God & The Pandemic: A Conversation with Jason Harris & N.T. Wright | April 30, 2020

[Music] well thank you for joining us my name is Jason Harris and I'm the senior pastor of Central Presbyterian Church located in the heart of New York City which unfortunately has become the epicenter of the corona virus epidemic I'm joined today however by my very good friend auntie right to most of us Tom right needs no introduction he's a world-renowned scholar a prolific author and a retired bishop in the Church of England anti-riot is a professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of st. Andrews as well as a senior research fellow at with lick Hall Oxford University and the author of over 80 books including the New Testament in its world so thank you for making the time for us Tom I know that it's a little light there where are you both always always good to be with you and thank you for setting all this up absolutely well as we previously discussed we said that this was a relatively good time because your work would be done for the day and neither of us have had a nightcap yet although maybe we should have done this conversation over a single malt that might have been fun maybe next time I I recently reflected on the fact that we first met nearly nine years ago I had just moved to New York City to assume my post at Central and I kid you not it was literally my first week on the job when I got a email from a friend a mutual friend of ours based in San Francisco who said that you had just published a another book this time it was simply Jesus and together with your publishers you were looking to do a little book tour through the US and wanted to make a stop in New York and so the question to me was whether or not central would be willing to host you for this lecture and I recall I had to think about that for perhaps less than half a second and quickly said yes and that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship so over the years we've had the opportunity to spend a lot of time together along with our wives we've hosted you at Center to speak from our pulpit as well as to give multiple lectures and so it's a it's a real treat for us to be able to talk to you now during this critical time in our lives where the whole world has been affected by this drona virus well I think when we first started hearing reports about the novel coronavirus we thought that it would go away like many of the other health scares that we've seen in recent years like the Zika virus or h1n1 and most of us assumed perhaps that it would be limited to a particular geographical area and not amount to much but we're all little more than stunned by the way in which this virus has overwhelmed our hospitals shut down the world economy and completely altered our way of life and we of course grieve the tragic loss of life and at the same time we're all feeling a bit disoriented and so in the midst of all this I think many people are asking big questions such as where's God in the midst of this pandemic and where are we supposed to be how should we respond to this threat to our lives to our economy and and to our health and so it seems to me that there's a number of potential missteps that Christians can make in answering those questions or struggling with those issues and so perhaps it might be good to begin by thinking through what some of those missteps might be one here's one to start us out I think I mentioned to you a couple weeks ago that in one of my sermons I I discussed Albert Camus snob all the clay I read I read the salmon much enjoyed it thank you and I was struck by my canoes novel he wrote it to be essentially an allegory capturing the reality of the human condition and yet his description of this of this play is rather uncanny when you compared to what we're all experiencing right now and through his description of this epidemic he describes the various ways in which people try to respond to it some try to flee the city some try to make money off the black market but perhaps he he shares his sharpest critique for the local priest and it seems that whenever there's a crisis there's always some sort of religious leader who delivers a message like the priest goes to his congregation in which case I hear he's trying to rationalize why this is happening and so he blames the the the citizens of Iran he says that this has come upon them because they deserved it this was a punishment from God because of their sins although of course he says it wasn't for any of his own sins and certainly I think there's people today who might be grasping for that same answer as they try to make sense of what's happening to us they would say well perhaps this is a punishment from God it's a punishment for our sins of misusing money or sex or power perhaps people on the Left might say well this is at least a warning because we failed to take place take good care of the of the environment in the world in which we live so what would you say to that as a punishment is this some kind of warning from God yep I had I wrote a little pieces you know a month or so ago in Time magazine they asked me to and just little 800 word thing and I warned against saying that kind of thing and immediately I got pushback from people saying doctor I obviously doesn't read his Bible because if only he looked at the Prophet Amos he would see that Amos says and I did this and this and this because you did that and that and that and this was all to make you turn back to me and I want to say yes there's plenty of passages like that in the Old Testament and there are also passages in the Old Testament which make it quite clear that you can't say that every time and central among those passages is was the book of Job where the whole point is against Joe comforter to stay job it's all your fault you've been a bad boy and so I mean the reader jobs or the reader of the book knows this is wrong Jobe knows that he's drawn but he can't figure out what's going on and there isn't really what what would count for us as a resolution at the end of the book we're just told you know god is great and ultimately he's in charge of this stuff but it's it's very puzzling and and so on but then the thing that really struck me as I was working through that if with Jesus there's a kind of a sense that the Prophet Israel's prophetic movement was all God funneled down onto this one point and that Jesus is doing and saying things which function as warnings to Israel to repent and that's very clear you know when he announces Bethsaida and Capernaum and so on because they didn't repent he's but but but finds that Jesus was doing what were creative signs there was healing signs they were to do with the kingdom of God breaking in in a good in a good way um edema because it wasn't you know Jesus didn't go around doing a repeat of the plagues