In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

There’s a saying that you probably have heard: Adversity does not build character; it reveals it. I think there’s a lot of truth in that statement, but also I would say that as our adversity reveals our character, hopefully we’re able to learn to strengthen it when our weaknesses are exposed. I would say that there’s a lot that’s been revealed in the current crisis that we’re going through. Our national motto is: “In God we trust,” and most Americans would probably say that they believe that, but in times of fear and panic we find out whether people really believe what they say they believe or whether they just say it.

My wife was trying to do some shopping to prepare for trapeza this Sunday, and she was looking for garbanzo beans, and all the garbanzo beans were gone in one store after the next. I’m thinking, “How many people in Houston, Texas, even know how to cook garbanzo beans?” [Laughter] But people in a panic—and we’ve seen this; we’ve seen this happen when a hurricane is on the way—people start panicking, and they’ll buy some of the craziest things. When I was in high school, I worked at a grocery store, and there would be certain kinds of stuff that you would never see move, but when there was a hurricane coming, if that was the last thing on the shelf, people would snatch it up. Then ten years later they would be looking at that can of green beans that they never ate, and they’d say, “Oh, well, the expiration date’s expired for ten years, so I guess I’ll just throw it away,” but they would never eat it.

If we really trust in God, we behave like Christians, and I haven’t seen any of the kind of riots that I’ve seen on the news in some places where people are just hitting each other to try to buy stuff. But that’s not how Christians respond in a crisis like this. As responsible Christians, we certainly have a responsibility to do whatever is wise and right. We should make reasonable preparations for the future. We shouldn’t not take any thought in terms of making sure that we have the ability to pay our bills, but we should trust God after we’ve done what we’ve been able to do. We can exercise reasonable caution, but we shouldn’t allow fear to govern our lives.

The Lord said in the gospels, “Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” And what he was saying there is that we shouldn’t fear death. We should not fear anyone or anything that has the power to kill our bodies but not our souls, but we should fear God who has the power to destroy both soul and body in hell.

If only Americans were as concerned to be quarantined from things like pornography. If only Americans were concerned to keep out blatant sexual immorality from our society because it would spread like a virus and infect people. If only we had that kind of concern about the things that will send people to hell, and send people to hell every day. We talk about the death rates from the coronavirus, but the eternal death rate is a lot higher than that, and we don’t see that kind of concern about those things. But when all of a sudden there’s a possibility that you might get an illness that could possibly result in your death, people start getting very attentive all of a sudden about certain kinds of things. Well, I’m not saying that you should blow it off or that you shouldn’t take any reasonable precautions, but what does this say about what you really believe or about what’s really important? It’s not showing that the average American really believes “in God we trust.”

I’ve circulated this week a sermon by Fr. Josiah Trenham that he preached last Sunday, so hopefully most of you have listened to it. He also gave a talk on a YouTube channel that he has with Patristic Nectar Press, where he elaborated on this further, and I would encourage you to listen to both of those talks. But he talked about how, in the early Church, one of the things that led to many pagan Romans becoming Christians is that when there was an epidemic, which was probably smallpox, the pagans were all reacting in horror and fear. People were abandoning their loved ones and fleeing to the countryside, and the Christians, on the contrary, were staying, and they were caring for these people. Now, does that mean that the Christians didn’t get sick and that no Christians died of the plague? No, it didn’t mean that. It meant that the Christians continued to act like Christians, because death of the physical body wasn’t their big concern.

It’s our eternal souls that really matter, and if you’re a Christian, what’s the worst that could happen from a physical illness? You die, and then you get to go to be with Christ, and that’s the attitude that we should have. Christ went on in the gospel reading to say:

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are numbered. Fear ye not, therefore. You are of more value than many sparrows.

Cholera is a killer even to this day in many parts of the world, but prior to more modern times it was a killer even in Western countries. There were epidemics that killed millions of people around the world. And in Russia there was one epidemic that lasted in the 1800s that killed about a million in Russia alone. This is when the population of the world was quite a bit smaller than it is now, so a million people back then was a much bigger slice of the total than it would be today.

St. Anthony of Optina said:

You should not be afraid of cholera, but of serious sins, for the scythe of death mows a person down like grass even without cholera. Therefore, place all your hope in the Lord God, without whose will even the birds do not die, much less a person.

The question you have to ask is: Do you really believe that? If you really believe that, that doesn’t mean that you go out and lick the doorknobs at the grocery store or something stupid like that, but it does mean that you continue to behave like a Christian, that you don’t go nuts, you don’t go crazy, and you continue to do the things that Christians do. We should do whatever’s in our power to deal with something like that, and I’m not saying don’t get vaccinated, don’t do things that God has provided us in our times to deal with these kinds of things, but once you’ve done what you can do, you should not allow yourself to be governed by the fear of death, because for a believer, death is a door to eternal life. If you really believe that, then you’re going to behave differently from everyone else who’s snatching up the garbanzo beans in the grocery store because they’re afraid that might be the last bit of nourishment on the face of the earth, and they don’t want to miss it.

When we face a time of crisis such as the one we’re in now, our actions show what we really believe; they show who we really are. And if we see by our actions, if we look back on how we’ve reacted to this that maybe God really isn’t the focus of our life, maybe that we really don’t believe what we just talked about here, perhaps God has allowed this to reveal to you that you need to come to have that belief, that you need to repent of your lack of faith and not respond like a pagan whose only hope is in this life, but like a Christian. Amen.