live out our humanity in love?
I will just give you with this short quote from the article to consider as the sheer, simply beautiful truth of it touched the deepest reaches of my heart:
“But there she was.
Here was a mother bucking that, taking her son to the playground. A profile in courage, in the midst of corona.
And before long, the father followed with their dog, who was also happy to get out.
Wonder Art Workshop: C...
Best Price: $12.47
Buy New $14.50
(as of 03:10 UTC - Details)
They ran about the morning park, availing themselves of the beautiful playground that everyone else was too gullible and cowardly to visit. Dozens of parents an hour would pass through that park just a few weeks earlier.
This was courage in a city of cowering people, going through every which means of contortion in order to comply: the face masks that probably don’t work, the social distancing that probably doesn’t work, the quarantines which almost certainly don’t work, the shameful ‘essential workers only’ mandate which evokes this.
Even the USSR had no massive peacetime lockdown of hundreds of millions like this. The atheist communists couldn’t manage to close churches like America has done this spring………
In the midst of that, a mother and a father courageously determined they would reject that distraction and instead live their lives.
Courageously they stepped out to go to the park. Courageously they stepped out of the house to live their lives.
And I want to thank them.
Because courage is contagious.”
I don’t know if this family was Christian or not, and frankly, I don’t care. They were human. Deeply human. And as Luther would say, they were “caught” taking a risk and doing and living exactly as God meant human life to be: a circle of peace, love, joy, and harmony with the Creator and other creatures. They were out “planting their tree,” as Luther once famously answered about what he wanted to be found doing when the end of the world came.
1000 Instant Words: Th...
Best Price: $1.60
Buy New $9.99
(as of 03:10 UTC - Details)
Can’t we be courageous too?
We Christians have the promise of eternal life from the lips of the Living God Himself. We have the Holy Spirit to lead us too. Certainly, can we not say to this evil driving us to lock ourselves fearfully behind doors and to push others there too: Enough is enough.
Have we, at long last, no sense of decency left?
In our quest to save our lives or at least save ourselves from the public shaming of supposedly “not wanting to hurt others,” can we not, at least, let the children play in the park unmolested?
Who did they harm?
Who do they want to harm?
Do we have to sacrifice the emotional well-being and happiness of our children too upon the altar of the god of the almighty coronavirus?
Is not our life and times in God’s hands?
The Bible indicates to me that Jesus might have been the most happy in His earthly life when He played with the children. I think I am too. I would gladly, instantly, give my physical life up right now just so the children can be happy and play in the park. That is how God intended His creation, and His children, to be, and that’s worth giving up my life to strive for in my humble opinion.
The Ultimate Book of H...
Best Price: $4.24
Buy New $12.00
(as of 02:40 UTC - Details)
I know many of us went along with all this, as did I, to be good neighbors, good citizens, good Christians, good pastors. Good intentions all around. Many of you are also “higher risk.” I get that too – I have many aliments from miltary service, like asthma, that put me in that category with you. I am not particularly fond of the thought of impending physical death either, having never experienced that of course.
As Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians 15:26, death is the final enemy to be defeated. Christ hasn’t taken me through that yet. So I am sympathetic to the concern for one’s own well-being and other’s concerns for the well-being of other people and loved ones too.
That is certainly also a legitimate human impulse, that is genuinely of the Spirit, heartfelt and sincere. Nobody wants people hurt or killed needlessly or certainly doesn’t want to be the catalyst for that, but, unfortunately, we don’t get the luxury in a fallen world of “no-risk” only “reward” solutions to complex or life-threatening problems.
There is a cost to all our choices, individually and collectively, as participants in civil society. So as Christians, we must ask as Paul admonishes in Romans 13:10 to determine: “What are the costs?” We don’t have a perfect solution in a sinful world. We can only hope to reason our way to the one which minimizes most the effects – short & long term – of sin.
All I am saying is that we have gone too far in one direction in striving to protect people from this virus. We are drifting beyond even long-term harm, into something, as I see it, that is evil and that soon will be a genie we can’t “put back into the bottle” so to speak.
I also understand that writing what I am writing may come off as an accusation of wrongdoing to some people, which isn’t my personal intent, but I truthfully acknowledge, it might end up being. It can’t help but be this way, because we are dealing with a matter of the law, not the Gospel. We are all placed by Christ back into a world governed and run by law – moral laws, laws of nature, government laws, social laws, and on and on – and the law in all forms always accuses us.
But I do sincerely want to say, I am trying to the best of my fallen, limited, sinful ability to keep in mind that good intentions certainly abounded from almost all folks in this situation. Definitely, this was the case I think as this was billed as something of a temporary inconvenience or sacrifice, but has now morphed into an open-ended solitary confinement prison sentence for billions of people around the world.
None of you wanted to cause harm or death to others nor I think ruin businesses or our Constitutional rights. But this “lock-down” is now a monster that appears, to me, to be “eating its young,” as the saying goes. There is far too much “collateral damage” well beyond the daily “confirmed cases and deaths” going on in this war on the hidden virus for me to stomach any further. So my heart compels me to say:
This has got to stop now. Not tomorrow. Not a week from now. Certainly not months from now, because this is not living, it’s dying while alive.
I know saying this right now is a risk, a big risk because many of you may judge that I am going too far “out of my lane” as a Pastor, as this probably is not a very popular message with you, nor most of the wider world these days. Email is like a virus you know. It’s contagious – you can send this anywhere – and thus potentially deadly, in certain ways for me, for daring to espouse contrary opinions to the popular narrative out there.
So, it could cost me dearly for publicly writing things like this right now. It could cost me a lot. It could cost me my call to our congregation. It could cost me my home in this community. It could cost me my freedom. It could cost me my family. It could cost me my physical life. Who knows? It might sound crazy to you to say this. But a few weeks ago, if I told you that you would be locked in your homes as a virtual prisoner in fear of a virus, you would have thought me quite mad. So anything is possible these days now, in regard to the consequences of freely speaking what is on one’s mind or heart now…..
But, I must confess too, that I believe that Christ died, gave up His own life in love for us, so we can really, for the first time, actually live in freedom, not fear – so we do not have to live in uncertainty anymore, because we now definitively know that God is for us, not against us. We can now dare be human again and leave the business of bringing in the eternal future to God.
So we can play like children in the park and enjoy the love and company of one another once more in the image of God – in peace with our Creator and one another – certain that even if bad things happen, God will be there to pick us up again and return us to living – even from our graves. So I am going to shove down my fear and say what my heart tells me to say, pray to God, turn it over to Him and rest in the promise of my Baptism that whatever may come my way in this old world, Christ is with me and has my life safely in His ever-loving arms, will carry me into His new creation where these things, which bring suffering, pain, and death will trouble me no more. And I know Christ has said this very same Baptismal promise is also for you.
So please pray that our Lord returns soon…..He is, in the end, our only hope!
v/r
Pastor Rich
