The Rev. Harlan Dalton.
In the weeks and months ahead, what will we learn about our deep behavior amid the covid-19 pandemic?
Will social distancing be mainly about keeping out of sneezing range? Or will many of us begin to display something more insidious?
That was the challenging ethical question engaged by the Rev. Harlon Dalton, the missional priest in charge at St. Paul and St. James Episcopal Church in a brief but quietly powerful online audio-only sermon Sunday morning.
The online service at St. PJ’s, where a jazz-style Eucharist has been a hallmark for years, was in keeping with the urgent call of Mayor Justin Elicker for all city congregations to suspend in-person services in order slow the spread of the coronavirus.
As still interior images of the beautiful 1880s church at the corner of Olive and Chapel streets moved across the screen, Music Director Will Cleary’s sweet John Coltrane‑y saxophone settled down listeners, at least according to notes written by several participants on the Facebook thread.
Then, after preliminaries, Rev. Dalton began his sermon with texts that dug deep into the Jewish roots of Christianity to send a lesson about not only the importance but also the perils of social distancing.
“Jesus,” Dalton began, “said, ‘Hear Oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One’ .…and the second commandment is, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There are no commandments greater than these.”
Of course, how to implement those moral imperatives at the new mandated distances, and amid forced self- isolation, is the new pressing issue. The good news, Dalton said is that — ideally — “the steps we take to love ourselves and others are one and the same.”
He also had some serious cautions: “Every time I hear ‘self-isolation’ and ‘social distancing,’ these Christian ears of mine begin to itch. Jesus himself escaped into the hills three times. Yet persistent or forced isolation is not good for the soul. We know from Genesis that we need to relate to each other.”
Then he referenced another text, from John, Chapter 9, where Jesus heals a blind man by fashioning a cure from his own spit, spat on the dirt and made into a kind of saliva mud pack and placed on the blind man’s eyes.
This expectorant cure was done on the Sabbath no less.
“‘Rabbi, who sinned that this man was born blind?’” Dalton quoted the Biblical text. “‘No one sinned,’” he then paraphrased Jesus’ answer. “‘He is blind so God could work through him.’”
Dalton admonished people not to follow that Jesus-like behavior in its details, certainly not these days. However, it was the basis for the second reason the reverend’s Christian ears have begun to itch again: “At every turn that Palestinian carpenter we follow made it his business to close social distance. And he used his own saliva mixed with the ground on the Sabbath, when the authorities had dictated to stay home.”
Dalton was at pains to praise the new protocols and Mayor Elicker’s courage in rising to the occasion. “However, social distancing should not cut people off,” he added, “from the rituals.”
The particular challenges in the immediate days, Dalton cautioned, are to avoid “othering” and treating carriers of the virus as somehow foul or unclean.
How, for example, would we act, he speculated if we had in New Haven a single individual, as was the case in New Rochelle, who infected 50 others? How do we behave towards that type of person?
Dalton’s prescription includes “acknowledging the person even as we separate from him; reaching out to the lonely; and supporting those who are hard- strapped.
“We should acknowledge the person we are six feet apart from, with a smile or a nod; it can do wonders.”
Because it is still Lent, the service included an antiphonal recitation urging the online parishioners to “fast on discontent and feast on gratitude; fast on bitterness and feast on forgiveness; fast on self concern, feast on compassion, and fast on suspicion and feast on the truth.”
Rev. Dalton, who had a career as a lawyer and law professor before entering the Episcopal priesthood, was associate rector at St. PJ from 2002 to 2010. His “return engagement,” according to the church’s website, began in November, 2018, in order to help the church, which like many others in town is struggling with membership, to rethink how it engages with the community.
Full info on up oming weeks’ livestreamed sermons can be found on the church’s website.