Navigating COVID with Christ

I cannot recall a year in which there has been more worry and trepidation about returning to school.

The reason for anxiety is well known.

The hulking viral presence of COVID-19 looms over the start of the 2020-21 academic year.

Most classes begin Monday in public and private schools. as well as at Southeast Missouri State University.

Parents, students, teachers, staff, kitchen workers, bus drivers and administrators all harbor various and legitimate levels of fear.

I will be in a lower level SEMO classroom at Dempster Hall with 15 students taking New Testament Literature.

The university mailed two masks to my home with the word "SEMO" imprinted on them to ensure my face will be covered.

"Protect the Nest" guidelines are in place.

Green dots, 6 feet apart, are on class desks.

I will supply my young charges with their own pens.

While medical experts lately have discounted the possibility of picking up coronavirus from surfaces, no one is sure, so we're going to take every precaution possible because, frankly, going back to holding classes via Zoom, as happened this spring, is a lamentable prospect.

The truth is no one has any idea how -- or if -- this fall semester will play out.

COVID is today's health scare.

In biblical times, there was another.

In Jesus' day, the big worry was leprosy, a malady better known now as Hansen's Disease.

Not a virus but a germ, a bacteria called Mycobacterium leprae.

One of my wife's uncles used to work for American Leprosy Missions in Greenville, South Carolina, and we visited him there one day during a trip in the 1980s.

What we learned in looking at the ALM displays in the lobby and asking questions of a docent is this -- in the days in which Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth, the worry then about leprosy was at least as great as the coronavirus is now.

• Leprosy attacked nerve endings.
• Leprosy destroyed the body's ability to feel pain and injury.
• Without pain, people injure themselves without knowing it.
• Being unaware of injury, wounds easily become infected.
• In extreme cases, hands become numb, eyes lose their blinking reflexes, unchecked nasal bacteria cause noses to collapse.
• Untreated, leprosy can cause deformity, crippling and blindness.

Leprosy, like polio, has largely been eliminated worldwide, but ALM says approximately 150 people are diagnosed in the U.S. each year.

Try to imagine, reader, the conditions of the first century -- a time without trained physicians, without medical research laboratories, without hospitals.

Leprosy then, like COVID now -- was legitimately scary and life changing, assuming you survived it.

I find myself wondering what Jesus of Nazareth might do if he were walking around Southeast Missouri during today's masked, social distancing COVID pandemic.

We don't know -- and anyone who tells you he does know, you might want to avoid because that person is making unsupportable assumptions.

However, we can read about what he did do when he encountered lepers in the first century A.D./C.E. and draw our own conclusions.

• (Matthew 8:2) "And, behold, a leper came to him and knelt before him, saying 'Lord, if you will, you can make me clean'."
• (Mark 14:3) "And while he was in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he was reclining at table, a woman came with an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the flask and poured it over his head."

Is there guidance in Jesus' actions for this moment in time, for a health emergency showing no immediate signs of ending?

Perhaps.

I see a Jesus who did not allow disease to stop him from being with others.

He didn't run from Matthew's beseeching leper, nor did he avoid the home of Simon, a leprosy sufferer.

Perhaps there are lessons to be taken from the prior actions of the one called Christ.

A different sickness at a different time, point taken.

Remember the enduring words of Paul, found in Romans 12:2: "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect."

I hope God, through his Son, will teach us in prayer what the last sentence means as we continue to navigate this puzzling COVID year of 2020.