Truth and Vaccines
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“Truth and Vaccines” by John Sumwalt
“Truth is What?” by Frank Ramirez
Truth and Vaccines
by John Sumwalt
2 Samuel 23:1-7, John 18:33-37
“Is not my house like this with God?
For he has made with me an everlasting covenant,
ordered in all things and secure.” (2 Samuel 23:5)
“You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” (John 18:37)
MG Sutker, a clergy colleague in Pennsylvania, writes, “So now that the phrase ‘avoid it like the plague’ no longer has any meaning, what will replace it? I’m thinking ‘deny it like the plague’ will be an idiom for describing those who disbelieve science or value their political ideology above all else — including scientific data, facts, and what they see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears.”
Misinformation and lies about Covid-19 vaccines abound on cable news and in social media. What is most disconcerting is that many of those spreading misinformation are church leaders. One clergy person in Wisconsin recently passed on the blatantly untrue assertion that a person can experience side effects just from being around someone who has received one of the Covid vaccines. False claims that the coronavirus vaccines can be passed — or “shed” — from an immunized person to an unvaccinated woman, and then somehow affect the woman’s reproductive system, are whipping around social media. Medical experts agree it’s impossible for a person to transmit the vaccine to people he or she happens to be nearby. And it’s impossible for a woman to experience miscarriage, menstrual-cycle changes, and other reproductive problems by being around a vaccinated person.
“This is a conspiracy that has been created to weaken trust in a series of vaccines that have been demonstrated in clinical trials to be safe and effective,” said Dr. Christopher Zahn, vice-president for practice activities at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “(The vaccines are) our single best tool for confronting a global pandemic that has taken almost 600,000 lives in this country alone. Such conspiracies and false narratives are dangerous and have nothing to do with science.”
Bruce Epperly, another colleague, said, “(That some Christian leaders) are the most anti-vaccine says something about the quality of their religious faith. Their adherence to the big lies about vaccines … makes them virtually irrelevant to thinking persons. If they believe falsehoods like this, can anyone believe their faith statements or sermons? Commitment to falsehood in one place undermines the credibility of their message.”
Conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine cults are not new to this pandemic or even to this century.
“Two of the United Kingdom’s most prominent anti-vaccine organizations were launched in the last half of the 19th century in response to new laws requiring children be inoculated against smallpox,” said Dr. Vincent Iannelli, a pediatrician who has written extensively about the topic. “Then as now, the anti-vaccine movement was often led by promoters of alternative medicine who claim vaccines don’t work, make you sick and contain poisonous chemicals that can cause cancer or birth defects. Other adherents simply seem to perceive mandatory vaccinations as an unjustified violation of their personal liberty.”
I’m fully vaccinated — and not just for Covid-19. I’ve been jabbed, as the Brits say, with two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. But like most baby boomers of my generation I have, through the years, also been vaccinated for smallpox, polio, tetanus, influenza, rubella, measles, whooping cough and diphtheria — all diseases that have been controlled because of vaccines. I remember standing in line at the Richland Center High School Gymnasium along with hundreds of other grade-school kids to have the oral polio vaccine in the early 1960s. That was a big deal then. We all knew someone who had been crippled by polio.
But I must confess I thought long and hard about whether to risk getting a Covid vaccine because I have a compromised immune system from Lyme disease. And I had a disappointing experience with the shingles vaccine several years ago. Two months after taking it, I became sick with shingles. It was a mild case. I didn’t have the excruciating pain that many report, but it left me weakened for months and I think more vulnerable to Lyme when I was bitten by a tick. Whether the vaccine brought on or caused the shingles, I don’t know. My conclusions about what happened might be completely wrong.
Full disclosure, three days after the second Pfizer shot, I had a reaction that landed me in the emergency room. The scary symptoms went away after a few hours; none of the tests administered by the Richland Hospital ER team revealed anything of concern. I have had two more similar episodes since with lesser symptoms, but no more trips to the ER.
I would do it again with no hesitation. I decided there’s a much-greater risk of dying or being disabled from Covid than of dying or being disabled by a vaccine. And after being locked down for a year with only Zoom visits with our four grandchildren I was willing to take a calculated, reasonable risk. After just two visits, our two-year-old grandson now comes running to greet me with open arms, yelling “Bapa!” It doesn’t get any better. Yes, I would do it again.