in Egypt I'm calling for frogs to come up from the road Jordan or and killing Herod's firstborn or anything like that all Jesus was doing was positive signs and even so the people didn't repent so the idea of signs because of which you should repent that's there but in the Gospels it's kind of changed from what you see in the Old Testament and there are some interesting bits of to and fro in Jesus teaching where in John 9 he and his disciples meet a man born blind and the disciples say well was it because he sinned or was it his parents and Jesus says no it wasn't either it's so that the works of God might be manifest in him and then of course what we then see is the works of Jesus which has all sorts of christological interpretation going on and that this God has allowed this to happen so that the gospel may come through now there are other hints which go the other way just to be fair and even-handed if you like and when jesus heals the man at the Pool of Bethesda in John 5 he says afterwards watch out don't sin anymore in case something worse happens to you so Jesus is not denying that there might be a connection between sin and sickness or sin and suffering but then when I came back from the whole thing and look at the different things or listen to the different voices that I've heard you're right some people may be on the political left would say it's all because we've been destroying the environment and so on some I think more shrewd voices would say hang on this started as far as we know in a market in China where they are selling and eating whether it's baths or pangolins or whatever these are not domesticated animals and that have had dangerous things bred out of them these these are essentially wild animals and that this may be a result of all sorts of sociological things going on I don't know and I suspect none of us might know the backstory of how all that happened but one of the many things that then comes out is that the World Health Organization and organizations like that and are commissioned by world's bodies by governments to make sure that this kind of thing is watched out for it is regulated and then so then it becomes a political issue and people are saying AHA it was all China's fault and so we got a dump on China and guess what we've got other reasons for wanting to dump on China so let's use this as well and then other people again are saying no no it was all America's fault for not doing this and that but then there's all of those are kind of searching for scientific or political explanations but that's different from saying and again I've heard this voice maybe from people on the American right it wouldn't be so much the British right all the cause of sexual misbehavior is because of the gay lobby or because of abortion or whatever where there's no attempt to make a connection you know there's nobody saying the fact that you have gay marriages now there's a causal link between that and the emergency there's nobody saying that so it becomes the kind of Deus Ex machiner bit of supernaturalism that God is angry so he has done this and and frankly that sort of thing really troubles me because you stand back and say hang on so you're saying that because God is cross with what some Western countries have done about sexual behavior God allowed this virus to escape from a market or a research laboratory or something in China to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people around the world all in order to tell those naughty people down the road who would disapprove of accept and that's the point at which non-christians listening to this conversation would just say but if that's your view of God you can keep it and thank goodness I'm an atheist kind of thing and and so but then I'm really interested in the way in which in the New Testament we don't see that kind of explanation being caught for anyway I can develop that in a minute you may want to come back amid some of what I've said because there's there's all sorts of things going on I do well I let me come back to bed because I think it'll tie into something I grants you in a moment about the Old Testament and how we should be interpreting it in light of the new in the first place but let's tackle a few of these missteps at first and then we'll get to that's the right way to tackle some of these issues because I think that we're seeing a lot of confusion and muddled thinking so certainly viewing viewing that pandemic as as a punishment for our sins or somebody else's can be rather simplistic especially for the reasons that you just laid out in terms of how this whole virus made its way around the world we can easily play the blame game and that becomes a political game as well what were what we're trying to point fingers and assign blame for why this has happened to us another misstep it seems to me is we can interpret all this as some kind of sign that that that Jesus is going to come imminently and again this might be more of an American phenomenon than one that you experience in the UK but according to some recent research in the u.s. many people look at the headlines in the newspapers and and they see signs of Jesus coming based on what they can read off the page and view in current events maybe these people would look to passages like Matthew 24 where the disciples asked Jesus well what would be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age and on the one hand Jesus responds by telling them not to let anyone leave them astray because they'll hear all kinds of rumors about the end of the world but don't be taken in by them but then on the other hand Jesus does make this comment where he says there'll be famines and earthquakes in various places and these are but the beginning of the birth pains and then in the corresponding passage in Luke Jesus specifically mentions pestilences so what do you think Jesus is referring to in Matthew 24 and Luke 21 now I personally believe that Jesus told us to be prepared for his coming but nothing tried it predicted because Jesus said that no one knows the day or the hour not even this themselves but yes I if this isn't a punishment should we think of this as a sign yeah I mean I don't think it's a sign in that sense no Jesus was very clear that for the coming of the Son of Man which is a complicated phrase in itself there will be no signs he says at one point it'll be like the days of Noah they'll be eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage in other words life going on as normal without any dramatic signs but there there is different things going on in Matthew 24 mark 13 anyone the central thing in all three of those passages is the fall of Jerusalem Jesus has warned Jerusalem that unless it turns from its desperate flight into revolt against Rome then Rome is going to come and crush it and the only language