Roger Ray, pastor
Proper 16 August 25, 2013
Isaiah 58:9b-10
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am. If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.
It happened again this week.... A scene made all too familiar by recent history in the United States. An angry young white man who had serious emotional problems brought an assault rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition into an elementary school. The media seems to have assiduously avoided mentioning the fact that the McNair Discovery Learning Academy, just outside of Atlanta, is a predominantly black school. I don't want to imply racial motivation where there is none and the shooter had recently threatened to kill his own brother, I'm just saying that when a crazy white man takes a military styled weapon into a black school, there is reasons to suspect racism.
The now infamous weapon, the AK-47 assault rifle, should not be in the private possession of any citizen, ex-military, police or sportsman. It is not a recreational toy, it is a weapon of war and for the same reason that no one is allowed to keep hand grenades or cannon in their homes, no one should have a gun that makes it so easy to kill dozens of people in a single minute.
And yet, thanks to the NRA and donation addicted cowardly, irresponsible elected officials, even a crazy man like this shooter in Georgia has access to military styled weapons. I'm not going to say the shooter's name and I wish the media wouldn't either. People don't deserve their 15 minutes of fame for crimes like this. No one should think that they can get their face on TV or have themselves talked about around the world by committing a crime of this sort.
Besides, there is not much to be gained in conversation about the motivations of the insane. I am, once again, ready to reinstitute Great Britain's old plan of shipping their problems off to a distant island.... I would love to be able to put all of the NRA executives, their gun manufacturer puppet masters and their lap dog Congress members on a deserted island and see how long it would take for them to become cannibals. If I have not been clear enough in the past let me spell this out: The gun manufacturing business with their lackey NRA spokespersons and bought and paid for legislators are more dangerous to the citizens of this nation than is Al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization. They are enemies of the safety of Americans and what is worst, unlike terrorist who wreak mayhem in the name of an ideal, they are doing it for money which is a thousand times more disgusting than terrorists who at least mistakenly think that they are serving a noble cause.
These people kill 30,000 Americans every year for money. You cannot get lower than that on the evolutionary scale. No excuse about hunting, home protection or sports can justify the carnage caused by this out of control for-profit business that has turned homes and schools into battle grounds.
But we have this text.... This ancient biblical bit of prophetic wisdom, assigned, virtually randomly, to be read aloud in churches this week. Isaiah says: If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.
..... if you will remove the pointing of the finger..... if you will stop fighting over resources and actually share your food with the hungry..... then your anger can be lifted..... the gloom will turn into bright sunlight.
On this 50th anniversary of the famous civil rights march on Washington DC, we have been reminded many times of how President Kennedy did not want the march to happen because he was certain that a half a million black people who had suffered the violence of both discrimination and poverty, if brought together into one place on a hot summer day in the Capitol that there would be violence.
It is not an unreasonable expectation that in force of numbers that an army of black people on the Washington mall might treat their oppressors with the same violent disregard with which they had been treated. But it was a non-violent gathering, led by this nation's most ardent symbol of non-violent social change, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Now, historically speaking, it must be said that King's wasn't the only voice crying out against white oppression. There was, on that day, also Malcom X and it should never been forgotten that white America was not realistically presented with the choice of the status quo.... Things were going to change and they were either going to change in the non-violent way that Martin Luther King advocated or someone like Malcom X was going to lead to liberation in a likely more violent way.
King called for change through forgiveness and love.... By acceptance and by working together. Malcom X, for most of his public career, called for isolation, radical segregation and transformation through retaliation and force. White America may have deserved Malcom X's plan, but by grace, they were given Martin Luther King's dream of loving reconciliation.
And we saw an echo of that grace this week when, yet again, an angry white young crazy man went into a school with heavy weaponry and a taste for violence.
No one died at the Georgia school this week. No one was injured. You don't need for me to tell you that it was the NRA's executive vice-president, Wayne LaPierre, who said after the Sandy Hook shootings, "The only thing that stops a bad man with a gun is a good person with a gun." The school's bookkeeper, Antoinette Tuff, showed just how wrong Mr. LaPierre was.
