Reflecting on the COVID-19 Pandemic
Sermon preached by the Precentor, Canon Anna Macham on the First Sunday of Lent
Sunday 9 March 2025
Jonah 3 and Luke 18:9-14
Today, the 9th of March, is a national Day of Reflection for the COVID-19 pandemic. The day marks five years since the pandemic began, and it’s an opportunity to come together to remember all those who lost their lives, and to honour the sacrifices made by many, including health and social care staff, frontline workers and researchers. It’s a day to express our appreciation for those who volunteered, and who did things to help others, whether large or small, during that critical time. And it’s a valuable chance for us all to reflect together, if only for a few moments now, on the impact the pandemic had on each of us and on our lives.
For some of us, those of us who are lucky, Covid-19 has now become mainly a somewhat distant and hazy memory that we occasionally reference in conversation, as a marker of time more than anything else, noting that a particular event or practice is something we did before the pandemic, or during it, or since. For others, to speak of it is to recall an incredibly traumatic period in their lives, especially for those who lost loved ones, and weren’t able to be with them in their final hours or attend a funeral due to lockdown rules. For still others, including the 2 million adults and children in this country who are suffering with long Covid, some very severely, the pandemic is still a daily reality. This week, unemployment benefits have once again been in the news, with it being announced on Wednesday that there will be cuts to the welfare budget. In connection with that, it was reported that the number of people out of work and claiming incapacity benefits rose during the pandemic and has remained high ever since, with more people coming on to benefits than off them. Yet in these reports, the ongoing effects of long Covid, particularly on healthcare workers who were exposed to high viral loads, were largely not mentioned as one of the key causes of why unemployment, not to mention the shortage of nurses, remains so high (Work coaches to focus on long-term unemployed – BBC News).
Collectively and individually, then, our tendency is not to talk that often about the pandemic. It’s tempting to try to put that time behind us, to pretend it never happened. And it’s not as if there’s nothing else in the world that it’s important to think about. It’s as if we’ve been gripped by a collective amnesia. Yet for all the reasons already mentioned, it’s important to remember.
We’re in the Church’s season of Lent at the moment, a sombre time of self-examination and repentance. The sign of the cross in ash made on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday recalls our mortality. The solemnities of Lent remind us that we are limited, finite beings, unable to deal on our own with the consequences of sin and the enormity of death that are part of our experience, even if we would rather block them out.
In the book of Jonah, we heard how the people come together to declare a fast, and to mourn. “Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth”, we heard, “and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands” (Jonah 3:8). In a busy world, where the language of lament is often forgotten or suppressed, the words of scripture makes us stop and remember those times of desolation and desperation that we have experienced. Such words also give us hope, that our grief- and that of others- will be heard by God when we cry out to him.
There’s also a strong value in hearing each other. The Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose new novel Dream Count, her first in 13 years, came out this week, also wrote a memoir Notes on Grief (2021), about her father who died during the pandemic when Nigerian airports were closed and it was impossible for Adichie, who lives in America, to visit her family. She speaks in the memoir of the value of communal mourning, “that African way,” as she puts it, “of grappling with grief: the performative, expressive outward mourning, where you take every call and you tell and retell the story of what happened, where isolation is anathema” (p.27). There’s an urge to run away from grief, the “shimmering panic” she describes, the grief that, in her words, “is not gauzy” but “substantial, oppressive, a thing opaque” (p.27). Yet, this remembering together, whilst stifling sometimes, can help us confront it.
One of the reasons we need to remember, it’s said, is so that we can prevent a similar pandemic from occurring in the future, by building resilience, and by investing in science, particularly vaccine programmes. There’s a value for us as a church community, and as individuals, in remembering for the future too. Perhaps, in the pressures of that time, we made decisions we would prefer not to have made; the church made mistakes too.
Covid-19 allowed us to do things differently, and to make our worship more accessible, because we had to. It showed that human beings can adapt quickly, when there’s a need. It would be sad if collective and individual tendency towards amnesia when we consider the trauma of Covid stopped us from reflecting further on different ways of doing things, and on the new relationships and insights gained.
One thing I missed during Covid was my daily walk through the Cloisters from our offices to Cathedral Evensong each day, and I missed singing; I missed my busy life, yet I’m not sure how fully I appreciate my busy life now I’m actually back in it. If nothing else, Covid taught us to appreciate what we have.
Above all, Covid showed how much we depend on each other. Analysts this week have written persuasively about how Covid caused us to rethink the relationship between the individual and the collective. The start of first lockdown was delayed by the then government, due to the mistaken belief that people would lack the resilience to cope with the strict lockdown measures. Yet such concerns proved to be ill-founded, as people became more concerned about the fate of others, which was shown in enduring levels of adherence to the restrictions. It’s estimated that, had Britain locked down a week earlier than it did, it could have saved more than 30,000 people. Two weeks, and up to 40,000 more would have survived. So Covid showed us how the group empowers us, providing resilience in hard times.
The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, told by Luke in our second reading, is very much a parable of the collective, a story that warns against the dangers of relying too much on the individual, at the expense of our relatedness, to God and to others. The Pharisee, with his learning and social status, is incredibly self-possessed; he relies only, as Luke tells us, on himself. Arrogantly and disdainfully, he considers himself to be a strong individual, with no need of others. Yet all along, Luke shows us how his self-definition is, ironically, completely reliant on the low-status tax collector, in that he defines himself against him; everything he says is not positively about who he is, but all about how he isn’t like this despised man. Luke, in his Gospel, shows this fundamental need for each other, for relationship, with God, and with all sorts of other people, that that new relationship of love will open up to us, and bring us into contact with, in the journey of faith.
For Luke, the way of salvation is the way of the collective. To understand our need for God and his healing is also to open ourselves to others, not least to help us through those times of grief and isolation. And so as we remember today, we honour those who have died, and we give thanks for our lives lived in community. We pray that we may not lose the radical collective concern for the fate of others that we developed in Covid, and that we may remember well, and actively, for the future.