you can use for that is what we call apocalyptic language about the Sun and the moon being darkened and the stars falling from heaven because Jerusalem this is where the temple is this is where God has promised to put his name and like Jeremiah who used that language of creation going back to chaos what he meant was if the temple is destroyed then the unit between unity between God and His people is broken and how can God live with his people without the temple of the major problem in the Old Testament so jesus is wrestling with that issue and you see it most clearly in Luke 19 when he's riding into Jerusalem on a donkey and he's in tears and he says if only you'd known the things that make for peace but you've rejected the way of peace and so your enemies will come and destroy you and leave not one stone upon another and it's in the light of that disciples asked in Luke 21 parallel mark 13 Matthew 24 how will we know what it's all about so when Jesus is then talking about wars and rumors of wars and famines and pestilences he's specifically saying these are not to be taken as signs of an imminent end whether the fall of Jerusalem or the ultimate end but this stuff is gonna happen and of course only a little bit of knowledge of history ancient history medieval history and church history in general will show that every few years every few decades there are some pretty terrible things going on in the world I think actually my generation the people who are baby boomers born just after the war we've had it so easy we've never had to have a war on our territory we've never had any major pandemics I'm 71 I've never had anything like this in my life the previous two generations in my family and every other British family had terrible things going on and people wild people would stand up and say this is a sign of the end and like in America of course late great planet Earth and all that sort of subculture and first I don't know why that's taken root in America the way it has but it's certainly been very big so I really want to say no this is not a sign of Jesus return that is not to say that Jesus couldn't come back at any time because he constantly says it could be at any time but from all that we see it's just as likely to be on a perfectly ordinary day when nothing much is happening rather than when everything's going crazy and wild but then the thing that came across to be very strongly a few weeks ago when I was starting to think this one through was that actually Jesus gave us this prayer which we call the Lord's Prayer which most of us pray every day sometimes more than once every day and the Lord's Prayer already is a prayer for God's kingdom to come on earth as in em and it's also a prayer for forgiveness so the idea that we need special signs to say oh now it's gonna happen or oh now it's time to repent and be forgiven no we are Kingdom people every day we are for forgiveness people every day and of course God being God if God thinks we need a push a kick a shove something to alert us God can do that as well but that's not the norm for the Christian the norm for the Christian is to stick proce with Jesus and pray his prayer and in that these things will be taken care of yeah I think that's a great way of thinking about it because that's the other thing that you're starting to see from various religious leaders around the country and around the world they'd say well this isn't necessarily a punishment it's not necessarily a sign of the end but if nothing else it is a it's a wake up call and they would say that especially during times of crisis God wants people to examine themselves and to repent of everything that displeases them and they may even be hopeful that if Lord enough numbers of people seek the Lord during this time that it'll lead to a kind of spiritual awakening and I I think what I hear you saying and this is sort of what I sense too is that in some ways that seems a little bit too convenient and it misses the point which is that all time is a good time for us to to heed the Lord's call upon our lives and to turn to him and faint that's something that we should be doing every day I think I sent this plague to the callers to be pen yeah I think that's right I remember when the first Gulf War happened I was working as a college chaplain here in Oxford in one of the Oxford colleges and the next after the war began and there was kind of panic in the college a lot of students were glued to the television all the time and some of them had friends who were in the military and and it was just taking over him and the teachers and the chaplains just had to say look I'm sorry these things happen you've got to get on with your studies there's nothing to be gained by watching a television all the time and people were coming into college chapel in droves the services were full people wanted to pray but when it was all over a few weeks later the Gulf War finished sadly not many of those people were still to be found coming to church now at the moment we've got this fascinating situation which is like a kind of accidental sociological experiment where because the churches are locked a lot of churches as I know you're doing at Central are running online services and clergy are celebrating Eucharist with just family members in their home when people are being invited to tune in and they're reporting I'm getting reports around the UK certainly that more people are tuning into those services that would normally show up to church on a Sunday morning in the first place now that's fascinating I'm thrilled about that and maybe some of them will turn to God and maybe that will last and I'm not holding my breath and I will pray for them and hope but these things come and go and I think to latch onto special events as though uh-huh this one will solve our problem and life isn't normally like that and I think the steady tread what's that is it a line of Eugene Peterson the long the long a long road of a beat long part of a God along the same direction that's that's the calling that's the vocation as I say of course anything that's alerts is I mean I have to admit I have prayed more in the last weeks about the prospect of my own death than I would normally pray in an average week it's it's my age it's a natural thing to think about it's become a more natural thing to think about um and so maybe but I don't think that's a big thing to think about I do think there are serious things which we can should do them welcome so what's the right balance then because the misstep could be to say this is a punishment from God or it's a sign of the end or it's a call to repent and the answer to the repentance question I think is sort of guessing no because what God say to that for example well yes exact same time God is calling all people everywhere to repent so of course well