There’s something about the passing of Norm Macdonald at the age of 61 from a ten-year battle with cancer that has me thinking about a number of things.

First, there’s the way he lived with the cancer. To my knowledge, he never disclosed his illness in public. He did a bit in a stand-up act that took on the idea of “battling” cancer. He said, “I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure if you die, the cancer dies at the same time. That’s not a loss. That’s a draw.” Somewhere else—Is it in his memoir?—he mentioned severe abdominal pain as part of a bit, but he never let on that he knew anything about that personally. It was with a remarkable dignity that he lived life with this awful disease of cancer.

I suspect the way Macdonald lived with cancer had something to do with his Christian faith. You don’t normally hear about the Christian faith of a comedian, but he was one who had one. It doesn’t mean I can listen to every joke he told. He often said things I wouldn’t say. But he seemed to have his identity settled in Christ.

In an interview he once said this:
“Some people believe that man is divine, like kind of a hippie idea. I can’t believe that because I know my own heart, and I know that’s not true. Other people believe that we’re wretched like the cynics or the atheists would believe we’re all just wretched nothingness, just animals, just creatures. I can’t believe that. It doesn’t make any sense, that we’re just beasts. I will say that Christianity has this interesting compromise where we’re both divine and wretched, and there’s this Middle Man that’s the Savior, that through Him we can become divine, but we’re born wretched. I kind of like that one, because it sort of makes sense.”

In an interview with Larry King, Macdonald declared, “I’m a Christian. It’s not stylish to say that now.”

King replied, “Are you devout? … You believe in the Lord?”

“Yes, I do,” Macdonald said.

I don’t think King was aware that Macdonald was dying from cancer at the time of the interview. He asked, “You think that you’re going somewhere when (life) ends?”

“Well, I don’t believe it. What people don’t understand about faith is that you have to choose. You know what I mean? They think that you believe it – but you have to choose.”

On Reformation Day (November 1) years ago he sent out this message on Twitter: “Scripture. Faith. Grace. Christ, Glory of God. Smart men say nothing is a miracle. I say everything is.”

Macdonald was listing the “Five Sola’s.” Sola is Latin for “alone,” so it’s “Scripture Alone. Faith Alone. Grace Alone. Christ Alone. And To God Alone Be The Glory.” That’s a pretty good foundation to build your life.

In 2018 he told his Twitter audience this: “At times, the joy that life attacks me with is unbearable and leads to gasping hysterical laughter. How could a man be a cynic? It is a sin.”

There’s a rather famous (infamous?) interchange Macdonald had with a comedian when he was a judge on Last Comic Standing, where he makes a defense of Christianity. It’s worth watching. One of the other judges said they thought a joke was brave. Here you can hear the joke and Macdonald’s reaction to both it and the reaction of the other judge:

You can hear the audience (and a fellow judge) not know quite how to respond. On a show about laughter, Macdonald is deadly serious about things that mattered to him.

This week, I’ve gotten a lot of joy of out Macdonald’s moth joke. It’s probably the reason that he is in my thoughts today.

I just heard the backstory to this joke. Macdonald did a segment on Conan’s show. Just before the commercial break Conan said, “We’ll be right back with Norm Macdonald.” The problem was that He didn’t have any material for a second segment. He was totally unprepared. So what we hear is Macdonald just making up things as he goes. He takes a 20″ joke and stretches it out for several minutes.

A writer, Jon Gabriel, said this: “The smartest comedians portray themselves as the dumbest; Norm Macdonald was the best at this sleight of hand. He graduated high school at 14, read Russian literature in his downtime and had long philosophical discussions with clergy. … Macdonald was a student of human nature first, comedy second.”

Norm Macdonald was a disarming comic. He kept his intelligence and his reading a secret. And he offers a challenge to me.

Eric Sorensen reflected on a interview he had heard Macdonald give. In the interview, Macdonald says, “I have a Rabbi who I talk to a lot… he’s a real scholar. My pastor doesn’t know anything-I mean anything…. he’s just a pleasant guy. If you ask him a direct question, he’ll go: ‘What? Didn’t you hear my sermon?’ But his sermon’s always like ‘How to be a nice fella’ or some nonsense.”

