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Pastor's Ponderings
I had an article all prepared for the January newsletter in which I would express my gratitude to you all for another year walking alongside you in ministry and my hopes for all the work we will do on behalf of the gospel in 2024. However, yesterday’s events in Perry, IA call for a different kind of article.
The school shooting in Perry has consumed most of my waking attention, just as it has consumed the attention of the media – all the media: news, opinion, social, etc. The voices of so many people exploring, yet again, such a massive range of topics are overwhelming. Add into the mix that the Iowa Caucuses are right around the corner and it simply compounds the cacophony of voices. To say that this is a conversation, in any more ways than the past iterations of our national ‘dialogue’ on violence and mass shootings, would stretch the word conversation (and dialogue for that matter) beyond any useful meaning. Conversation assumes that we listen to one another and we try to understand what the other person or people are trying to say, rather than seek to twist words or even change them altogether.
To be sure, the problem is complex. It balances freedoms and restrictions and stigmas and safety and emotion and…well the list could go on. It is a mixture of subjects including guns, mental health, individual responsibility, corporate responsibility, movies and TV, video games, and the way these types of incidents are reported by the news. To assume that any sort of solution to the complex problem will have one dimension is foolhardy in the extreme. To assume that the “blame” for something like this atrocity lies in any one area fails to see the problem as complex. There is plenty of “blame”, if you want to call it that, to go around – if it were as simple as saying that all the blame belongs to the one who picked up the gun and killed all of those people, then the conversation would be over already, there would really be no problem to solve. But, that it happened and that it keeps happening is a problem.
Violence is not a new thing. Indeed, even the story we have just shared and celebrated at Christmas: the birth of the Prince of Peace, shifts to the story of “The slaughter of the innocents” (see Matthew 2:16-18).
One of the thrusts of the story we celebrate at Christmas is that Jesus comes, and he is not so unthreatening to us as we would like to keep him: wrapped up in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. He comes to change us. He comes to challenge us. He comes to show us a different way of life. Herod knows! Herod relies on the method of protection and safety that he knows: violence. If Jesus is eliminated he would no longer be a threat to Herod. If Jesus is killed as a child he is no longer a threat to the powers and principalities of the world. If Jesus dies helpless and vulnerable he can no longer be a threat to the ways we choose to do things.
The way of violence stands in sharp contrast to the way of God. It has from the very beginning and remains so. In Genesis 6 violence is the thing that has so blotted creation that God seeks to make an end to all flesh. It has corrupted that which God called so very good in Genesis 1 so much that God wants to start over (Genesis 6:11-13). It is also, finally, the very thing that God gives up at the end of that narrative. In Genesis 9 God sets “His bow in the clouds” – God hangs up the weapons of war and makes a covenant with Noah and all creation that no longer will God make war on the creature; God won’t wipe us out and start again. It is almost as if God has learned something about violence itself.
To suggest that we are a culture that glorifies violence is beyond argument, though we all would point our fingers away from ourselves and the things we do toward something else. But, our culture as a whole glorifies it. We use it for entertainment: playing violent games, going to movies, watching television shows that all have as their driving force, that which keeps them exciting and engaging and, well, entertaining, violence. I remember a line from the movie “Clueless” where the main character makes the point ironically but succinctly, “Until mankind is peaceful enough not to have violence on the news, there's no point in taking it out of shows that need it for entertainment value.” That is not even to mention the violent entertainment we crave in sports. And I have to confess I’m right there in it with everyone else – I love Bond movies. I have seen Lethal Weapons 1, 2 and yes, I even sat through 3 and 4 for crying out loud!
Further, and probably more antithetical to the gospel, is that we as a culture dare to suggest that violence will save us; that a righteous person or group of people using just the right amount of deadly force can protect us from evil. It can save and protect what we have, our property, our family, and our way of life (sound familiar?).
The problem is that we as people of faith, as Christians have given ourselves to rely on something else to save us. We proclaim that God – not violence (or anything else for that matter) – but God saves us!
Jesus does not remain a baby in a manger; he is not done in by Herod. Instead, he grows up. He becomes a Jewish prophet calling us to do such things as turn the other cheek, and love the enemy, and “put away your sword.” He proclaims that the Kingdom of God is not something brought in with weapons. And he exposes our violence. When confronted with the Kingdom of God, we cry out “No!” and we enact violence on God by placing Jesus on a cross. When confronted with our violence, however, God turns the tables on us. In our fundamental act of violence on God, God takes the consequences of that violence, of that rejection: death into the divine life and renders those consequences empty of their power in Christ’s resurrection.
There is the way of God and there is the way of violence. May we find the strength, the vision, the light, and the hope in these dark and difficult days to seek the way of God.
Shalom,
Pastor Owen
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