that takes me to I mean the very interesting fact when you look at the Old Testament yes a lot of bad things happen which are directly traced to the fact that the people had sinned in some way but it's very interesting that the 400 years of slavery in Egypt at no point to somebody say oh this was because Jacob and his sons are actually sinners they needed the whole family needed to go there it's and Passover is never seen as a release from sin and its results this is just something that happened this stuff happens and God will free his his people from that slavery but it's not a forgiveness thing at that point now there's a similar thing in the New Testament and when in Acts chapter 11 when there's a famine is going to come upon the whole of the Middle East and and there were famines quite regularly we know this from secular historians of the time and the Prophet Agabus stands up in Antioch and says there's gonna be a famine and the church in Antioch does not immediately say oh this is calling us to repent or it's calling these wicked people down the road trip and nor do they say oh this is a sign that the Lord's coming back and they believe that the Lord might come back at any time clearly but that's not how they construe Oh they say who's going to be at special need in the middle of this what can we do to help and who shall we send to take the money and so there's a sense and when I first thought that line of thought through I thought somebody's gonna say oh you're forgetting God in all of this and the answer is no within the New Testament as in John 9 when Jesus says the works of God will be shown in him and then it turns out to be the works of Jesus himself um so now God is at work by his Spirit in and through the church and so the theological answer not a pragmatic it is pragmatic but it's also theological is to say as the people of God craftily what can we do to help and how we're going to do it and let's make the actual plans and get on with it and I was reflecting on that because there obviously is a call to repent in the New Testament and I was thinking about it particularly in terms of Acts chapter 17 when Paul is in Athens now we know that roughly a hundred years before Paul was in Athens the city of Athens have been destroyed by the Romans because Athens had backed the wrong side in a war and Rome had come in and flattened the place as it did to Jerusalem in AD 70 now all could have said don't you remember when God flattened your city that was calling you to repent or maybe there were other things famines and plagues and so on the Great Plague of the fifth century BC when Pericles died that they had they had these things and Paul doesn't say that Paul draws all of those onto the single sign which eases himself God commands all people everywhere to repent because he's fixed today on which you will put the world right judge the world by a man whom he's appointed and he's given assurance that by raising him from the dead Paul says this knowing perfectly well they're gonna laugh at you because because of course they would they know perfectly well dead people then rise but this actually is the message there has now been one sign and here's a really important theological point I I feel it's it's a sort of Bart Ian point really if we try to create Aitor court repentance out of something other than Jesus now now that we've had the revelation of Jesus it's as though we're saying well yeah we know about Jesus people know a story but now we need an extra oomph to get us going and the answer is no you don't do theology that way you don't do good theology by going around the back of the Incarnate son and the Hebrews says in former times God spoke by the Prophet but in these last days he's spoken to us through a son and it seems to me therefore that that's the point at which the church has to say yes and what Jesus does by his Spirit is what we are struggling to do to be obedient through the spirit so we are not doing something other than what God is doing through Jesus because it is the life of Jesus which is visible when the church is active in the community and bringing healing and hope anyway that's that's the line of thoughts I've been exploring right and so if if we're going to clear our minds of some of the confusion and be a little bit more focused in terms of how to interpret the moment in which we're in it seems that we we have to make sure that that Jesus is the starting point the foundation as well as the end that everything is interpreted in his life and if that's the case then how should we look at some of the Old Testament prophets you mentioned someone had mentioned Amos to you one of the things that you hear often in America is people will quote 2nd chronicles chapter 7 and the idea is that if we give my people turn back then yeah and it seems to me that we we have trouble understanding how to interpret the Old Testament in light of Jesus and then apply it to our own situation so what advice would you have for that right I mean I want to say it's always good for people individually or on a large scale to repent I have rather wished that our church leaders in Britain would have put out a call to prayer not specifically necessarily a call to repent because I think that that might have given the wrong impression but certainly because it seems to be the proper approach in this situation is basically lament and intercession before anything else it's easy because because sorrow what we don't do sorrow well we don't do grief well in the modern Western world but the Bible is full of lament there may be a quarter to a third of the Psalms or Psalms of lament and I was reading a book recently which said and I think it's absolutely right that so many of the modern worship movements have been all happy and thanking God for everything he's done and isn't it marvelous and there's been very little lament and partially as well if somebody comes to their prayer group and says you know my wife and I've just had this horrible thing happen to us and cetera said there'll be a pause and then somebody may blunder in and say well never mind because God works all things together for good or something anything else of the right answer is we will pause and we will read one of these great Psalms Psalm 44 or something and we will just hold on to this brother and sister in the in the love of God and I think globally that's what we're called to do because again and again in those Psalms of lament only after the lament think of Psalm 22 you get and you're verses of lament and then and only then something new happens or sometimes the new thing doesn't happen the Psalm 88 were just left in the dark but if you think if new lessons are going to be learned they may well emerge from lament rather than from an instant rushing for a solution for a judgment for a blame game or