Here’s a screenshot of today’s graph of COVID-19 case numbers in our county (Lane County in Oregon) over the last few months. Graphs like this have helped motivate the relaxing of almost all pandemic mitigation mandates and measures here in Oregon and across the United States. And I have to say it looks hopeful. The daily average is well below even where it was prior to the Omicron surge which one can see clearly in the chart. I pray that the line keeps sliding downward.
Yet our sermon text from I Corinthians 10:1-13 and the Gospel lesson from Luke 13:1-9 are warnings against overconfidence. While it is spiritual overconfidence, as found in the Corinthian church, that is primarily in focus for Paul, Jesus’ words in Luke 13 invite us to beware even of an ordinary human overconfidence in relation to things like acts of terror and natural disaster. Natural disaster might very well include a pandemic.
This story about an uptick of the BA.2 variant in the UK and Europe, not to mention what is happening in Hong Kong, might make us want to take note of these words from a University of Washington microbiologist at the end of the article: “We can’t let our guard down, because the message that people get when they say ‘we’re lifting restrictions’ is the pandemic is over. And it’s not.” Overconfidence is a danger both in the natural order and in spiritual things.
So I am glad that our church council decided last night to buck the general inclination to “unmask” here in our community and continue for at least three more weeks to ask everyone in our congregation to wear a mask to worship. We will then re-evaluate the situation.
Yet there are many forms of overconfidence. Even solid scientific steps, like vaccination, mask wearing, and social distance, can generate dangerous indifference to continuing risks from the COVID-19 virus. Similarly, in spiritual life, Paul addresses what appears to be Corinthian overconfidence in relation to baptism and the Lord’s Supper as measures for spiritual protection against the threats of a pagan society full of idol worship.
Paul points to the story of Israel in the Exodus in verses 1-4, suggesting that the Hebrew people had their own analogues to the Christian sacraments, a “baptism” in which they passed through the water of the Red Sea and sacred food consisting of manna and the water which Moses produced from a rock on two different occasions. In speaking of the “spiritual rock that followed them,” Paul may be drawing on Jewish legend which imagined that it was literally the same rock from which they drank both at the beginning and the end of the wilderness journey and that the rock had actually followed them in their wanderings. Paul goes on to identify that “spiritual rock” with Christ, making perhaps something beyond an analogical link between Israelite “baptism” and eating and drinking in the wilderness and the Christian sacraments.
In any case, Paul warns in verse 5 that their “sacraments” did most of the people of Israel at that time no good and that most of them died in various ways in the wilderness without ever entering the promised land.
One might think that Paul’s warning about God’s judgment on disobedient Israel in the wilderness contradicts what Jesus says in the Gospel. Some folks brought him a current news story about fellow Galileans being horribly slaughtered by Pilate in a repressive act of terror. Jesus responds by asking those bringing the news if they thought those Galileans worse sinners than other people. He then goes on to mention another current event, eighteen killed in the collapse of a tower, asking if those who died were worse people than others. In verse 5 of that text, Jesus answers His own question, “No.” So Paul seems to be saying that what befell the Israelites in the desert was God’s judgment on their sin, while Jesus explicitly denies that what happened to unfortunate people in His time was directly because of their sins.
Yet both Jesus and Paul continue forward with the same sort of warning, a call to repentance and to repudiation of wrongdoing, specifically the evil of idolatry in what Paul says. Both Paul and Jesus are addressing spiritual overconfidence. Jesus spoke to those confident that they are not as bad as others who have suffered dire fates. Paul spoke to those who imagined that the Christian sacraments gave them license to live however they pleased among their pagan neighbors.
The gracious part of the text from I Corinthians comes in verse 13, the blessed hope that the testing of temptation to sin, in whatever form, comes to us with a promise of God’s faithfulness to us in such times, along with the assurance that there will be a “way out” of such temptations toward sin. We must remember that promise comes after warnings not to be overconfident in our status as better people than others, whether because of goodness or because of our reception of grace in the Sacraments. Grace is just that, not our own doing, nothing on which to base self-confidence, but a gift to see us through all this world’s trials.