I also decided I have a moral obligation to the rest of the community to do whatever I can to stop that deadly disease. How would I ever forgive myself if I passed the virus on to a loved one or a neighbor and it caused their death? So, I decided to put aside my personal fear and trust the science.
Jesus said, “…the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” (John 18:37)
Don’t listen to the purveyors of misinformation, even if they are standing in a pulpit holding a Bible. Trust God and study the facts.
A top intensive care unit doctor in Tampa Bay, Florida, said, “People who are vaccinated don’t die. You can’t imagine what it’s like to see a 35-year-old person or a 24-year-old mother gasping for their last breath.”
* * *
Truth is What?
by Frank Ramirez
John 18:33-37
Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” (v. 38)
What is truth? That’s the question Pilate asks after Jesus responds to Pilate’s question, “Are you a king?” by telling the governor that he came “to testify to the truth,” and that “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
Well, truth is the Bible, right? We all remember the nursery song still sung in our church nurseries:
Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so.
So, if the Bible tells me something, that’s the truth. Of course what makes this much more interesting is that even with the truth right there in front of us, it might take us some work to figure out what that truth means.
When it comes to truth, believers and non-believers alike know that one of the characters in this scene, Pontius Pilate, was a real person. After all, he is also mentioned by ancient historians, and inscriptions discovered by archaeologists demonstrate he really lived.
Even though there are many people who do not believe Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah, the king of Kings, at the very least even non-believers know there really was a Jesus and there really was a Pilate. Jesus is mentioned by the historians Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus, and there are other references in ancient literature that make it clear that whether nor not they believed that Jesus rose from the dead, people knew that Jesus really lived and died.
Take this one account. The Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus (55-120 AD) wrote his Annals and Histories which covered history in the Roman Empire from around 14 AD to 96 AD. In the Annals, written around 115 AD, he wrote about the great fires in Rome, which took place in July of 64 AD. Tacitus mentions that many suspected the Emperor Nero of setting them. His response was to blame the Christians, and to begin a reign of terror against the.
Consequently, to get rid of the report (that Nero had ordered the fires himself), Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the popular. Chrestus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular.. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were domed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight expired.
Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty that they were being destroyed.
So, what do these words tell us?
First, this passage tells us there really was a Jesus. He refers to Chrestus, which is a Latinized form of Greek Christos, from which we get the word Christ. Along with the Hebrew word Mashiach, from which we get the word Messiah, both words mean “the anointed one,” which was an act that preceded a person’s accession to king. So, we may be fairly certain that Tacitus went to the official archives where such records as the Acts of Pilate were kept and saw that Pontius Pilate condemned Jesus to death. He did not think of Jesus, the Christ, as a real king, but claiming to be one was a capital offense. This tells us there really was a Pilate, and this Pilate had Christ subjected to “the extreme penalty,” which is a euphemism for crucifixion. He places it in the reign of Tiberius, so the crucifixion happened in historical time. It’s not something legendary. So somewhere there was a real, historical record of the execution of Jesus the Christ on a charge of sedition, claiming to be emperor or king.
There’s something else this story tells us, and it’s subtle. Something must have happened — we know it is the resurrection — because this “mischievous superstition” did not die out! Tacitus, Nero, and many of the other Romans obviously do not believe Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah. Nor would they have proclaimed “He is risen!” But the faith was still alive, and not only alive but thriving, both in 64 AD when this persecution occurred, but also in 115 AD when Tacitus wrote it down. The faith had not only come to Rome, but these Roman believers were willing to plead “guilty” to the crime of being a follower of Jesus, even though such an admission led not only to death, but to a horrible death! Not only that, but these multitudes, in Rome, the heart of the empire, were willing to plead guilty of being a follower of Jesus the Christ, who is the king.
(This translation by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb of the passage from “The Annals” by Tacitus is taken from Great Books of the Western World, v. 15, p 168. Some of the reflections on what this passage tells us come from “Ancient Evidence for the Life of Jesus: Historical Records of His Death and Resurrection,” by Gary R. Habermas, 1984.)
*****************************************
StoryShare, November 21, 2021, issue.