whatever it is and as I said because we're not good at lamenting and this may be a hard lesson for us to learn and particularly I think there are some theologians well-meaning theologians but I think it's a sort of rationalism who say well God is in control we know God's in control so if this has happened it must be what God wanted therefore we his people must be able to deduce what's go on and I want to say I'm sorry you need to go read Romans eight this is just not how it works where maybe come back to Romans eight in a minute so I think restraint is the first order of the day with lament then within that and maybe disciplined lament day by day taking those Psalms taking lamentations obviously lamentations recognizes that Jerusalem has been destroyed by the Babylonians because Jerusalem that sinned lamentations doesn't try to hide that but nevertheless the city is empty the babies are hanging up the breasts unable to get any food was in their fault what's this all about that there is a sorrow which is overwhelming much more than just oh these people did these wrong things therefore God did that and I think it's perfectly appropriate to have a kind of a prayer of Unknowing which is a prayer of lament right and that was one of the most important things that I got out of the article that you published in Time magazine and it was a poignant thing to say that the Christian vocation at a time like this includes lament and does not necessarily include having to explain everything Roger ROG and yet I think that's hard for some people to hear because of what you said earlier about God's sovereignty we want to believe that God is sovereign and in control we talked about the coronavirus as a kind of Black Swan event a improbable event that has severe consequences nobody saw it coming although we think maybe we should have respectively in hindsight but as Christians we believe that there are no Black Swan events for God nothing takes God by surprise yeah yeah and so how do we hold those things in tension this is this is really important isn't it I think of two passages in the Old Testament one in Genesis where the Genesis 6 God saw what humans were up to in the post que period and it grieved God to his heart it's very interesting I was checking this out in the Hebrew and the Greek and the Hebrew is very clear in who grieved God I'll live to his heart the Septuagint is obviously worried about the idea of God being grieved to his heart though it just says that God thought about it and it's as though the Septuagint is asking the same questions that people are today surely God is basically in control he shouldn't be suffering grief and God doesn't have an emotional heart and the Hebrew text I think says oh yeah he does don't fool yourself and get to rationalistic of the other passages something which Jeremiah says twice actually where he's talking about child sacrifice where the trial factor feist was forgiven who who was forbidden but the Israelites astonishingly not an ended but they built up special high places to be places where they would offer their sons and their daughters to mow long now um III simply I can't get my head around that but Jeremiah says God couldn't get his head rounded either because God says twice in Jeremiah I ever told you to do that in fact it never came into my mind and again the Hebrew word is hard God never even imagined it God never had a bad dream one night and thought they would do it and some of the idea oh well he's sovereign so he must have known this was going to be it is this is a slide towards stoicism and it's a slide away from what you see in the Gospels I was having this discussion with my dear wife Maggie who you know well and Maggie was just glancing at a passage that I'd written and she said you're talking about God being in control and I said well the whole point is that in Jesus the very notion of control is radically redefined and she said I don't think you should even say the word control because I said God God isn't a controller like that and I think she's actually right but now Jesus his whole theme is the kingdom of God which is about the sovereignty of God but he's constantly saying let me tell you what the sovereignty of God is like and he's having a party with all the wrong people and he's healing a leper and he's touching a corpse and he's doing this and he's doing that and ultimately it goes off and gets crucified and it's as though the whole time is saying this is what it looks like when God's in control uh-huh how does that work and somehow the whole New Testament stands the idea of divine control on its head and this is why I was talking with friends the other night about this the famous verse in Romans 8:28 one of the first verses I learned from those very young Christian in the King James Version it's we know that all things work together for good to those who love God now there's a problem because the Greek text has some some manuscripts have the word God in there that God works all things together for good which I think is the right reading but it's also the word working together it ties Romans 8:28 much more closely to Romans 8:18 227 which ends up with the spirit groaning inarticulate within us as we groan in a prayer of unknown we don't know what to pray for as we ought and in Romans 8:26 and 27 it says that even the Holy Spirit doesn't have words to speak at this moment and if you slide across to 8:28 and say never mind God's in control then you're just going for stoicism instead I think you have to translate 8:28 and it's a good translation the Greek we know that in all things God works with those who love Him and it's working with sooner ye within the dative for those who love Him who are then called according to his purpose because part of the purpose for which were called is not to be fellow controllers sitting upstairs running the world but to be fellow grievers fellow Drona's people who share the suffering of Jesus as Paul says in that passage so that the glory may come through that is the paradox of it and it will be a real ah a shame in terms of our appropriation of Scripture if we use this as a way of jumping back into a God's in charge so we don't need to worry thing it's no the in charge miss of God is shaped by Jesus on the cross and that cruciform shape is given to us in the spirit to be our prayer of Unknowing our prayer of groaning of Tears where we do not know what to pray for as we ought I have thought in the last weeks and I haven't done it yet but I maybe I will and there are lots and lots and lots of churches in ox and probably more churches per square mile than almost anywhere else one of these days that we're allowed to go out and take exercise each day one of these days I may just go for a prayer walk around some of those churches and just grieve that they are not at the moment