Week of Easter Three

Join Us for the Bible in Christian Worship this Wednesday:

Over twenty persons participated in the first session of this new series which explores how the patterns and content of our Sunday worship are grounded in the scriptural witness of both ancient Hebrew and Christian practices. A Zoom link will be distributed via Constant Contact. If you are not receiving our Constant Contact messages and wish to do so, please This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

“Personal Reflections from Quarantine”

Dear Friends in Christ:

For two full years, I had managed to dodge the Covid-19 bullet. No longer. As I write these words, I have shown improvements each and every day with the diminishment of what from the beginning were comparatively mild symptoms. General fatigue persists with energy levels waxing and waning through the day. And while I currently have tested negative for Covid, erring on the side of caution, I maintain for now the discipline of quarantine for the sake of the health and well-being of our wider community.

Even with a mild case of Covid, I have a sense that the coronavirus is not something to be trifled with, particularly when it comes to its general systemic effects on my whole body’s energy levels and capacities. In a renewed, first-hand way, I am thankful to God for the work of scientists who developed such effective vaccinees and boosters and antiviral medications which likely kept my case mild.

But how did Covid catch up with me? Throughout the pandemic, I have consistently persisted in my discipline of wearing masks in all indoor settings and circumstances, from church to grocery shopping, and have limited my participation in large group activities. What the reality of my infection reveals to me is that guarding or promoting public health is not reduced to a matter merely of individual, personal choice. I chose to err on the side of caution, and yet I still got sick. As individuals we are inevitably participants in a wider community culture, namely, one that has currently chosen to relax safety protocols such as mask-wearing – and this during a phase of the pandemic when a variant of the virus that is even more transmissible than omicron and its first subvariants is increasingly widespread throughout the nation, especially in the Northeast. I’m not engaging in a blame game here, but just observing that we are all in this together, whether we like to admit that or not. What we choose to do or not do together as a society has real life effects and consequences, all up and down the line, on individual lives and on the quality of our life together.

Of course, I cannot determine or isolate the particular set of circumstances that resulted in my exposure to the virus sufficient that I tested positive and became symptomatic. Which is to say, even as I acknowledge the power of our whole communal contextualization, it is still a matter of my individual particularity that resulted in my current illness. I marvel at the fact that during the pre-symptomatic time when I was likely most infectious, my son, Nathan, and my college friend, Chris, and I were together in the parsonage, un-masked and interacting in close quarters. Yet, neither one of them has gotten sick or even tested positive. The body, with its immunities and complicated, interacting systems, is full of wisdom and mystery.

Which is to say, stress and its effects have a lot to do with what we, our bodies, are able to withstand or succumb to. I find it fascinating that I began to experience symptoms the moment that Nathan got on the plane at Dulles Airport Sunday a week ago to return to Phoenix. It’s as if my body was waiting to get sick until my fatherly duties for his visit concluded. Nathan’s spring break time with me happened in the context of the busiest time of the year for pastors, namely, Holy Week and Easter – and this on top of what has already been a stressful two years with the pandemic. I’ve long been wondering when my body would eventually tell me, essentially, “you have no choice now but to take a break.”

It’s noteworthy that past periods of particular stress in my life have commonly resulted in my being on the receiving end of one form of illness or another, at this point, consistently on the milder end of things. Each occasion became its own kind of grace to allow a cessation of stressful circumstances in order to open up horizons for rest and healing and restoration. I am claiming my current case of Covid as one such expression of grace. Clearly not everyone who catches Covid would name it as an odd kind of grace. If my episode were more severe, I wouldn’t either. But in this particular case, I do see the grace – and the warning sign to listen to my body and its wisdom in always seeking a restoration of balance and well-being.

I often joke after Easter Sunday that Jesus vacated his tomb in resurrected new life at least in part so that pastors and other busy church people can enter that womb of the tomb for their own few days of rest toward new life…. So it is that I have claimed my bout with Covid as such an occasion for needed rest, hopefully also toward renewal in this Eastertide for the sake of the work entrusted to me as pastor here.

Enough about me. Thanks for your various expressions of concern. Thanks for your indulgence in reading these personal reflections. I pray that they may provoke you to reclaim a renewed passion to promote and nurture public health in our wider communities. And I pray that my reflections may also inspire you, without first getting sick, to claim your own needed occasions of rest and renewal for restoration in the midst of your busy lives and routines, and perhaps to see moments of God’s grace in unexpected places and circumstances. And I pray that you all may stay well.

I trust that I will be back in your midst soon. Another graced moment in all of this is that I also had the occasion to share in Resurrection’s livestreamed worship for the Third Sunday of Easter, obviously a new experience for me – more on that in next week’s Midweek Message. Meanwhile, my thanks to those who covered for me in my absence – especially Council President, Glen Mason, who took on some additional duties in my absence, Pastor Amy Feira who officiated at the funeral of Malcolm Stark, and Pastor and Seminary President, Guy Erwin, who preached and presided on Sunday.

With ongoing prayers in Jesus’ name for your health and well-being and that of our communities,

Pastor Jonathan Linman