And there’s the challenge: How do you be more than pleasant? How can you be a scholar that knows something? But, then, how do you own that knowledge in a way that isn’t off-putting. How can you relate Christianity to others the way Macdonald tells a joke?

I had three touches with history over the Memorial Day weekend. I wasn’t looking for them, but there they were anyway.

–1–

The first was a book I read over the weekend called The Bomber Mafia, by Malcolm Gladwell (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2021).

Good news continues to flow in on the COVID-19 front here in The United States. As of Tuesday, June 8, 2021, hospitalizations across the country are down to 16,835 and 171,731,584 Americans have received at least one dose of a vaccine.

In an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, says the news “is even better than you’ve heard.”

He writes that “80 to 85 percent of American adults are immune to the virus: More than 64% have received at least one vaccine dose and, of those who haven’t, roughly half have natural immunity from prior infection.”

Obviously, eradication of the disease would be even better but, “With more than 8 in 10 adults protected from either contracting or transmitting the virus it can’t readily propagate by jumping around in the population.” This is what is referred to as herd immunity. This “should speed up the timeline for returning fully to normal.”

If natural immunity is not factored in, then “we are far from Anthony Fauci’s stated target of 70% to 85% of the population becoming immune through full vaccination. But,” Mackary continues, “the effect of natural immunity is all around us” as evidenced in “plummeting case numbers.”

The really good news is for those who have been infected. Now, this is an opinion piece, but Dr. Mackary points out, “After treating Covid for 16 months, we haven’t seen significant incidence of re-infection.”

One question he takes on: “Should the previously infected be vaccinated?” His “clinical advice to healthy patients with natural immunity is that one shot is sufficient, and maybe not even necessary, although it could increase the long-term durability of immunity.”

Those who have had the infection but haven’t been vaccinated are in kind of a strange status. You’re probably safe for a time from re-infection or infecting others, but you’re not in the category of people who are told they no longer need masks. This article is helpful information for those thinking through this issue.

Related to this topic, on Sunday afternoon I finished a phenomenal book, The Premonition by Michael Lewis (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021).

If you haven’t read any of Lewis’ books, it’s likely you’ve seen one of the movies based on them, Moneyball or The Blind Side. (The books are ALWAYS better than the movies.) He writes so well you can hardly help yourself but continue reading.

Side note: There is a blurb on the dust jacket of The Premonition offering “Praise for Michael Lewis.” In a piece for New York Times Book Review, John Williams wrote, “I would read an 800-page history of the stapler if he wrote it.” That’s about right.

This book reads like a thriller, but it is a work of non-fiction. It is about COVID-19, but it begins back in the administration of President George W. Bush.

The story goes that Mr. Bush went on a vacation in 2005 and read John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza (New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2004, 2005, 2009, 2018). It scared Mr. Bush who convened a group in The White House to gauge preparedness for an outbreak of a disease as deadly as the Spanish Flu of 1918. The result was a group of people got together in the Bush years to create a plan.

The book tells the story of close calls—the swine influenza outbreak of 2009 figures prominently in the story. It is called “the pandemic that wasn’t.” Drug-resistant tuberculosis is also part of this story. This is pretty alarming, to say the least. And one thing you learn along the way is that public health officials have a lot of power and a lot of responsibility when it comes to dealing with deadly infections. It feels like a bit of a no-win for them. If they don’t react, people could die. But if they do impose sanctions, then they are taking away freedoms.

The Premonition is not what I expected. I thought somehow it would be about the people we hear in the news all the time. But the most important people in the fight against COVID-19 were people I had never heard of. It’s inspiring to read about these individuals who are so smart and so concerned about solving problems. The CDC features in the story, but they are almost a distraction from and for the protagonists.

Lewis’ book answers some of the questions I’ve had. For example, Where did this idea of “social distancing” come from? The answer is there is “no difference between giving a person a vaccine and removing him or her from the social network.” Makes sense.