Copyright 2021 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
“Truth and Vaccines” by John Sumwalt
“Truth is What?” by Frank Ramirez
Truth and Vaccines
by John Sumwalt
2 Samuel 23:1-7, John 18:33-37
“Is not my house like this with God?
For he has made with me an everlasting covenant,
ordered in all things and secure.” (2 Samuel 23:5)
“You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” (John 18:37)
MG Sutker, a clergy colleague in Pennsylvania, writes, “So now that the phrase ‘avoid it like the plague’ no longer has any meaning, what will replace it? I’m thinking ‘deny it like the plague’ will be an idiom for describing those who disbelieve science or value their political ideology above all else — including scientific data, facts, and what they see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears.”
Misinformation and lies about Covid-19 vaccines abound on cable news and in social media. What is most disconcerting is that many of those spreading misinformation are church leaders. One clergy person in Wisconsin recently passed on the blatantly untrue assertion that a person can experience side effects just from being around someone who has received one of the Covid vaccines. False claims that the coronavirus vaccines can be passed — or “shed” — from an immunized person to an unvaccinated woman, and then somehow affect the woman’s reproductive system, are whipping around social media. Medical experts agree it’s impossible for a person to transmit the vaccine to people he or she happens to be nearby. And it’s impossible for a woman to experience miscarriage, menstrual-cycle changes, and other reproductive problems by being around a vaccinated person.
“This is a conspiracy that has been created to weaken trust in a series of vaccines that have been demonstrated in clinical trials to be safe and effective,” said Dr. Christopher Zahn, vice-president for practice activities at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “(The vaccines are) our single best tool for confronting a global pandemic that has taken almost 600,000 lives in this country alone. Such conspiracies and false narratives are dangerous and have nothing to do with science.”
Bruce Epperly, another colleague, said, “(That some Christian leaders) are the most anti-vaccine says something about the quality of their religious faith. Their adherence to the big lies about vaccines … makes them virtually irrelevant to thinking persons. If they believe falsehoods like this, can anyone believe their faith statements or sermons? Commitment to falsehood in one place undermines the credibility of their message.”
Conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine cults are not new to this pandemic or even to this century.
“Two of the United Kingdom’s most prominent anti-vaccine organizations were launched in the last half of the 19th century in response to new laws requiring children be inoculated against smallpox,” said Dr. Vincent Iannelli, a pediatrician who has written extensively about the topic. “Then as now, the anti-vaccine movement was often led by promoters of alternative medicine who claim vaccines don’t work, make you sick and contain poisonous chemicals that can cause cancer or birth defects. Other adherents simply seem to perceive mandatory vaccinations as an unjustified violation of their personal liberty.”
I’m fully vaccinated — and not just for Covid-19. I’ve been jabbed, as the Brits say, with two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. But like most baby boomers of my generation I have, through the years, also been vaccinated for smallpox, polio, tetanus, influenza, rubella, measles, whooping cough and diphtheria — all diseases that have been controlled because of vaccines. I remember standing in line at the Richland Center High School Gymnasium along with hundreds of other grade-school kids to have the oral polio vaccine in the early 1960s. That was a big deal then. We all knew someone who had been crippled by polio.
But I must confess I thought long and hard about whether to risk getting a Covid vaccine because I have a compromised immune system from Lyme disease. And I had a disappointing experience with the shingles vaccine several years ago. Two months after taking it, I became sick with shingles. It was a mild case. I didn’t have the excruciating pain that many report, but it left me weakened for months and I think more vulnerable to Lyme when I was bitten by a tick. Whether the vaccine brought on or caused the shingles, I don’t know. My conclusions about what happened might be completely wrong.
Full disclosure, three days after the second Pfizer shot, I had a reaction that landed me in the emergency room. The scary symptoms went away after a few hours; none of the tests administered by the Richland Hospital ER team revealed anything of concern. I have had two more similar episodes since with lesser symptoms, but no more trips to the ER.
I would do it again with no hesitation. I decided there’s a much-greater risk of dying or being disabled from Covid than of dying or being disabled by a vaccine. And after being locked down for a year with only Zoom visits with our four grandchildren I was willing to take a calculated, reasonable risk. After just two visits, our two-year-old grandson now comes running to greet me with open arms, yelling “Bapa!” It doesn’t get any better. Yes, I would do it again.
