US COVID-19 Density
Special to United Methodist Insight
1. God would have us be transformed by the Pandemic, rather than debating its source.
2. Despite our human accomplishments, we have “miles to go before we sleep” (Robert Frost).
3. The blood of virus survivors has healing qualities (Henri Nouwen’s “Wounded Healer”). May we be healers as well.
4. Historic Black inequality because of race-based injustice compels a reparations response. The deaths of Blacks and Browns from COVID-19 because of lack of health care dictate it.
5. The Presidential differences between Barack Obama and Donald Trump are obvious. May the voters be “woke!”
6. Those of us over 65 (I am 86) have had our vulnerability exposed. Let us, because of our closer proximity to our “home-going,” be brave in our vulnerability.
7. Isolation, self imposed or not, reminds us, “We need people.”
8. Our differences, debates, divisions in the UMC are insignificant amidst the death dealing Corona Virus. The reasons for our proposed division are foolish. May the Pandemic serve to re-unite our Church, rather than divide it.
9. “We Are The World” (Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson). “We Are Family” (Sister Sledge). Why do some UMC “family members” want to oust others because of who and how they love? Same gender loving persons in Methodism, past and present, at every level of the UMC, have been used by God to lead our Church. We know some of them. Would that I could publicly name those who have been/are the most effective clergy in our Church.
10. “The Creation” by James Weldon Johnson has come alive for me during the Pandemic. The God who “made us” has not abandoned us. Rather God wants us to be worthy of the miracle of our creation. Individually and as a UMC, God wants us to become that we have not yet been. Langston Hughes in his “America” poem writes, “America has never been America to me.” We who claim to be followers of Jesus, have not always been persons, or a Church in touch and in tune with “Jesus and the Disinherited.” (Howard Thurman). May the Pandemic of 2020, be viewed by Historians as a “Turnaround Time”. Those of us who went to Selma on the Tuesday following “Bloody Sunday” named that Tuesday “Turnaround Tuesday.” We marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, had prayer, and then marched back to Selma.
May 2020 for Church and Society become known as, “Turnaround 2020.”
Gilbert Caldwell
The Rev. Gilbert H. Caldwell. Photo by Mike DuBose, United Methodist Communications.
The Rev. Gilbert H. Caldwell of New Jersey is a retired clergy member of the Mountain Sky Conference.