“Our Pre-Existing Condition” A Sermon delivered by Rev. W. Benjamin Boswell at Myers Park Baptist Church On March 22nd, 2020 from John 9:1-41

We are most definitely living in trying times today. The coronavirus has radically altered our world. There are now over 300,00 people infected, and nearly 27,000 cases in the United States alone. More then thirteen thousand people have died globally, and it has claimed over 350 American lives. The world is sick and scared. We are sequestered in our homes trying to save our own lives and each other. The market has receded before -in 2008, we’ve been afraid before - after 9/11, food has been rationed before - during WWII, but never have so many businesses, restaurants, and churches closed. Never have so many people been put out of work. Never have we been forced into social isolation. We are living in the midst of the most unprecedented moment in 100 years. It is a time of great uncertainty and fear. The long-term impact of this virus is unknown, and our hearts break for people suffering around the world, our world in need of hope and healing.

Research suggests that when bad things happen, and suffering occurs, human beings universally look for someone or something to blame. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but so far in this crisis it seems like everyone is playing the blame game. Americans are blaming China for not taking the steps they should have taken to stop the outbreak of the virus. China is blaming the US for starting the outbreak. Many Americans, including the President, have been referring to the virus as the Chinese virus, Wuhan virus, Asian virus, or even the Foreign virus, placing the blame on Asian people and fanning the flames of xenophobia and racism—leading to an outbreak of anti-Asian coronavirus rhetoric and hate crimes. The Anti-Defamation League has noted a surge in anti-Asian activities including racist messages or caricatures of Chinese people mocking their eating habits, accents, and hygiene. Some are even blaming animals like bats or pangolins for the virus.

Many Americans are blaming the spread of coronavirus on the President or the slow government response. I’ve seen older folks blaming Millennials for not taking the virus seriously, and I’ve seen some younger folks blame their Boomer parents and grandparents for not taking it seriously as well! Everyone is blaming Gen-Z for going on Spring Break and naively saying, “If I get corona, I get corona! It won’t stop me from partying!”

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The one thing we can all agree on is that there is someone to blame for the coronavirus crisis, but it is not us. That’s the dangerous thing about the blame game. When someone else is to blame it means no one takes responsibility. A Persian poet once wrote, “We can’t accept that everything that happens to us, is our own doing. We need someone to thank and someone to blame; so, we created the concept of God and the Devil.” A recent research study by Psychology Today suggests that when people are victims of disease, they search for someone to blame for their misfortune—and often that search to explain suffering leads people to blame God.

We see this in the most detestable form in “so called” religious leaders who blame God for the outbreak of coronavirus! Roberto de Mattei called the coronavirus “the killer of globalization” and “a scourge from God,” and he reminded followers that “God sends tribulations to families, cities, and nations for the sins they commit.” Robert Jeffress, pastor of FBC Dallas, TX preached a sermon entitled, “Is the coronavirus a judgement from God?” and claimed, “All natural disasters can be traced to sin.” The ridiculous view that sin is the explanation for all suffering is as old as the Bible itself, and it should have been put to rest long ago when Jesus rejected the idea. In Luke 13, Jesus said, ‘Do you think because some Galileans suffered they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? Or the eighteen who died when the tower of Siloam fell—do you think they were worse sinners than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you! But unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.’”

Jesus was clear: there is no cause and effect relationship between sin and suffering. The passage we heard today from the gospel of John confirms his rejection of this theology. Jesus saw a man who was blind from birth, but his disciples wanted to play the blame game and asked, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents?” Jesus rejected their assumption outright and said, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that the work of God might be revealed in him.” Jesus dismissed the possibility that sin could be the cause of the man’s suffering. No one was to blame for the suffering— not the man, his parents, or even God! Jesus reduced suffering to a morally neutral fact. Suffering cannot be explained by sin, and it is not caused by God. However, God can work through suffering to bring injustice into the light and create change, transformation, new birth, and new creation. Suffering breaks God’s heart, and God has a preferential love for those who suffer, which is why God draws near to the suffering in order to embrace them with love, comfort, and peace.