Another question: Why close the schools? When you are modeling the spread of disease, “One intervention was not like the others . . . when you closed schools and put social distance between kids, the flu-like disease fell off a cliff.” (It doesn’t come out in the book, but as it turns out, with COVID-19 this wasn’t that important of an intervention.)

There’s a great analogy in the book. When it comes to pandemics, there is no one thing that you can do that works. An intervention is like a piece of Swiss cheese. You need multiple interventions. If you layer enough pieces of Swiss cheese interventions on top of each other, now you have the ability to prevent things.

We learn the importance of the early moments when you’re dealing with communicable disease. One California public health official who figured prominently in this story says “ninety percent of the battle is in the first few days.” (The book doesn’t say outright, but it seems like we didn’t get on it early enough in this country. By the time we locked things down, it was too late and “The problem with implementing [social interventions] too late is you get all the downsides and little benefit, so speed is critical.”)

Another character in this story, Carter Mecher, offers an analogy: “Managing a pandemic was like driving a weird car that only accelerated, or braked, fifteen seconds after you hit the pedal. ‘Or think of looking at a star. It’s the same thing. The light you see is from years ago. When you are looking at a disease, the disease you are seeing is from last week.’”

COVID-19 has a couple of weird characteristics. One thing, for which we can be grateful, it is a disease that spreads quite easily, but it isn’t as dangerous as, say, Ebola. (Though certainly not without consequences for the nearly 600,000 who have died in this country and their grieving families.)

Another characteristic, most people didn’t pass the disease along. But there were “super-spreaders” who “played an outsized role in the spread of the disease.”

I’ll stop with the takeaways. I couldn’t put The Premonition down.

Q. Have you watched any good movies lately?

A. Actually, I have. I watched the movie, The Young Messiah, on Netflix.

Q. What’s it about?

A. It’s based on Anne Rice’s novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. Both the book and the film are fiction, trying to imagine what it was like for Jesus as a child to come to understand who he was.

Q. What do you think about a made-up story about Jesus?

A. Well, I suppose you need to approach the subject cautiously. And this one does. The gospels are mostly about Jesus as an adult. They give us a brief look at Jesus as a baby and a very young child. But then there is no record of anything until he is twelve, attending Passover in Jerusalem. You can understand why someone would want to fill in the details.

Q. What did you like about the movie?

A. For starters, it’s a movie I can recommend without reservations. It’s short. I don’t have to warn anyone about language or tell them about a bad scene. It’s pretty well made.

Q. Anything you didn’t like?

A. I guess in general I don’t like movies about Jesus. The production quality is often low, which is disappointing. And then I don’t like the specificity of one particular actor trying to represent the Son of God. There are too many interpretive issues involved.

Q. What do you mean by interpretive issues?

A. Well, we tend to think of the gospels like a modern biography—where we’re given all sorts of information about a subject’s appearance—their height, weight, hair and skin color, personality, what they were wearing, etc. But the gospels don’t give us any of that sort of information.

And in the gospels we get the words of Jesus and not much more beyond that. We don’t get a lot of characterization—was he smiling when he said that? Did he sound angry? And so the actor that plays Jesus is making decisions in terms of the tone of Jesus that simply aren’t in the text. He is interpreting the text. I prefer having to use my imagination and to think deeply about the words—not see the representation of someone else’s imagination.

Q. So what was different about this movie that you don’t seem to have those objections?

A. This movie is dealing with a subject that has always interested me—what was it like for a young Jesus to come to terms with who he is? Obviously, he was human and didn’t arrive speaking complete sentences. But he was God, which means he had the power of God. And somehow he was an eternal being. Presumably he would not (or could not) sin. How did he relate to other people? The gospels don’t say anything about this. I don’t think it’s wrong to wonder or to try and fill in some of these details.

