(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Living Reality, originally shared on July 6, 2020. It was the twenty-ninth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

Last Saturday was the 4^th of July, the 244^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. Many of us celebrated it by declaring our independence from any sense of the common good, exploding illegal fireworks, and thumbing our noses at local government and law enforcement.

We celebrated freedom by ignoring it. In my experience, and in the observation of church development author of Tex Sample, people who say, “No one’s going to tell me what to do,” aren’t declaring their rights, they are usually the same people that everybody is telling what to do, and they have nowhere to vent their anger. That’s not freedom, that’s license.

I personally don’t buy the argument that it was done for the children. Children aren’t naturally drawn to explosions and noxious fumes.

I don’t buy the argument that, after months of restrictions brought on by the coronavirus, people needed to blow off steam. There are lots of ways to do that that don’t involve a betrayal of the common good, terrorizing animals, polluting the air for everyone and put people with compromised breathing systems at risk, breaking down civil order, and teaching children to care for no one but themselves. It’s just another form of rioting that, and forgive me if I’m wrong, the same people who blew off fireworks were condemning when they saw it on TV.

The same could be said about wearing facemasks. Current scientific research indicates that the coronavirus is spread in water droplets launched through the air from person-to-person by such activities as coughing, sneezing, singing, and talking.

Any kind of mask helps reduce the transmission of these droplets, though some are better than others. We’ve known for some time that, according a model developed at the University of Washington in a study often quoted by the White House, that 33,000 lives could be saved by the beginning of October if 85% of the American public wore masks.

That doesn’t seem to be enough of an incentive for large numbers of us, as you can see most places every day.

So, maybe this will. According to a study by economists at Goldman Sachs, we could save 5% of our $20.54 billion Gross Domestic Product (in 2018) if wearing masks became a national mandate. That’s a little over a trillion dollars that could save jobs and pay decent wages, save business and help develop material independence from enemy countries who now make the things that we buy including, medical equipment, strategic machinery, and personal protective equipment.

Some will say it’s all a political plot by an overreaching government, that it’s a hoax, and will ask, “Do you personally know anyone who has died of the corona virus? Do you even personally know anyone who has contracted the coronavirus”.

I haven’t, and I’ve thought about that a lot. Here’s what I think.

I’ve only known one person my entire life who has been killed in a car accident. I’ve only known a handful who have been seriously injured in a car accident. Those facts do not lead me to conclude that national seat belt mandates or airbags are examples of government overreach. It leads me to conclude that I don’t want to die or suffer injury because of a little thing like a seatbelt.

When people still didn’t wear them, and I confess that it took me a long time to wear them regularly, the “Click-it or ticket” campaign was effective in reminding people that there is a penalty for avoiding laws written for our safety.

Wearing a seatbelt doesn’t guarantee that you won’t be in a car crash, but it does make it way more likely that you will survive one if you are.

Someone online suggested that maybe we should institute a similar campaign, with a slogan like “Mask it or casket”. Too harsh?

The coronavirus numbers over the Fourth of July weekend did not look good: Hospitalizations continued to rise at a record pace, and the number of intensive care unit patients with confirmed infections was up 63% over the previous three weeks. That’s pretty harsh.

The rate at which coronavirus tests in California are coming back positive has also jumped 42% over the past two weeks. That’s pretty harsh.

Los Angeles County announced that on Friday, 3,187 new cases of COVID-19 were reported — the highest daily total since the pandemic began. That’s pretty harsh.

So, we can wear masks, or not wear them and stay at home. Or, we can see what we are seeing now, rising numbers of cases and rates of death.

Which version of what is true do we chose? Which reality?

I heard a philosopher/theologian speak at the Claremont School of Theology several years ago. He spoke about having grown up in a poor village in Argentina. One Christmas, his gift was an apple.

That may seem pretty pathetic. Apples literally grow on trees here. But in his village in Argentina, no one had ever even seen an apple. His father brought it back from a trip to the city. It was presented to him in something like green waxed paper.

He didn’t eat it at Christmas. People would come to his house to see that apple. He would ceremoniously unwrap it and show it. People would say, “Ahhhh.”

One day, when he didn’t think he could keep the apple fresh any longer, he took a bite.

He said that he still remembers the snap of the bite, the taste of the apple, and the juice running down his cheeks.

He said that each of us brings a different association to eating apples. In fact, we could take a bite out of the same apple, but would experience it very differently.

Likewise, we each bring our own history to our experience of reality; we experience eating the apple differently, but there is only one apple. God, however, is reality itself.

Do we make our own reality then, or does reality make us?

*Romans 1:16-20

Paul reminds the Christians in Rome, who had been undergoing terrible persecution, torture and death, that people who do evil but who do not believe in God have no excuse before God. That the Creator is knowable through the creation.

Philip Dick, the science fiction whose esteemed written works such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Ubik were turned into such popular movies as Minority Report, Total Recall and Blade Runner, once said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Salvation through faith in Jesus Christ comes through the proclamation of the Good News, but our understanding of reality is built on the Creation, and creation reveals the general nature of the Creator.

The Creator is made known to us in a living relationship with the living God that God gives to those who receive it, and that reality is alive and accessible to everybody on the planet.

Reality reveals life itself, it is a gift from God the Creator, to all people, not just the Jewish people, not just Greeks (to the non-Jewish people, i.e. Pagans), not just to Christian people. To all people. Reality, that is, the Living God, is accessible to all people.

To know God, therefore is to care for the real needs God’s people and for God’s creation. It means placing the needs of others ahead of our own.

To build up the community, the Body of Christ, with all the gifts God has given us, and to show that same love to the world is rooted in living reality.

God is living reality, and even more than what we can know of reality.

God created reality. If the cosmos ceased to exist, God would still exist, in a kind of existence we cannot even imagine.

The physical world can be measured. But, what can be imagined, and understood God has revealed to us. God’s love, God’s forgiveness, God’s patience, God’s justice, have been made known to all people.

Our task is not to motivate ourselves into thinking that the world revolves around us. Doing that is what sin means.

Our task is to point to what God has done and is doing. It is to care for the world, to care for other people, to seek what builds people up in the name of God. We do not ask God to bless what we are doing to help ourselves, we pray that we might do what God is blessing to help the world.

Paul writes, in his letter to the Philippians:

*Philippians 4:8

There is where you will find God at work in you, by serving God, the Living Reality.