alive with the praise of God although I am grateful that at the same time Jesus is not locked in those churches Jesus is out and about doing all sorts of things in the community but there is a time for grief for just holding on to the pain in the presence of God and that's what I think we're called to be doing right now right and one of the things that you shared with me previously is that Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus is showing us the way in which God's sovereignty and control and care for us comes together with his own lamentation and grief and again if we're gonna be focused on Jesus in terms of understanding or unique moment it seems like that that's a good place for us to go in order to see absolutely right I was reflecting on that recently because you know the beloved Japanese artist makuta Fujiwara yeah yeah mikono has recently written a book I'm losing its title but it's published by you by Yale University Press and it's on what it is to be an artist what is to be making I think it's a theology of making and in there he uses the scene in John 11 of the tomb of Lazarus very very powerfully in terms of what Jesus is doing and so I was reflecting on that when I was reading Macker were and then when I came to be thinking about these issues it's fascinating because there is a sense in which Jesus is in control he's found by the Jordan and he hears word that Lazarus is sick and then that he's died and he stays where he is and he's obviously praying and John wants us to join the dots later on the chapter because when Jesus comes to the tomb and Martha says you can't take the stone away because it'll be a smell he's been in there three or four days and Jesus says take the stone away and then he says father I thank you that you heard me it's one of those amazing moments this is before he caused us and I think it must be that Jesus has prayed that Lazarus his body will not decompose that's a big prayer and so Jesus is in control prayerfully but when he arrives he lets Mary and Martha go after him Lord if only you'd been here my brother wouldn't have died and and and the crowd are saying he opened the eyes of the blind surely he could have stopped his friend from dying and Jesus weeps Jesus goes to the place of Tears and joins in he doesn't say no it'll be all right just trust God back there is I mean he does say somethings like this I am the resurrection but he draws the trust onto himself I am the resurrection in the life and so it's through the prayer and through the tears together that the new thing happens I I find that hugely powerful and I think John intends that to be the climax of the first and first half of his gospel from then on we're into Jerusalem and the whole of the second half unfolds so so then I want to say John's Gospel is probably the clearest place in the New Testament but when we're looking at Jesus we are looking at God incarnate God the idea of God incarnate is huge and extraordinary and massive but as John tells that story he doesn't say by the way at this point Jesus stops being God incarnate and just becomes an ordinary human being he just says add a crescendo yes it's Jesus burst into tears and this is the word made flesh who bursts and is this is God's second self who bursts into tears so it's no surprise to me then that we get Romans 8 with the spirit groaning with inarticulate groanings even though God remains in the redefined sense sovereign God sovereignty has worked out through the pain of the world which becomes God's own pain through incarnation and through the spirit I don't know that I can said any better than that that's perfect well in addition to the the lamentation and the grief I think there is a place for action and and in some places that is the critique of the church well we shouldn't just be lamenting the fact that our churches are closed or we can't have our services we should be out there doing something about all this and one of the first messages that I gave when the coronavirus it the the States was about how this is an opportunity for Christians to display both courage and love and I pointed our people back to the ways in which early Christians dealt with even more ravaging epidemics in the 2nd and 3rd centuries and how in many cases they they nursed and cared for the second dying not only within their own ranks but their their neighbors throughout the city and well the pagan response may have been to throw out their own relatives to die in the streets alone the Christians cared for their sick and the sick of others and in many cases transferred the sickness to themselves and and died in the place of those that they sought to care for and this is one of the great reasons that many were attracted to Christianity in those early psyshock writes this up as you know in the rise of Christianity before when I was rereading that the other day right and in in response to that and specifically in response to that during chapter one of the things that we've done at Central in New York is first and foremost to encourage and support our doctors and nurses and emergency responders who were on the front lines in and out every day at the hospital wearing their full gear but we're also trying to provide groceries and supplies for the elderly and the most vulnerable members of our congregation you might have underlying health issues now and and we're trying to do what we can to take care for the poor and the homeless obviously when the governor tells everyone to stay at home but you don't have a home it's a little bit hard to that instruction and so we've got a team of volunteers who over the last several weeks now have made packed lunches that have been delivered to the homeless I think we've made over 2,500 meals now at this point on this wonderful question that people have is well what does appropriate Christian action look like in response to the corona virus pandemic yeah that's great all the things that you described and I had an email from a friend who's in a parish in South London just before we came on air who was saying how exciting it is that many members of her church are just springing into action saying oh we could do this and say they've got a food banks and all sorts of things and um phone calls with other lis people who are shut-in and they're having they're having coffee mornings but separately where they're kind of all making coffee in their own homes and then there are they're doing a zoom or they're getting on the phone so that they are they're being very creative actually and that's wonderful but it seems to me we have to work from both ends one of the things that the church is always called to do in John 16 is this whole business of the Spirit convicting the world of sin and righteousness and judgment now that could easily translate into the thing that I just been saying we shouldn't do but sooner or later the church needs both in itself and in praying for leaders in our countries in our medical services etc and the church needs to be among those who are holding people feet to the fire and saying okay what do we learn from this how can we strengthen the World Health Organization how Queen mixture is doing its job how can we think about our own methods of food production our own methods of illness research and particularly again I had an email out of the blue from a young man who is a medical student in East Harlem in in New York and who's volunteering to help in a place where most of the people don't have any health insurance and so they have chronic health conditions already and are hugely vulnerable to the disease and then they are the ones who are passing it on and often they don't live in a space where they can keep safe space from other people so the disease is spreading really because these people are at the bottom of the pile and they're not being helped and so you know one needs to ask questions and I know this is a political hot potato in America obviously but one needs to ask questions about how how we supply what the whole society needs so there are the macro big questions which we've got to be asked but we don't wait to until we've sorted them out before helping the people on the street around the corner so the church needs to be working at both levels simultaneously and often it's the people who are working on the street at the local level who are most ready with the sharp questions for for the the the biggest use and the the politicians and so on and one of the things that I've been praying for and I know this is slightly ambiguous I was thinking about the time when Joseph finds himself suddenly whisked out of prison giving advice to Pharaoh and the next thing is running because three and he's collecting corn so that when the famine strikes there won't be starvation now it seems to me we need maybe not one person maybe but maybe new leadership to come forward of people with practical wisdom of economic wisdom etc metal and medical wisdom to say actually there is a way through this and out the other side because particularly what we're going to do after this is anybody's guess there will be thousands of businesses that will have gone under and will not reappear and there will be other people as you said before trying to make a profit out of it etc we need wise leadership I look at Britain America Europe at the moment I'm not overly impressed with the level of leadership that we've got at different quarters there are some shining lights but there's also a lot of odd stuff there we need urgently to pray for wise leaders and maybe people in the churches need to pray for and support one another in speaking and writing writing op-ed pieces etc etc and showing that there will be a way forward and that it won't be a dog-eat-dog way forward where the strongest will elbow their way to the front and again the weakest will go to the wall we must fight against that for all we can so there are all these many things but in the middle of it all again we are nothing if we're not a people of Prayer and we need to be figuring out ways to pray together as well as individually it's something because I'm now as you know attached to it they're all here in Oxford and the term has started but the hall is empty everyone is at home and they've got the the software called teams where they do morning prayer every morning and so you see all these little boxes with initials in and here are all these people they're showing up and they're taking part in morning prayer and that's that's amazing all in their different location and I'm going to be doing a course of lectures this this term by that same method method as far as we know so we're being creative but it's off and we're all looking forward and praying for the day where we won't have to do this anymore these quote we will see through and be able to come out the other side right yeah and we like many churches have obviously tried to be very careful so that we don't encourage the the wrong kinds of behavior that are gonna spread the virus and that's exactly right Martin Luther has that wonderful quote which people have been circulating on the internet where he says I will do what I can I will share my post I will help but I won't forget the exact words be means I won't be responsible I won't get into places where I might do more harm than good there's a danger of Christians wanting to say oh I'll do the here heroic Jesus thing and come in and help even if it builds me the answers you may be carrying the disease chunk which is a real problem you know when I go supermarket shopping if I do sneakily every two or three days Maggie doesn't but um I put on gloves I put on a mask and I'm aware and I'm in the shop this person could give me the virus but I may be carrying it too without realizing it and so there's a kind of a humility about that which which is quite difficult actually to live with no that's definitely right and one of the things that I've been reflecting on is because of our inability to meet in person we've we've moved to online services and as you say I think that we've actually seen rather rather significant increase in the number of people who have participated in or services as we're doing it online now but there's also a sort of danger that lies there too which is that well this is actually rather convenient and easy it's nice to be able to go to church and not have to get out of your pajamas and it's easier for the pastor to it's easier for the pastor to lead one online services rather than three in a day which is what a typical Sunday looks like for me and so obviously we're hoping and praying that we'll be able to meet in person so it's at worship and gathered together again soon but one question I have for you is what you think that's so important why is it that we believe in an embodied faith why is meeting together as a body so significant and one of the things that you've talked about at Central many times before is the importance of sacred space and why should we hope to be worshiping again in our beautiful sanctuary as opposed to just worshiping together from our sofas yes yes it is a difficult one isn't it because it's possible and in my tradition it does sometimes happen but people to become so attached to the buildings but the building becomes an idol and then they think they can't worship unless they're in this building or they can't worship unless they've got all the kit and and an altar and all the bits and pieces and I understand that I mean I like bits and pieces myself and and so on but so there is a sense of exile there and I think we if we name it as exile that that does two things for us it's it says yeah this is a bad place to be but we understand it