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In 1947 Albert Camus published “The Plague,” a story about a virus that spreads uncontrollably from animals to humans and ends up destroying half the population of “an ordinary town” called Oran, on the Algerian coast. As the book opens, an air of eerie normality reigns. The town’s inhabitants lead busy money-centered lives. Then, with the pace of a thriller, the horror begins. An epidemic seizes the town, transmitting itself from citizen to citizen, spreading panic in the streets. To write the book, Camus immersed himself in the history of plagues. He read about the Black Death that killed 50 million people in Europe in the 14th century, the Italian plague in 1630 that killed 280,000 across the plains, the great plague of London in 1665 as well as plagues that ravaged China’s eastern seaboard during the 18th and 19th centuries. Camus was drawn to this theme because he believed plagues were concentrations of a universal precondition: that all human beings are vulnerable to being randomly exterminated at any time, by a virus, an accident, or the actions of our fellow human beings.

The people of Oran can’t accept this fact. Even when a quarter of the city is dying, they keep imagining reasons it won’t happen to them. They are modern people with phones, airplanes and newspapers. They are surely not going to die like the wretches of 17th-century London or 18th-century Canton. One character says, “It’s impossible it should be the plague, everyone knows it has vanished from the West.” “Yes, everyone knew that,” Camus adds, “except the dead.” At the height of the contagion, 500 people a week are dying, and a Catholic priest gives a sermon that explains the plague as God’s punishment for depravity. But a doctor named Rieux knows better. He’s watched too many children die. Suffering makes no sense, it is random, it is absurd, and that is the kindest thing one can say about it. Philosopher Alain de Botton explains that “For Camus, there is no escape from our frailty. Being alive will always remain an emergency; it is truly an inescapable ‘underlying condition’” Plague or no plague, we are always susceptible to sudden death, an event that can render our lives instantaneously meaningless. Camus called this the ‘absurdity’ of life. But he believed that recognizing absurdity should not lead us to despair but redemption, a softening of the heart, a turning away from judgment and moralizing toward joy and gratitude. Therefore, we need to love our fellow human being and work for the amelioration of suffering.”i

The disciples were not the only people in John 9 who played the blame game. The Pharisees got in on the game themselves. They assumed the man born blind was a sinner, and they went even further to proclaim he could not have been healed by Jesus, because Jesus was a sinner as well. When it comes to sin and suffering, we have this deep and powerful human desire to find a scapegoat.

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We scapegoat presidents and political parties for our problems. We’ve scapegoated the Jews, Muslims, immigrants, minorities, and the poor for our sufferings. And whenever humans play the blame game it always has violent and disastrous consequences. As we move through the season of lent, the day and hour are coming when we will remember how everyone made Jesus the scapegoat for all their sins — the disciples, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the chief priests, the scribes, the Sanhedrin, Herod, Pilate, the Roman soldiers, all the people of Jerusalem. They placed the blame on Jesus so they would not have to face their own responsibility. They accused him of blasphemy and treason and condemned him to die on a cross between two revolutionaries.

Camus called mortality our pre-existing condition. Augustine called it original sin. But I think our true pre-existing condition is our propensity to play the blame game—our human proclivity to deny our sin, deflect our guilt, and project our blame onto someone else. This human predisposition is as old as Adam—one of the first humans—who you might remember from that great primordial myth—didn’t just eat the forbidden fruit but would not take responsibility for it when God came calling! He placed the blame on Eve. Then Eve placed the blame on the serpent. And the serpent placed the blame on God. Everyone blamed someone else until there was no one left to blame. The story of the Bible and all of human history is the story of people blaming someone else for their sufferings. But in John 9 Jesus looked at the disciples and the Pharisees and asked them a haunting question about the problem of suffering: “What would happen if there was no one to blame? What would you say and what would you do if there was nothing and no one to blame?”

This is a question we need to ask ourselves during the coronavirus. What would we say and do if there was no one to blame? The question reminds me of one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned about leadership from Todd Bolsinger who said, “The leader in the organization is the person who is not blaming anyone.” It is a very humbling idea, and it is why Jesus was a true leader. He never blamed anyone for what he suffered or experienced. In fact, he strived to help his followers to stop playing the blame game –to stop scapegoating people like the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the Samaritans, the Gentiles, the tax-collectors, and the prostitutes. He taught us that talking about people’s sins and trying to explain suffering is a purely academic exercise and a waste of time.