I also decided I have a moral obligation to the rest of the community to do whatever I can to stop that deadly disease. How would I ever forgive myself if I passed the virus on to a loved one or a neighbor and it caused their death? So, I decided to put aside my personal fear and trust the science.
Jesus said, “…the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” (John 18:37)
Don’t listen to the purveyors of misinformation, even if they are standing in a pulpit holding a Bible. Trust God and study the facts.
A top intensive care unit doctor in Tampa Bay, Florida, said, “People who are vaccinated don’t die. You can’t imagine what it’s like to see a 35-year-old person or a 24-year-old mother gasping for their last breath.”
* * *
Truth is What?
by Frank Ramirez
John 18:33-37
Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” (v. 38)
What is truth? That’s the question Pilate asks after Jesus responds to Pilate’s question, “Are you a king?” by telling the governor that he came “to testify to the truth,” and that “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
Well, truth is the Bible, right? We all remember the nursery song still sung in our church nurseries:
Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so.
So, if the Bible tells me something, that’s the truth. Of course what makes this much more interesting is that even with the truth right there in front of us, it might take us some work to figure out what that truth means.
When it comes to truth, believers and non-believers alike know that one of the characters in this scene, Pontius Pilate, was a real person. After all, he is also mentioned by ancient historians, and inscriptions discovered by archaeologists demonstrate he really lived.
Even though there are many people who do not believe Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah, the king of Kings, at the very least even non-believers know there really was a Jesus and there really was a Pilate. Jesus is mentioned by the historians Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus, and there are other references in ancient literature that make it clear that whether nor not they believed that Jesus rose from the dead, people knew that Jesus really lived and died.
Take this one account. The Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus (55-120 AD) wrote his Annals and Histories which covered history in the Roman Empire from around 14 AD to 96 AD. In the Annals, written around 115 AD, he wrote about the great fires in Rome, which took place in July of 64 AD. Tacitus mentions that many suspected the Emperor Nero of setting them. His response was to blame the Christians, and to begin a reign of terror against the.
Consequently, to get rid of the report (that Nero had ordered the fires himself), Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the popular. Chrestus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular.. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were domed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight expired.
Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty that they were being destroyed.
So, what do these words tell us?
First, this passage tells us there really was a Jesus. He refers to Chrestus, which is a Latinized form of Greek Christos, from which we get the word Christ. Along with the Hebrew word Mashiach, from which we get the word Messiah, both words mean “the anointed one,” which was an act that preceded a person’s accession to king. So, we may be fairly certain that Tacitus went to the official archives where such records as the Acts of Pilate were kept and saw that Pontius Pilate condemned Jesus to death. He did not think of Jesus, the Christ, as a real king, but claiming to be one was a capital offense. This tells us there really was a Pilate, and this Pilate had Christ subjected to “the extreme penalty,” which is a euphemism for crucifixion. He places it in the reign of Tiberius, so the crucifixion happened in historical time. It’s not something legendary. So somewhere there was a real, historical record of the execution of Jesus the Christ on a charge of sedition, claiming to be emperor or king.
There’s something else this story tells us, and it’s subtle. Something must have happened — we know it is the resurrection — because this “mischievous superstition” did not die out! Tacitus, Nero, and many of the other Romans obviously do not believe Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah. Nor would they have proclaimed “He is risen!” But the faith was still alive, and not only alive but thriving, both in 64 AD when this persecution occurred, but also in 115 AD when Tacitus wrote it down. The faith had not only come to Rome, but these Roman believers were willing to plead “guilty” to the crime of being a follower of Jesus, even though such an admission led not only to death, but to a horrible death! Not only that, but these multitudes, in Rome, the heart of the empire, were willing to plead guilty of being a follower of Jesus the Christ, who is the king.
(This translation by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb of the passage from “The Annals” by Tacitus is taken from Great Books of the Western World, v. 15, p 168. Some of the reflections on what this passage tells us come from “Ancient Evidence for the Life of Jesus: Historical Records of His Death and Resurrection,” by Gary R. Habermas, 1984.)
*****************************************
StoryShare, November 21, 2021, issue.
Copyright 2021 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