Armed with kindness, acceptance and even a willingness to be personally vulnerable, not just to the possibility of being shot, but to the extent of talking to the crazed gunman.... Sharing her own life's struggles with man..... she identified with him.... She let him know that her own life had been painful.... She talked about a sad and unwanted divorce after thirty years of marriage.... She opened her heart to him and, at one point, she even told him that she loved him.
She offered to walk out with him so that he would not be shot by the police. She assured him that she would help him to end this crisis without anyone having to die.
.... If you will set aside the yoke of your anger, your resentment, your need for revenge..... if you can refrain from the pointing of the finger, just don't speak evil of the people who have hurt you,..... if you offer something of yourself, if you ar willing to try to see how much you have in common with your enemy.... If you will share your food with the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.... And nobody has to die.
Albert Einstein allegedly said, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." There is a certain macho appeal to revenge, to fighting back, to giving our enemies a taste of their own medicine. But you can never solve the world's problems using the same techniques and intelligence that got us into trouble in the first place.
A good guy with a gun is just a bad guy with a gun who has a noble view of himself. If someone in that Georgia school had pulled a handgun out of their belt to confront this crazy young man with an assault rifle, there is a good chance that a hundred people might have died in the ensuing gun battle.
What Antoinette Tuff did that day may well be called miraculous but it wasn't accidental. She had training in crisis management. She had been through training to put herself in that situation and had thought out in advance how to talk a gunman down. And that is not training that you go to one time during a summer in-service and you are done. To be the kind of person who practices patient, loving kindness, compassion and empathy, you have to take a lot of refresher courses.
When we have our Sunday School kids make sandwiches that we take down to the homeless Veterans center, we're not solving the problem of hunger. When we take a hot meal to two hundred people every week who are living in their cars and in abandoned buildings along the Commercial St rail road tracks, we are not solving poverty..... but we are exercising compassion.
We are teaching our children to think about those who are in need. We are meeting people at Bill's Place and learning to see them as human beings.
The point is not the sandwiches the kids make or the meals we serve..... the point is to be changed. We are in training. We come in here and read these ancient texts and we sing songs about justice and fairness. We pray in hope of a new beginning, we symbolically share in a meal that represents that vision of a time when everyone has a place at the table.
As many of you know, my metal was tested in this arena early on. I was still in seminary when I was called to the home of a parishioner who was in the midst of a violent dispute. By the time I arrived, it had become a hostage situation. The very inebriated man held me, his estranged wife and his mother and brother hostage for five hours at the end of a shotgun.
He was wearing ammunition belts crisscrossed on his chest and his plan was to wait for the police, have a shoot-out and in the end, kill us and finally himself. Fortunately, the police were not called and they did not come. I managed to talk him down, get him to lay down his gun and allow us all to leave.
The day ended well.... In a way.... But there was a price to pay for all of us. I personally didn't sleep all of the way through night for the next two or three years. I doubt that Antoinette Tuff is sleeping very well these days either.
The leaders of the famous march on Washington D.C. fifty years ago went through extensive training in non-violent resistance. They were prepared to be beaten with the police Billy clubs, to have vicious dogs turned loose on them, they knew that fire hoses and tear gas were likely and that bombs and bullets would take some of them.
I believe that it was Daniel Berrigan who said that we must often bait the trap for evil using our own flesh. There is risk involved in being a peace maker. There has to be a willingness to make personal sacrifices if you are going to change the world for the better.
You have to decide that forgiveness is preferable to revenge. That acceptance is better than judgment. You have to choose to extend love even to people who have chosen to try to hurt you. You have to willingly put your pointing finger back in your pocket and expose your own failings, your own hurts, your own heart to empathize with those who are still bleeding.
Today we give thanks that the incident in Atlanta did not turn out the way that Sandy Hook did nine months ago. And we resolve, all of us, here together, that we will prepare our hearts and minds to play the role of Antoinette Tuff should we ever have the opportunity to be the one who uses acceptance and love in place of fists and bullets.
