December 9, 2012
I ask you to
join me in a few moments of silent prayer for all those impacted by the tragic
shootings in Connecticut and Oregon this week.
SILENCE
It must
stop.
Violence
rips us apart.
It is time for us to say No to a world in
which assault weapons can be casually obtained to massacre little children in a
classroom and their teachers and principles or people out for a stroll in a
local mall or people at a movie or at worship.
While John
the Baptist’s confrontation of his listeners may make us squirm, he is the
image we need today.
A clear
voice crying in the wildnerness.
NO. STOP.
NOT ON MY WATCH.
This
weekend, amid all our other feelings, we are outraged.
Outraged
that families dropped children off for school never to see them alive again.
Outraged
that one person could rob so many lives so utterly.
We are outraged. And that is as it should be.
Yet, in
times like these, our most demanding task is not to come together in outrage
Of course,
outrage is a natural response.
But the less
obvious, more difficult challenge is to try to understand the connections
between such horrific violence and our own lives.
What is our
connection, if any, to the evils of this world?
What ought
we be doing to bear Christ in our communities?
Addressing
mental illness early and providing interventions before a crisis? Noticing and
mentoring at risk youth before their paths become irrevocably destructive?
Ridding our
culture of easy access to assault weapons that no citizen could possibly need
for hunting or self defense?
What are the
connections between our lives and the evils we face?
I think this
is the question John the Baptist is really asking today in the gospel.
To address
that question, you and I must be willing to examine our lives with both the
unconditional love of the shepherd and the razor sharp critique of the prophet.
Every one of
us has sinned
Every one of
us bears the glory of God.
Both are
true.
Knowing this
gives us empathy as well as insight about how to make change.
It’s easy to
call people who commit heinous crimes evil.
Not so easy
to focus, instead, on understanding the anatomy of evil and the fabric out of
which it grows
Not so easy
to make connections between our lives and these events--connections that both
challenge us and truly enable us to do something about it.
Within each
of us there are radically divergent forces at work.
The world is
not made up of good people and bad people
The world is
a place where good and evil are constantly at play in all of human life.
We all bear
responsibility for understanding both forces and learning to address this mix
effectively.
A few weeks
ago I went to themovies and saw The Life of Pi
It addresses
in some way this idea of holding together different parts of human nature.
tame and
wild, heroic and fearful, saintly and sinful.
The Life of
Pi deals with two stories explaining one event.
a
relationship develops between a tiger named Richard Parker and a young Indian
man named Pi.
There is a
scene in which the Richard Parker and Pi are together on a boat under desperate
conditions
Pi had the
upper hand and could have let the tiger Richard Parker die.
But their
eyes fix on each other.
They
understand their connection.
In that
moment, the viewer sees that the wild beast and the civilized man are
inextricably linked and must make peace with each other in order to survive.
The viewer
takes the lesson: peace is not obtained by one person demonizing another.
Peace is
hammered out in relationships that are not optional to us.
The NRA
member and the pacifist must work together to create a way to stop gun
violence.
To create a
safe world, we must value the life of someone else enough to risk ourselves for
that person.
The people
we do not value can either be harmed or can harm us because they have become
cut off from us
We need to
create a fabric of support so that no one lives in isolation, in fear, in
shame, in unnamed grief, or with a lack of the accountability that true
connections foster.
I think this
is a first step in the repentance John calls for.
Every time you see things about yourself or
the world that you cannot easily reconcile, you are glimpsing something God
needs to heal.
God’s work
is reconciliation”which means, literally, to bring back together into one whole
the creation that has been ripped apart by our sin, our violence, our blindness
to the needs of others.
When I
re-read today’s well known story of John preaching repentance, I noticed
something that had never before caught my attention.
Just after
John calls his hearers a bunch of snakes, just about the time we’d expect them
to be trying to get away from John, the writer says this: “the people were
filled with expectation.”
They were
drawn toward this wild, strange man ,compelled by his challenge.
The word we
translate “expectation” means literally to watch towards something or someone.
It involves
being awake, alert.
The people
listening to John heard in all his harsh words a wake up call.
We love
comfort be it the comfort of our homes or of our known personality traits and
habits.
We are used
to what we know.
Few of us
like being challenged to look at the opposite of what is familiar to us, at
least not initially.
Yet, that’s
precisely what John is asking us to prepare for
He sounds an
alarm, a wake up call.
Like Pi we have the potential to wake up
sleeping parts of ourselves when God’s adventure calls.
John’s words
are an invitation to adventure.
Try hearing
them this way, “Listen to me
God doesn’t
care about your status in life, the money you make, the job you have or don’t
have.
Some day,
the playing field will be leveled for all of us
Wake up;
what you should do is fairly simple.
Share your
extra coats with the homeless
Work to set
up more humane and effective ways to heal your sisters and brothers with mental
illnesses.
Don’t ignore
family violence; speak honestly about it and address it.
Use your
power to bring justice.
Ask how you
can help prevent another massacre--advocate, serve, question, learn. Your life matters
Everything
God wants to do begins with people like you.”
The problem
is, adventures by nature offer no guarantees.
We don’t
take them because they are a sure bet.
Far from it
We take them
because we sense they might wake up heroes within us.
We take them
wondering if we they will lead us to stare into the eyes of a tiger and there
find our souls.
We take them
because we sense they are the only things that can heal us and put the torn up
pieces back together again.
The violence
we saw this week must stop.
Our world is
torn apart.
And you and
I, John proclaims, are not separate from it all, sitting by our hearth at home.
No. We are
hereby summoned to be in the company of adventurers, called to stare down the
tigers, called to change the world.
So, the
question is, are you in?