Q. Were there any surprises in the details?

A. Yeah, I think there were two. One was the presence of Satan in the life of the young Jesus. Satan isn’t always visible to the other characters in the story, but he does influence them. And so this brings a deeply spiritual emphasis to the film. It’s not creepy or spooky, as in a horror film, but we are made aware that there are spiritual realities that we tend to deny in our modern world. Jesus as an adult would be doing battle with evil. His presence in the world as a child was not unknown to dark powers. So I loved that this film represented a reality the Bible presents.

The second surprise was how dangerous the world was for Jesus and how much anxiety his parents felt. Obviously, the danger is represented in the gospel story. God appears to Joseph in a dream and warns him that he needs to take Mary and Jesus to Egypt. The threat is real and they live with an understandable level of pressure. They are living with both the normal anxieties of parenthood as well as this extra mission of keeping God alive until he is old enough to care for himself. It’s hard to imagine what that must have been like. Jesus was a little kid who needed protecting. God speaks to them and gives them a general instruction—”Go to Egypt”—but then all the details are on them. There’s so much of life that Joseph and Mary have to figure out. This, too, feels real.

Q. There’s the age-old question: the book or the movie? Which is better.

A. The book always wins. I’ve seen some enjoyable “based on the book” films, Sully, Remains of the Day, Pride and Prejudice, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, the first Harry Potter. In this case, it’s been a long time since I read the Anne Rice book. My memory is that I really enjoyed it. Rice’s research was impeccable. She comes from a Catholic perspective, which has some traditions associated with the child, Jesus—but these so-called “infant narratives” aren’t historical accounts. For example, the scriptures tell us that the first miracle of Jesus was at Cana of Galilee, while the book (and the film) have Jesus performing miracles, although not consciously.

So maybe the fact that it’s been so long since I read the book made this film so much more enjoyable. Something I liked about both the book and the movie—while they are both fictional accounts, they are out to present a historical Jesus. I am behind any enterprise that tries to make the real Jesus known to the world.

Note: A version of the following appeared previously in an email I sent to my congregation this past summer.

Previously I wrote about the coronavirus.

It’s a difficult disease to manage because you’re contagious before you’re symptomatic, and you may never become symptomatic. As a disease it’s not a big deal, unless it’s a big deal, and then it can be a pretty big deal. To keep it from becoming a public health crisis, you need to act early, when it doesn’t look like a problem.

You can contain it when a small number of people have it, but if you don’t, then it becomes about mitigation, which is where we’ve been the last seven months, and may continue to be for some time. (In fairness, it did take medical professionals some time to realize that the coronavirus was being spread person-to-person.)

The coronavirus was a lot to deal with. And continues to be. Part of the story of this year is that we had a hard time finding common ground and holding on to the center. Somewhere we lost the spirit of “we’re all in this together.”

We have even felt this in the Church (not so much our congregation, but in the larger Church). There were some on one end of the spectrum who said (and continue to say) that they weren’t going to wear masks or maintain distance from others. Some have called this a “scamdemic” or a “plandemic,” suggesting conspiracies and/or no actual health problem. They maintain that the Church as well as the general economy should be business as usual. On the other end of the spectrum, there are churches that are effectively closed.

We have been trying a middle way. We want to obey the scriptures which remind us not to be “giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing” (Hebrews 10:25) and be part of the efforts to mitigate the disease—wearing masks and keeping our physical distance. To me this seems reasonable. We don’t want to live in fear. But we don’t want to be foolish, either. In the same way that you would sneeze into your elbow so as not to pass on your cold to people around you, it seems both loving and wise not to pass on the coronavirus, made more difficult because you will spread it before you have it, if you ever become aware that you had it.

This is not to say that you can’t or shouldn’t have opinions on the handling of this public health crisis. I’ve been pretty vocal in saying that we need better testing in this country. First of all, we need an easier and quicker test. (One of the members of my congregation had one of those early tests. He said something about the feeling of someone scratching his brain.) But a lot of problems would be solved if we had a way to test, even at home, and know if we are sick or have been sick.

