When Being Heroic Means Staying Home
What do we do when that great moment of our age appears and many of us are forced to admit we won’t be the kind of heroes we had imagined? What stories will I tell my grandkids about this pandemic?
For me, there will be no storming the beach, no raising the flag, no speech in the colosseum. Will I tell them tales of buffering conference calls or how I did my best to ration toilet paper?
I’m a pastor. I grew into this vocation through stories—stories of missionaries who courageously risked sickness and death for the sake of the gospel; ancient church figures who cared for plague victims as others fled in fear; prophets and preachers who declared truth before murderous tyrants and mad kings. I’m also an American, raised on stories of Crocket’s last stand at the Alamo and a great uncle’s jump over the Rhine as a World War II glider medic.
So, what am I to make of a crisis in which the most heroic action may very well be to do nothing at all? To concern myself with washing my hands, sanitizing doorknobs, and staying home. To protect the people I pastor by staying away from them.
ARMCHAIR HEROES
My wife is a nurse, currently working with mothers and newborns but facing the possibility of more dangerous work in the weeks to come. She has already been coming home with stories about friends, nurses, custodians, and doctors who are making incredible sacrifices.
They are rightfully receiving the heroic recognition they deserve, a kind of heroics not formed by some stoic disposition but by their courageous willingness to keep showing up, even as they too wrestle with fear and anxiety. They will get lots of attention in the weeks to come, and they deserve every word of it.
This article is not for them, though. It’s for those of us who are sitting at home, the ones who always imagined themselves being heroic in times of crisis but who are now forced to scroll endlessly on iPhones in sweatpants, gathering second-hand details of the frontline.
CUT OUT OF THE STORY
There’s a story in the book of Judges I return to often. I read it because it reminds me of an uncomfortable tendency I recognize in myself. It’s part of a story I’m sure you’re familiar with, but this part is one few seem to remember. And, as it turns out, that may be its most important point. It’s the story of Manoah, the father of the far more remembered Samson.
Manoah had a barren wife, a perpetual theme in our Scriptures. And here, as we see in similar stories in Scripture, a stranger appeared with a message; “You shall conceive and bear a son. . . . He shall begin to save Israel from the hand of the Philistines.” This son would be a national hero—a savior from the scourge of the Philistine oppression. There was just one stipulation: Manoah’s wife was commanded to raise him as a Nazirite. That meant no wine, no contact with the dead, and no cutting his hair.
She immediately ran to her husband, telling him everything she had heard. Manoah decided to pray. A reasonable thing to do. A prayer of thanks, perhaps? But Manoah instead prayed, “O Lord, please let the man of God whom you sent come again to us and teach us what we are to do with the child who will be born” (emphasis added).
“Manoah hadn’t been given anything to do. Where was his place in this miraculous event?”
What was Manoah asking? His wife had told him everything. A child would be born. They were to raise him as a Nazirite. What did Manoah want to know that he hadn’t already been told? But Manoah hadn’t been given anything to do. Where was his place in this miraculous event? Manoah wanted to know more. He prayed and got his answer—sort of.
The angel did come back, but again only to Manoah’s wife, while she was alone in the field. Again, she rushed to her husband. He followed her and wasted no time in pressing the angle for answers. “Are you the man who spoke to this woman?” Those hardly sound like the words of a man desperate to hear from God.
The angel responded, “I am.” Manoah asked a follow up: “What is to be the rule that governs the boy’s life and work?” The angel of the Lord answered, “Your wife must do all that I have told her.” Manoah was cut out. Again.
The messenger’s reluctance to say more forced a reality to become clear: this was not Manoah’s story. Manoah would be required to step out of the spotlight. He would have to watch what unfolded.
I’m not sure it’s any easier for us to discover we’re not the hero of this moment, either.
WHEN CHURCH AS WE KNOW IT IS DEEMED “UNESSENTIAL”
As Christians, we do grave damage when we attempt to insert ourselves into the heroic role of every story. We do it with good intention, a desire to demonstrate faith, and articulate the distinction of our hope, but there are times when the church must not be the hero. There are times when we are made to sit and receive along with the world. This is what Manoah’s wife seemed to have grasped and Manoah struggled even to comprehend.
“What we’ve spent a lifetime building has now been labeled “unessential.””
I fear we have not prepared ourselves for this time or this peculiar calling—what the church has long called its theology of suffering. Our constant concern for the church’s public reputation, the buildings we’ve built, the programs we’ve engineered, and the celebrity influence we’ve amassed have suddenly been reduced to the same 10mbs of upload speed used by every other live-streamer on Facebook and YouTube.
What we’ve spent a lifetime building has now been labeled “unessential.” The ground we have built our influence upon has suddenly and dynamically shifted. The heroes of this story will not be our megachurch pastors or bestselling Christian authors; it will be hospice chaplains in facemasks, custodians whispering prayers as they gather trash, a teen stocking grocery store shelves, worshiping silently through her headphones, and families who huddle in prayer before one parent steps back into scrubs and infected hospital rooms.
ATROPHIED BY PROSPERITY AND SUCCESS
This virus has done more than flip the stock market and force the retrofitting of sports arenas into make-shift hospitals; it has reoriented the nature of our heroics. It has repositioned the spotlight onto those who are called greatest in the kingdom of God.
Many of us, particularly those used to being in charge, have come to the disorienting realization that we are not in control and that to be a “leader” in the kingdom of God does not mean to be at the center of the stage or to possess answers to every problem. We are called to the isolation of our homes to pray, read our bibles, and offer encouragement and communion over phone calls and cameras. Our stages and our carefully choreographed worship sets have become as irrelevant to this moment as our theater seating and offering baskets.
“Our stages and our carefully choreographed worship sets have become as irrelevant to this moment as our theater seating and offering baskets.”
We are forced into practices that, though central for generations of Christians before us, have atrophied by years of prosperity and success. We are left to mourn, to lament, to weep, to intercede, to withdraw, to fast, to sit alone, and to “hope against all hope,” even as we too may suffer.
But are these not the works of our Savior—weeping over Lazarus, mourning over Jerusalem, withdrawing to the wilderness, and petitioning his Father for another way? Are these not the very truths upon which his kingdom is founded: blessed are the meek, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are those who hunger and thirst? And aren’t these living rooms the very place his spirit was first poured out?
Jesus called us to faith like a child’s, a truth I hear echoed back each night as my three-year-old daughter, Charlotte, prays over dinner, “And help the cernona-virus to go away.” What more can I do but join her in that prayer? Does she not lead it as well as I could?
A WORSHIP NOT ABOUT OURSELVES
Manoah’s final attempt to regain his influence and control was to offer a burnt-offering sacrifice. Having already become suspicious of Manoah’s motivations, the sacrifice feels more like manipulation than worship. As the sacrifice burned, the angelic messenger was suddenly caught up in the flames, ascending to heaven above them.
Manoah fell on his face in fear. “We shall surely die, for we have seen God.” Don’t be fooled—Manoah had been afraid since the beginning. Fear is often masked by busyness and overvaluation of self-importance. While some are paralyzed by fear, others roll up their sleeves and attempt to take control of whatever they can. Manoah’s fear is obvious now only because his attempts to control the situation have all failed.
Manoah’s wife recognized from the beginning what Manoah was still struggling to recognize: “If God had meant to kill us, he wouldn’t have offered us this messenger and the promise of a son.” Manoah’s desperate attempts at control had blinded him to the grace so obvious to his wife. Her level-headed calm only underscored his inability to recognize it. Her worship perceived and believed where his faltered and questioned. He became desperate as she felt her faith swelling with worship. The same moment was a gift for her a gift and a threat for him.
CALLED TO BE STILL
I wonder if this is, for so many of us, that moment. We are being stripped of our control and exposed in our desperation for relevance. It is not our calling. Like Christ, we will bear this infirmity, and we will bear witness to a faith that need not be in control nor be the hero.
We will stay at home, giving where we can, serving where we can, sacrificing as we can. But most of us will not be at the center of this story. And it will be this forced abandonment of our own kingdoms and power that will allow us to see God more clearly.
My prayer is that, freed from our own desperate self-centered control, we might worship in an abandon not possible when we are in charge. I pray that in our busyness to setup new cameras and lighting, reformatting programs, cutting budgets, and projecting calm to our congregations, we don’t miss a glimpse of his grace.
History has forgotten the name of Manoah’s wife, but we can’t afford to lose the example of her encounter with God’s message of hope, received while she sat alone in a field.
Chase Replogle is the pastor of Bent Oak Church in Springfield, Missouri and hosts the PastorWriter Podcast.