Please: Don't Go To Church

Don’t go to church. 

I know that is not the message that you might expect to come from someone who is in seminary being formed for ordained leadership in the Episcopal Church.

But I mean it.

Even though we are coming to Palm Sunday, and will be entering into Holy Week, the most meaningful and powerful portion of our liturgical calendar culminating in our celebration of the Resurrection of Our Lord….

Please, for the love of Jesus, do not go to church.

I’m writing this because the Governor of Florida, after too much delay, has finally ordered people to stay at home to slow the spread of COVID-19. The death toll in Florida, while not nearly as bad as some other locales, is rapidly rising. The fear is that we will be seeing our hospitals facing the same dire straits that exist in New York City and have devastated Italy. We might end up forcing our doctors to make a horrific choice of who will get a ventilator and live and who “has lived a good long life” and will die simply because there are not enough machines for every person needing one.
There have been letter-writing campaigns and petitions and phone calls to the Governor, pleading with him to close the state down…even while college students chugged their Bud Lites on beaches and mumbled that “if I get Corona, I get Corona,” as they kept wrapping their arms around each other and wandering into cities while resident retirees hid behind their doors.  

The Governor ordered the beaches to limit gatherings to no more than 10 people in a group. He has refused to close them. Local municipalities have had to do that.

He has closed the nightclubs, bars and restaurant dining rooms. But we can still get takeout.
The pressure was mounting on him to get more serious and aggressive in closing down the state. So he started having roadblocks to stop people fleeing New Orleans to the west and New York from the north. 

On Wednesday, the Governor finally issued an order to have people stay at home. With exceptions for essential services…such as gas stations, grocery stores….and your local church, synagogue, mosque, or temple.

What?!?!?

Yes. The Governor’s order specifically overrides any local government mandate that bans a religious group from meeting if it has more than ten people present at a time. Some church will use this misguided idea of freedom of religious expression to gather and sing at the top of their lungs, shout for joy, all the while potentially infecting ten people around them. They won’t even know what hit them until days later. And by that time, they will have been around grandma or a person in line at Publix unwittingly infecting them.

They will get seriously ill, be unable to breathe. And unfortunately, some will die.
We know this is true because this is how the virus has spread both here and in other countries. Christianity is a communal religion. It started with a rush of wind through the Upper Room and people babbling in all kinds of languages praising God. But the virus sleuths have found that it's these gatherings of the faithful that have been one of the most convenient ways for the virus to spread.

I have no idea why the Governor thinks religious services are an essential need. Even I, as one in formation, and want people to be curious enough to come to church and experience the presence of the Holy in community don’t like this decision. And I do not believe it is motivated by God. I believe this is a wicked move motivated by love of something that is not God; hence it is sinful and must be rejected. This is pure evil. And nothing could be more evil than to call on Christians to gather in worship of the one who we ask for the saving health of all nations to be the center of infection.
For the president to suggest that he wants to see houses of worship “packed on Easter,” for me sounded like the Tempter had come into our public space to encourage everyone to throw themselves down from the pinnacle of the temple.
“God will save us so what do we have to lose?”

I believe in a loving and creative God who works through the scientists and researchers looking for a vaccine. I believe in a God who sits at the bedside with nurses and doctors treating the sick and comforting the dying. I believe in a God who keeps calling to us to see in this crisis that there are serious problems in our health care delivery system…our political leadership…and our treatment of nature that has exacerbated the problem. I believe this God knows the hearts and minds of those who truly turn toward Love and Life and away from self-centeredness and death. And, much as we love our buildings, God is not found just inside the red doors and the Tiffany stained glass windows of our sanctuaries. Now, God is being discovered through the pixels and data shared over the internet. New life is emerging from the figurative rubble of this age if we keep looking. 

When the day comes that we are no longer wandering through this COVID-19 wilderness, we will gather again in our churches, maybe just a little more cautious and respectful of each other’s personal space. We will share in the breaking of the bread, and pray together again. And we will praise God for helping us get to the other side of a tragic and terrible time. But we’re not there yet.

So, please, don’t go to church.