And we need to trust our leadership. The most famous example is the prominent doctor and government spokesman who told us early on not to worry about masks. But now he says we should wear masks. His story was that he was worried that there wouldn’t be enough masks for medical professionals if everyone went out to buy them. So did he lie? What are we to make of his words now?

I’ll try to avoid a rant, here.

All this to say, we had plenty to deal with and we weren’t necessarily doing it that well.

And then George Floyd died in police custody on May 25, 2020. This absolutely should not have happened. Is it fair to say he was killed? I know it’s innocent until proven guilty, but we saw it with our own eyes. It was horrifying. I understand Floyd had some underlying health conditions, but isn’t it likely he would be alive today had that former police officer not knelt on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, with three other police officers watching and bystanders asking, pleading, for him to stop?

Most people were disturbed by this. Many people were upset deeply by this, particularly members of the African-American community. Can you blame them? We had a conversation on one of our Wednesday night Zoom meetings with a Black pastor who was pretty outspoken about his feelings.

The death of George Floyd (as well as Breonna Taylor and others) was awful, but maybe there was some good that could come out of it. It looked like we could have a discussion about police procedures. (A friend of mine in law enforcement discovered that kneeling on someone’s neck is an actual police procedure in Minneapolis. It’s not here in Portland.) It looked like we could talk about police unions and removing the few bad police officers so that the vast majority of good ones could be trusted to do their jobs. It looked like we could have a discussion about racism in this country. It is, after all, America’s original sin.

I was certainly ready to go there.

But then something strange happened. The coronavirus was still a problem and family members could not be in the room with relatives as they died from the coronavirus, but large gatherings of protesters were allowed.

We decided—I use “we” because I really do believe we are all in this together—that the police were a greater health threat than the coronavirus.

And then protests turned into destruction and looting and rioting. We even, for a while, had an anarchist zone in Seattle. Reforming the police turned into defunding the police.

And here is where things get really difficult, because we don’t all see eye to eye on what has happened and what should happen, even in our little community. Some of us are overwhelmed by profound loss. Others see opportunities that need to be seized.

I see some good right now. These are personal reflections, but see if they ring true for you. Let me share three right now:

1. I believe this year is exposing some idolatry in our hearts. What do I mean? It’s just possible that for some of us love of country is more important than God right now. That, by definition, is idolatry. It’s one thing to be concerned about things you see and make them a matter of prayer. It’s another thing to be unsettled by the things you see and feeling as though all is lost because your vision of what America is and should be has become a kind of god to you. If God is the most important person in my life I won’t be troubled by anything else.

2. I believe this year is reminding us of sin and its effects. This is a fallen world—a good world gone wrong. A fallen world has disease and being a Christian does not always provide immunity from it. There are a number in our community struggling with bodies that aren’t working well right now. Broken bones. Heart trouble. The prospect of surgery. We have a friend who, recently, in the midst of all of these large-scale events this year, lost both parents in a ten-day period. If sin and death were the end of the story, it would be an unlivable tragedy we could never recover from. But we are promised both an abundant life in this world and eternal life in the one to come. That gives us hope. In the center of human sin and suffering is Jesus on the cross. Dying for our sin. Experiencing our suffering. Sin is not the whole story. It’s certainly not the end of the story.

3. I believe this year is reminding us of the importance of individuals. Presidents and governors are important. We need leaders who will lead us well. Can we agree that good leaders can make things better and bad leaders can make things worse? But the power and beauty of this country is not found in our leaders. It’s found in its citizens. The Constitution opens with “We the people …” The same is true of the church. The pastor and elders matter. They can make things better or worse. But nothing matters more than the individuals in the church. It’s what individuals do day in and day out that matters. I am so proud of this community that we get to be part of. I ran into town yesterday afternoon and there was a 94-year-old member of our community out with the weed-eater, keeping her lawn tidy. You’re doing what you know to do. And you’re making things better. I should say something about the importance of families, but I’m running late and long. I know there’s one family at the coast right now. There’s another one headed there this weekend. There’s another family that is camping. Another one went kayaking the other day when dad had a day off. These are triumphs. They won’t get reported on the news, but they matter so much right now.