There was disturbing news this morning out of Texas with a second health care worker testing positive for the Ebola virus. Both women had cared for Thomas Eric Duncan, who recently died of Ebola here in the U.S. The worry is heightened by the fact that this second nurse had taken an airline flight from Cleveland to Dallas the day before she came down with symptoms. There’s some reassurance in the information that the virus is not contagious before symptoms appear.
The opening of Proverbs 27 certainly speaks to our current moment, “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring.” The uncertainty and fear generated by even the small scale spread of a dreaded disease does call us to be humble in our expectations for the future.
Many of us are wondering, like Beth and I did this morning, how to respond to all this. We will take an offering at church Sunday morning to support Medical Teams International, which is sending supplies and supporting personnel in Liberia and other parts of western Africa. But beyond such gifts and prayer for all affected, there doesn’t seem much to do, unless the crisis draws closer to home.
For each of us it’s worth wondering about how we might respond if Ebola appeared in our community. We face broad questions like, “Would we run and hide or would we take risks to help those afflicted?” Actual situations would of course be much more complicated, and trying to decide one’s actions ahead of time seems pretty hopeless and depressing.
I suggest that Proverbs 27 offers a different tactic in response to the uncertainties of this life, including fears about Ebola. Rather than encouraging careful planning for all contingencies, it invites us to value friendship and good character developed in the context of relations between friends. In the language of virtue ethics, it invites us to ask not what we will do if Ebola arrives in our community, but what kind of people we want to be, regardless of the situation facing us.
Proverbs 27:10 begins “Do not forsake your friend…” and goes on to argue that friends who stay nearby in a “calamity” are better even than family that is distant. We might ask ourselves how we can be friends like that, people who do not abandon each other in threatening, difficult times? How can we be faithful friends?
Faithfulness, like many virtues, develops over time, both as one experiences the expectation of friends and family, and as one practices faithfulness in smaller, simpler matters. Thus verse 14 holds up the simple courtesy of restraining one’s voice around neighbors early in the morning. That practice of courtesy and care for the feelings of others shapes a larger form of character that can remain in place when tested.
Interactions between us are perhaps the crucible (see verse 21) in which much of our character is formed. The well-known verse 17, “Iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens [the wits] of another,” had always meant to me an intellectual sharpening. In my philosophy studies, dialogue and even disagreement sharpened one’s own positions on many subjects. Yet the overall context and the fact that “wits” in Hebrew is literally “face,” means that something larger is in view here. We sharpen the character of each other by how we speak and interact with one another. Verse 19 carries that thought forward by saying, “one human heart reflects another.” We have the capacity to show one another our real character. That is, what you say to me can help me glimpse some of the truth about my own heart and vice versa.
I’ve been in conversation with Mark Alfano, whose book Character as Moral Fiction, argues that the act of “labeling,” telling others that they are virtuous in various ways, can be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Being praised for neatness makes schoolchildren behave more neatly. Verse 21 says that “a person is tested by being praised.” Our first inclination might be that the test is in regard to humility, but perhaps it is also in the willingness to live up to that praise and genuinely and consistently exhibit the virtue being asserted about you.
Which is all to say that it is important to remember that in Christ Jesus we are saved into a community, a “community of character” as Stanley Hauerwas terms it, in which we encourage each other to grow into the character of Christ. Proverbs 27 teaches us that our friendship and interactions are part of that sanctifying process.