Imploring the flock to love thy neighbor, get the shot
I tuned in to Facebook Live to watch my brother give a sermon last Sunday. He preaches at Dudman Springs Church, a nondenominational gathering set in some of the prettiest farmland in southwest Missouri, where we grew up.
Dan is a bit of an institution back home. He played football for the local high school. He never forgets a name or a conversation. These days, he is a charismatic preacher, and popular referee and umpire for the sports that form the backbone of my hometown. If you’ve seen Robert Duvall’s movie, “The Apostle,” that’s my brother, only to my knowledge he’s never swung a baseball at any one.
In this time and in that place, my brother is the tip of the spear. We are white evangelicals, and during this pandemic, some people in our pews have acted as human roadblocks to the country reaching herd immunity against the deadly COVID virus. They refuse to get vaccinated and sometimes even kick up dust against wearing masks.
Freedom, and all that. In fact, in June, the Kaiser Family Foundation said the groups least likely to get the COVID vaccine are, in order, rural residents, Republicans, and white evangelicals.
My brother is all three. And on Sunday, in simple and convincing terms, he did a brave thing: He implored his flock to get the vaccination.
I am starting to believe that no amount of shouting or sneering from those of us on the coasts will turn the tide for the souls in Missouri, Kentucky, in Ohio who have a hard time wrapping their minds around the importance of the vaccine.
Yes, it boggles the mind that people would still question, and we’ll be years parsing out why that’s happening. In the meantime, we just may move through this crisis because of the quiet efforts of people like my brother, saying what he said on Sunday, that getting vaccinated goes beyond politics, that if you want to protect your family and yourself, you’ll get the vaccine.
Down the road, he said into the camera on Sunday, we’ll look back at our resistance to this and wonder what precisely we were fighting against. Or for. Honest to God, if I was in Missouri, I’d hug him around the neck.
No one was surprised when COVID vaccination rates leveled out after the initial rush to get shot. Early on in Connecticut, people stayed up late to enroll online, and then they cheerfully stood in line for the jab.
At least, I did.
But we are at about 64% fully vaccinated now – high compared to the rest of the country, but we could do better, especially as the number of new cases and hospitalizations are rising. Nationally, health officials recently reported 51,000 new cases a day – more
than four times the average of just last month. The vaccine would quell the spread of every variant of the virus.
We have enough vaccines to do the job, but we have too many people who believe nonsense and propaganda. Hospitals say 99.9% of all new cases are the unvaccinated. It is, say officials, a pandemic of the unvaccinated. They’re ruining it for the rest of us.
In some areas of the country, the increase in COVID cases has contributed to an uptick in vaccination rates, but people aren’t moving fast enough. Near my brother’s church, officials at Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Mo., opened a third COVID ICU unit, while people are flocking to the super-spreader event that is the Ozark Empire Fair, where one estimate said 6 out of 10 people who crowd onto the
rides and into the lines for fried dough are unvaccinated.
Last week, St. Louis health officials announced they’d reinstate a mask mandate, and Missouri’s attorney general (and U.S. Senate candidate) Eric Schmitt vowed to fight it. He did the same when Kansas City officials reinstated an indoor mask mandate, because in this time and in that place, it is politically expedient to do the unthinkable and rail against science. (Please pray for Missouri, who along with Schmitt counts among her Senate candidate that St. Louis attorney
who with his attorney wife, aimed guns at peaceful protesters in their fancy neighborhood. Evidently, attorney Mark McCloskey believes that if he can gain national attention by being a gun nut, he can serve in the U.S. Senate.)
Here in Connecticut, in addition to protests from members of the anti-mask/ anti-vax/anti-science club, we are drowning in misinformation pumped into our homes on social media. The swill is so thick that earlier this year, Attorney General William Tong joined 11 other attorneys general to write the heads of Twitter and Facebook to
ask that those platforms stop allowing the spread of misinformation about the vaccine and the efficacy of masks. Twitter, at least, has in their rules and policies a ban on misinformation about COVID-19 “which may lead to harm.”
But the waters of ignorance are deep and some of our fellows are drowning in it. So, in keeping with my brother’s sermon:
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Well, that’s your business.
Are you vaccinated out of a love of your neighbor? Well, that’s ours.
Love your neighbor. Get the shot.