November 20
Ezek 40:28-41:26 | PS 118:19-29 | Prov 28:3-5 | James 4:1-17
We have drifted so far from what made us loving and human. Each little change seems innocent enough. It's hard to see what is lost until it is too late. In this current coronavirus crisis, like never before I believe we see a loss in our humanity. I recently listened to a concentration camp survivor describe her view of the dehumanization of Germany as the atrocities continued to escalate. She described how before they went after the Jewish people, they went after the disabled, then the mentally ill, followed by the elderly, who they referred to as the "wasteful eaters". She then draws an analogy to what she saw in Nazi Germany and what she sees in the response to the current crisis. She points to the purposeful sending of the sick elderly into long term care facilities who were in no position to handle this disease, resulting in the deaths of so many of our elderly. As I step back and view my profession I am saddened. Medicine was the picture of what it meant to extend a human touch, love to the hurting. But over the past generation, before my eyes, the system which I grew to love has been replaced by efficiency, cost considerations, a focus on lifestyle for the physician over the profession. Most are probably unaware that hospitals have largely moved away from their private physicians and to a hospitalist model. The hospitalists work shifts. The hospitalists don't know you. So, if you have had a doctor who has known you for thirty years and you have formed a strong bond, but now you find yourself very sick, a hospitalist who has no relationship with you cares for you in the hospital. Though your own doctor who knows you and your family would care only for you, not seeing the expense, who would fight for you even when it doesn't make sense, he or she is not the one making these decisions. Instead, you will often be managed in a cold model of efficiency, by caretakers who don't know you at all. So, when you ask how loved ones could be not allowed with their loved ones as they are dying alone in a hospital bed from coronavirus, which though contagious, carries a less than a one percent chance of killing others, now it begins to make sense. It's not that these caretakers are individually cold or uncaring, they simply follow the dictates of a cold system.
I know that many in our nation are praying. But we had better step back and ask what it is we are praying for. Are we praying for the status quo? Because the status quo is not the status quo which existed thirty years ago. I can speak of the medical profession since I entered medical school in 1984 and have seen its transformation from a model of love and humanity into a model of efficiency and cost effectiveness. I'm sure that many of you in your specific lives can recant similar examples. We read in James 4:2-4, "Yet you do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures. Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God?" As so many pray for things surrounding the elections, the shutdowns, etc., what is it that we are truly praying for? Are we praying for revival? Are we praying for a return to humanity? Or, are we praying that we can return to the things that we had, the toys that we enjoyed, the godless lifestyle that we miss? We need to step back and ask ourselves whether our priorities are selfish or whether they align with God's word? We read in James 4:7-8, "Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded."
Our nation has drifted so far from the principles which were respected at its founding. We as people, like sheep, often follow the dictates of what society directs us to do. Many well meaning people have allowed themselves to become cold and robotic as they emotionlessly go through life doing what is expected of them. God will not be mocked (Galatians 5:7). We are called to be different. Anything short of revival will simply not be enough. We can not yearn for the "good old days", when those days, if honest, were steeped in godlessness. We must individually repent of our sins, and turn our hearts to God. We need to fall on our knees, broken, realizing what it is that our nation has become. We need to return to God, or come to God for the first time. As we look around at a nation which in many ways has lost its humanity, and certainly its love for God, how I pray that we recognize how far we have drifted and pray to our God who always listens to the broken individual.
Messages from Pastor Lloyd Pulley: