Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
Job 38: 1-2, 4-7
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: 2"Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? 3Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
4"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. 5Who determined its measurements--surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? 6On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone 7when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
I'm working on a new book, a collection of essays edited from the last several years of my columns in the Springfield NewsLeader. The last essay I worked on before shutting up for the day on Wednesday was one about gun control entitled, "America after Sandy Hook." After that December 2012 tragedy in which a lone gunman killed 20 children and six adults, it had seemed like reform was inevitable.
Though we have between 80 and 90 gun deaths in America every day, this incident, this nightmare, this horror of the deaths of so many children in one school on one day.... Surely this would cut through the opposition, the indifference, the NRA bribed congress and we would finally find some sanity in America. There was a lot of talk, some promises, but the weeks went by and people got interested in other things.... Paula Dean was caught saying the "n" word.... The Duchess of Cambridge had a baby...George Zimmerman was found to be not-guilty when we all knew that he was.....people forget, they move on....and the deaths of the children in Sandy Hook Elementary ended up meaning nothing at all on a national level.
When I got home Wednesday evening and sat down to watch the news, like all of you, I found myself going back to the familiar territory of shock and horror. A racially motivated young man went into the Wednesday evening prayer meeting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC and executed, murdered, shot, the pastor and eight other church members while shouting out racial epithets from a hundred years ago.... Emotions, beliefs, prejudices, that should be as consigned only to ancient history just as the Confederate flag that still flies over the capitol in Columbia, SC should only be seen in a history museum.
Two weeks from today I will be preaching at the Unitarian Church in Columbia and if that flag is still flying over the capitol I may not be out of jail in time for our service the following Sunday but I am sure that you will understand.
Today the survivors of this horrible mass murder have the sympathy of the world. Sure, the media and the web have been ablaze with the absurd outliers.... The NRA board member who said that now deceased Pastor, Clementa Pinckney, was personally responsible because he objected to people being allowed to carry concealed weapons into church.... Or the Fox News commentators who initially tried to deny the racial nature of the murders saying that it happened because liberals have led a war on Christianity, some even saying that we pastors should arm ourselves so that we could shoot anyone who threatens us....but these people are too stupid to be allowed to rent any space in our skulls. They should be summarily ignored and not even be shown the attention of being ridiculed by TV talk show comedians.
Just as I have resolved not to mention the names of shooters in these mass murders and I do not want to recount their story or in any way make them famous for being such evil people, I don't want to dissect the misinformation and propaganda being spewed by conservative talk shows and by Fox News. I just want to implore you to do the one thing that will hurt them all the most.... Don't watch their news programs, don't listen to their radio programs, and don't repeat the names and messages of murderers.
There is very little reason to even talk to the kind of people who say, "guns don't kill people, people kill people." I dare say that there has never been a person so deceived as to have ever believed that mantra but anyone who says it has already abdicated any fealty to reason or information and I have no interest in engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.
Still, I recognize that this is not just a gun issue. I know that the mentally ill have much greater access to lethal weapons than they have access to counselors and appropriate medications. And I know that there is a serious addiction problem in our nation and that many of the worst crimes committed in our nation are committed by people under the influence of drugs.....illegal and prescription drugs.
And, in the case of this mass murder in a church, there is clearly and unmistakably a racial motivation. And the opponents of gun violence will try to play the game of diverting attention and blame to all sorts of other issues to prevent the one conversation that this nation must have which is that no other developed nation has this kind of problem and the only difference is that those nations have strict gun laws and we don't.
There are literally millions of responsible gun owners who know how to handle, store, and keep their guns safely but when there are hundreds of millions of guns floating around in our nation, there is no reasonable way to keep all of those guns safe.
We do everything that we can conceivably do to minimize deaths from car accidents or product safety issues and yet we do everything possible to make it easier and easier for a crazier and crazier population to kill more than 30,000 Americans a year.
As tragic as the Emanuel Church murders were, those nine deaths represent only 10% of the people that were killed by guns on Wednesday in America!
The NRA uses their lobbying power to do everything they can to keep us from talking about the annual carnage in America. They have made it illegal to sue gun manufacturers for product liability. They have made it illegal for the CDC to even research and keep records on gun deaths. They fight even the most obvious and minor restrictions on the number of guns you can buy, the amount of ammunition, the kinds of weapons or even things like cop killer bullets and hundred round drums for semi-automatic weapons.
I am all about reasoned debate and a negotiated solution to any problem but when you don't have anyone with whom to negotiate in good faith. If facts, information, research, and critical thinking are ignored or suppressed, then we just have to stop feeling that we have to gain the agreement or the permission of the most militant of NRA gun enthusiasts. They have demonstrated themselves to be, as Jon Stewart has observed, more dangerous to Americans than Isis, and we need to give them no more space in the conversation than we would give to any domestic terrorist organization. We don't need the permission of the NRA to bring sanity back to America.
The lectionary reading before us today is one of those alternative voices from our ancient scriptures.
Most religious people, then and now, were inclined to insist that God is in charge of everything and that everything happens for a reason. God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked. We have told one another that the Lord will provide, that the Lord is our shepherd, that the Lord will never give you more than you can bear, and, I love this one, "all things work together for good for those who love the Lord."
But the person who wrote the Book of Job was calling BS on that line of religious jargon. He had seen the wicked prosper and the righteous get nothing but a raw deal. Job, for 40 chapters, shakes his fist at heaven and tells God that the world is not fair, that horrible things happen that don't make any sense, and, in point of fact, not only do not all things work together for those who are faithful but in fact, the faithful often seem to be the first be the objects of genocides, false arrests, holocausts, beheadings, bombings, and mass shootings during a prayer meeting.
In the end God actually shows up in the Book of Job and confirms Job's accusation is true... he tells him that the world isn't fair and that he doesn't get an explanation... it just is.
Hundreds of years later some ancient Palestinian fundamentalist wrote a theologically terrible new ending to the book and tried to make everything seem okay because Job got new kids, a bigger house and new cash but that's not how the real world works.
And here, men and women, I'm coming down firmly on the side of the minority voice of scripture. The universe is not going according to some Divine plan. The universe is capricious, full of chaos.
The universe is devoid of meaning, entirely, unless you bring meaning to it. Lots of religious people have been quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.'s response to the church bombing in which four children lost their lives more than 50 years ago. King talked about "redemptive suffering".... Suffering that means something because it changes the world. You can say that Christ's suffering on the cross, Dorothy Day's imprisonments, Gandhi's hunger strikes, Romero's beatings at the hands of the police... you can say that these are redemptive suffering but I will tell you that there were just examples of senseless violence UNLESS someone makes it mean something.
The universe is capricious and chaotic and devoid of meaning unless you bring meaning to it. The deaths of those 20 children in Sandy Hook Elementary were not redemptive because we let them die in vain. We didn't get gun laws changed, no far from it, gun sales skyrocketed. And all of that insane talk about "Obama's gonna take our guns,".... Both times that Obama has been elected, gun sales went through the roof.... They have not been able to keep ammunition in stock on the shelves at Bass Pro Shops here for years, the most dangerous people on earth buy it up as soon as it arrives.
Suffering in injustice is not automatically redemptive. It isn't automatically anything at all. What you do about it, how you react to it, how you change the world.... That makes it either just 9 more graves in a Charleston, SC graveyard, or this event becomes the moment when the world is changed.
In John Irving's wonderful fiction novel, Cider House Rules, the aging Dr. Larch keeps telling one of the orphans in his care, Homer, to be useful.
The setting of the novel involved ethically challenging circumstances around abortion and caring for unwanted children but the advice of Dr. Larch reaches through the pages of fiction into our real life situations. Homer does not want to take Dr. Larch's place as the sometimes physician to orphans and sometimes illegal abortion doctor because he does not want to play God. Dr. Larch points out that in fact we owe it to the world to play God because to do nothing is, in effect, playing the part of an evil god.
Pastors often disappoint me because they try to remain popular by always taking a neutral position on every earthly moral dilemma which is the opposite of what we have pastors for in the first place. As Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, said, "Take sides. Neutrality always serves the oppressor and never the oppressed."
I wish that evil were personified and living in a single crazy shooter who we can arrest, put on trial and execute.... I wish it was that simple..... but you know it isn't.
Blood has been spilled... innocent blood... this can be the blood of martyrs or it can be just the blood of victims of a violent crime. How you react makes the difference. I implore you, this time, don't get distracted. Don't forget. Don't move onto the next exciting news story. Stay on this one until it becomes redemptive. Make yourselves useful. Sacrifice for social justice. Being neutral doesn't make you good unless your goal is to be a paperweight.
I am begging you to play god.
