We all know
that the world can surprise us with unexpected beauty and healing warmth. We also know that the world can shock us with
unimaginable cruelty and savage indifference.
This week we are acutely aware of the latter. Twenty precious young children, six caring
educators and a mother are dead.
Suddenly there is the sound of gunfire where there should be the sound of
laughter. In little more than a moment
there are lifeless bodies where there should be wiggling arms and legs full of
surplus youthful energy. In the place of
Christmas parties and Sunday School pageants, there are funerals and weeping
that seems as if it will have no end.
How do we make sense of this?
What do we do?
First, we
don’t try to make sense of it. We simply
look it in the face and say: This
happened not far from us, to people like us.
It is not that these could have been our children or this could
have been our community. As
Christians we believe that we are our brother’s and our sister’s keeper. These are our children; this is our
community. Although none of us pulled
the trigger, none of us ever wanted this, it has happened in the society that we
have built. We cannot distance ourselves
from what has happened.
We can ask
what caused this. We can devise a plan
to reduce the likelihood of future schoolhouse slaughters. We can start blaming one another and line up
along our well-rehearsed social and political divisions. What we cannot do is make sense of this. There is no neat lesson to be learned here
except that there are powers loose in our world that want to destroy what God
has so lovingly made. Christian faith
does not minimize human suffering; it does not deny loss; it does not whitewash
tragedy. Rather, faith looks something
in the face and gives it the proper name.
Faith gives us the courage to tell the truth about what has
happened.
The cross
is what the Gospel provides in times like this.
All the loss, all the suffering, all the death, all the ugliness, all the
savagery is taken up in the cross of Jesus, absorbed into the heart of God. God has taken to himself all the pain. And God goes on absorbing it all, until the
end of time.
Elie Wiesel
stood in a crowd of prisoners in a concentration camp and watched as some
prisoners were hung for stealing a piece of bread. One of the culprits was a young boy who did
not weigh very much; it took him a while to die. He struggled as he hung there. Someone in the crowd of prisoners asked:
“Where is God now?” Another
answered: “Hanging at the end of a
rope.” This is the answer of the Gospel
to the ongoing presence of evil in our world.
God is among the victims. God
does not deliver himself from the tragedy.
Should we have
a sober conversation about guns and ammo clips?
Should we talk about how we care for the troubled among us, how we
support parents who face enormous challenges in child rearing? Should we ask what this tragedy reveals to us
about the broader community that we have built?
Yes, we must; but don’t expect any of this to make sense of what
happened. Just know that, in a way, God
died anew hiding under a desk in a first grade classroom in Newtown,
Connecticut.
"A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel
weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more."
(Matthew 2:18)
Then I saw
a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had
passed away, and the sea was no more.
And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven
from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne
saying, "See, the home of
God is among mortals. He will dwell with
them; they will be his peoples, and
God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death
will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first
things have passed away." (Revelation
21:1-4)
James
Kelsey
Executive
Minister
American
Baptist Churches of New York State