exile does happen to the people of God from time to time but also it says it's not normal and the reason it's not normal is because of what it means to be a human being that whether you take this theologically or psychologically or anthropologically we are not meant to be alone we are not meant to be solos if you put somebody in a room in solitary confinement that's normally a punishment a very severe punishment and and all the analysis is that humans become who they really are in contact with one another and the contact is more than the son more than what we are having now which is facial contact and and smiling and talking because it's it's also contact and a thousand signals that we give about who we are with somebody else etc and I mean purely pragmatically speaking as a pastor maybe a third of the crucial little pastoral conversations that you have with you will know are either before or after the service when you're just hanging around and somebody says oh the word sometime this week about such-and-such anything okay put it in the diary that's gonna happen far less when you're simply sitting in your room at home on a zoom or or whatever it is but but it is something about God's kingdom coming on earth as in heaven the technology enables us to be kind of electronic Platonists you know to to be in this detached space where we're not really there and that's something we have to watch out for because it plays into a be setting ideological sin in Western culture and with which which you see in all sorts of other spheres in advertising and so on and so one of one of the Grammys one of the great things about the Eucharist is that basically you can't do it by extension or you shouldn't do it by extension that's not it's not going to be like that I don't think anyone's quite thought this through in the present man that we have services going on where you get a priest or a bishop with maybe one other person in the room because you're in our tradition not supposed to do it totally privately celebrating the Eucharist breaking bread pouring out wine sharing it with just two of them and I think around the country there are some people innocently putting a piece of bread and cup of wine in front of the screen and treating it as either in church now that's not a good idea that really isn't um we are one bread one body one family people and that unity ah that is so important well I'm preaching to the choir here but I think I do think it's a really important thing for us to think through and if there's juggles us into thinking that sort of thing through well okay maybe we need that hmm I was recently reminded of a question that see his lowest responded to which i think is contained in that god of the doc collection of essays where he was asked by someone why do I need to go to church at all why can't I just worship God on my own from my living room and and he said that well the nearest thing you get to a direct command of the New Testament is that you're obligated to take the sacrament and you've got to go to church to do it there's no other way to follow that command so if there's one reason to go back to church again that's that's a part of the whole point as in first Corinthians 10 and 11 is that it is about the church as a family and and the family characteristically meets at a meal table and this isn't just a vague analogy it is who we are and Jesus says where two or three gather in my name I'm sure that he would be quite happy to say if it has to be electronically on a screen well okay Jesus will show up here - he's gone but that's not the norm and I think that is to do with our being embodied selves and the body being a good god-given thing which is to be raised from the dead into the new physicality of God's new world and the Eucharist points towards that and every step away from that into a virtual reality is as I say in danger of producing the source of platonism which I will resist - well let me ask you one final question Tom we we talked about how it's probably not a Jesus centered way to interpret this moment in history as as a punishment or as a sign of the end or even a call from God to be penned although at the same time God of course can use all kinds of events to alert us to the things that we can see but might be tempted to ignore and I think there's a very good chance that that someone could click on this video because they are searching for answers maybe they do feel like God has gotten their attention because of what they're experiencing right now and they're struggling and and reaching out to find him and to find some comfort in the midst of this crisis and so what words have comforter or consolation with you offered to a person in that kind of position right now I would say as we read the stories of Jesus we don't see somebody who is detached from the pain of the world we see somebody who is going right to the heart of where the world is in its worst pain and taking it upon himself and I would say to somebody in that position if you can find a Bible read Psalm 23 read Romans chapter 8 and read and say the Lord's Prayer those are very simple but actually each one of them has a profundity and I think specially the Lord's Prayer the Lord's Prayer is something that in my tradition every child learns but you never grow out of it it's it's waiting it's got depths which are waiting for us and I think particularly towards the end don't bring us to a time of testing but deliver us from evil that's what we really want to pray most of all at the moment but in order to get to those points in the prayer we also need to pray for God's kingdom to come for God's will to be done for daily bread and for forgiveness and so if the prayer please don't let us be overwhelmed by this which comes to the end of that prayer that's going to mean anything we need the earlier bits too but I would anchor those with Psalm 23 and Romans 8 by reading an excerpt from Psalm 43 but I want to thank you for taking this time with me and with all of our listeners as a principle I'm very very grateful to have you as my own personal bishop so thank you for all your care for me and for my wife and family and and grateful that we can have this encouraging conversation together let me conclude our time by reading Psalm 43 verses three through five oh send out your light and your truth let them lead me let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling then I will go to the altar of God to God my exceeding joy and I will praise you with the heart of God my God why are you cast down on my soul and why are you disquieted within me hope and God for I shall again praise him my help and my god you [Music]

Channel: Central Church NYC

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Id: PoUY1hI9O-s

Length: 61min 53sec (3713 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020