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The Pharisees and Sadducees loved to debate about who is a sinner and why someone was suffering. It was a distraction from the work they should have been doing. Instead of trying to explain the cause of suffering, they should have been do everything they could to relieve people’s suffering, because that is the work of God—the work of Jesus—the work we have all been called to do!

When Jesus told his disciples, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him,” he was saying that our work as human beings is to care for the sick and disabled. That is why he followed that statement by saying, “We must work to do the works of the one who sent me while it is day; night is coming—a time is coming when no one can work. But as long as I am in the world, I will be a light in the world.” Jesus was commanding his disciples to stop playing this theological blame game and get busy loving and healing people—to stop trying to figure out who sinned and start caring for people who are being oppressed and beaten down by the world—to stop trying to find the cause of suffering and start working to relieve the sufferings of those who are sick and hurting—to stop explaining and blaming and start being the light of the world before it was too late.

In his famous book, The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark argued that the explosive growth of an obscure and marginal movement of apocalyptic Jews in the second and third centuries to become a community powerful enough to take over the Roman empire is partially explained by the way the followers of Jesus responded to plagues and diseases. Stark describes the loving way Christians responded to pandemics throughout history and claims this was the critical reason a small group of a hundred or so followers grew to become a church of six million believers by 300 AD. Roman politicians noted the way Christians responded to the plague. Emperor Julian complained bitterly of how “the Galileans” would care for even non-Christian sick people. Bishops took notice as well. Dionysius, the bishop of Alexandria, reported that during the plagues Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ.”

Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage said, “This plague and pestilence, which seems horrible and deadly, searches out the justice of each and every one and examines the mind of the human race; whether the [healthy] care for the sick, whether relatives dutifully love kinsmen as they should—do not desert the afflicted.”

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During the Black Plague, Cathrine of Sienna ministered to the sick, and the great reformer Martin Luther said, “We are bound to each other in such a way that no one may forsake the other in their distress but is obliged to assist and help them as we would like to be helped. Luther even claimed that the commandment “Though shalt not murder” means we must never endanger others through our negligence or recklessness, which is why Luther encouraged believers to obey quarantine orders, fumigate their houses, and take precautions to avoid spreading the sickness and stated that the Christian motive for hygiene and sanitation does not arise in self-preservation but as an ethic of service to our neighbor. Beyond Luther, it was Christians who created the first hospitals in Europe as hygienic places to provide care for the sick during times of plague, on the understanding that negligence that spread disease was, in fact, murder.

All throughout history, the plagues have caused people of faith to search themselves to discover either “the way of love” or “the way of blame.” Instead of spending all of their time arguing theologically about sin or debating the cause of the suffering, historically the truest followers of Jesus have leapt into action on behalf of those who were suffering and cared for those impacted by the diseases that plagued their communities. Plagues intensify everything. They have the ability to intensify the natural course of life. They intensify our fear and desire for self-preservation. They intensify our grief and anger. They intensify our own sense of mortality and frailty. But they can also intensify our love. They can also intensify our common humanity. They can also intensify relationships. They can also intensify community. They can also intensify the church. They can also intensify our ability to relieve the suffering of others by giving up on the blame game and getting to work.

There is no need to try and explain suffering, because there is only one answer to the problem of suffering—and that is us. We are the answer to suffering that God has given the world. We are the only hope the world has for healing. So, what will this plague intensify in us? Will the coronavirus intensify our fear and our blame, or will it intensify our love and compassion? How will we be remembered in the age of coronavirus? How will the church be remembered? What will this scourge upon our bodies call us to be and to do? Will we play the blame game, or will we be like those brave followers of Jesus who showed us that crisis is the time to roll up our sleeves, get into the action, be the light of the world, care for the suffering, and spread more love than ever before? May the absurdity of this coronavirus lead us not into fear or despair but soften our hearts, turn us away from judgment and moralizing and toward joy and gratitude. May it intensify our love our fellow human beings and lead each one of us to work even harder to relieve the suffering of the world.

i Alain de Botton, “Camus on the Coronavirus,” New York Times, March 19, 2020. 6