Mandarin Sermon Message: How To Love Others During A Pandemic

The streets are quiet. Are you also internally quiet enough to hear God?

Minister Emily Cui asked her congregants that question on Sunday morning, with the help of YouTube Live.

The challenge was part of a sermon Cui titled ​“The Greatest Commandment Amidst the Pandemic.” It was the second sermon the Calvary Baptist Church on Dwight Street had held entirely online since Covid-19 began to affect New Haven.

“What comes to mind when you see this title?” Cui asked. ​“Is it about coughing into your elbow, washing your hands, or keeping six feet apart from one another? For Christians, we also know there is Mark 12:28 – 34.”

Nearly 80 people tuned into the Calvary livestream.

Worship leader Stephanie Ma began the service by playing piano and singing hymns. Cui then started her sermon in Mandarin. Throughout the two hours of the service, she paused every few sentences to allow Nathalie Feng to translate her meaning into English.

Cui focused her sermon on a passage from the Gospel According to Mark, one of the books that make up the Christian New Testament. In the passage, a man asks Jesus which commandment is most important.

Cui broke the passage into five key lessons (pictured at top):
1. To listen to divine guidance, you must have internal and external quiet.
2. God is in control of all things, including hardships like pandemics.
3. Loving God means building and maintaining a relationship, including focusing on trust and commitment during hardships.
4. The concept of loving your neighbor is clearer during these times.
5. Wisdom means knowing God.

The fourth takeaway — loving your neighbor — has become particularly important to Cui in recent months.

Her grandmother passed away in February, one week after her 90th birthday. While her death was not caused by Covid-19, the restrictions in China at that time meant that none of Cui’s family members were able to be with her when she passed.

A Christian neighbor continued to visit her, however. She prayed with her and helped Cui’s grandmother get baptized when she expressed that wish. When Cui’s grandmother passed away, the neighbor asked to be one of the 10 that could attend her funeral.

Cui recounted that the neighbor knew her grandmother always wanted to have a daughter and ended up with four sons.

“She said, ​‘Today I will be her daughter,’” Cui said, tearing up.

“I’m not just talking about how God has blessed my grandma or myself. He took care of little details. He took care of my grandmother when her own children couldn’t do that,” she explained.

The story also highlighted the message of a poem Cui read early in the sermon about the spread of Covid-19.

“China played the first half of the match. The rest of the world is playing the other half, but all the expats and their families are playing the entire match,” Feng translated.

Cui said that Chinese expats helped in the early days of the epidemic by mailing two trillion face masks to China. Now, they find themselves not only potential victims of the disease but also targets, she said.

“Under this kind of situation, people need to find a scapegoat. They need to find someone to blame. For example, last week, President Trump declared that this is the ​‘Chinese virus.’ This caused lots of anger among Chinese communities, and it also brought a lot of hurt,” Cui said.

Cui issued a challenge to her virtual listeners just before praying a final time.

She drew from the story of Giuseppe Berardelli, one of the over 50 priests who have died from Covid-19 in Italy. She recounted that he died because he gave the last available respirator away to someone else. (Although initially reported by sources like the BBC, this story has been contradicted by close friends of Berardelli.)

“All these heroes who put themselves in harm’s way have to go against the flow,” she said. ​“During this pandemic, how do we go against the flow to love our neighbors? We need to think about that.”