Guns, Grief, and Gaudete: Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent, after the Newtown Massacre

The Third Sunday of Advent (Gaudete Sunday), year C                                               

December 16, 2012                                                                                         

St. Mary’s House, Greensboro

Zephaniah 3:14-20

Canticle 9 [from Isaiah 12:2-6]

Philippians 4:4-7

Luke 3:7-18

In the name of God

Who creates us,

Who saves us, and

Who remains with us always,

Amen.

Charlotte Bacon, 6 years old

Daniel Barden, 7 years old

Rachel Davino, 29 years old

Olivia Engel, 6 years old

Josephine Gay, 7 years old

Ana Marquez-Greene, 6 years old

Dylan Hockley, 6 years old

Dawn Hocksprung, 47 years old

Madeline Hsu, 6 years old

Catherine Hubbard, 6 years old

Chase Kowalski, 7 years old

Jesse Lewis, 6 years old

James Mattioli, 6 years old

Grace McDonnell, 7 years old

Anne Marie Murphy, 52 years old

Emilie Parker, 6 years old

Jack Pinto, 6 years old

Noah Pozner, 6 years old

Caroline Previdi, 6 years old

Jessica Rekos, 6 years old

Avielle Richman, 6 years old

Lauren Russeau, 30 years old

Mary Sherlach, 56 years old

Victoria Soto, 27 years old

Benjamin Wheeler, 6 years old

Allison Wyatt, 6 years old

[short silence]

Nancy Lanza, age unknown

Adam Lanza, 20 years old

Let us pray.

O God, who came into the world

as a fragile child

and who lived as one of us,

even unto death;

Risen One,

Mysterious One beyond our understanding,

who created and creates us,

who seeks us out,

and whom we seek;

Comforter and advocate,

our shield and our strength,

hold us in our grief;

Oh Holy One,

in Whose name we gather,

Amen

Like most preachers in this country,

I threw away the first draft of my sermon on Friday afternoon.

Advent took on starker colors.

It became more urgent, its prophetic calls more sharp.

At the same time

it went into slow motion

as our world does after trauma.

Twenty-six people shot and killed,

each shot several times, from the medical examiner’s account,

in an elementary school in a quiet, privileged community

in Connecticut.

Most of them children.

More than half of them girls.

Their teachers, all women,

killed trying to protect them.

A young man

not long out of childhood,

killing others and himself,

and before that, killing his own mother.

The rose color of Gaudete Sunday, the Sunday of rejoicing,

this third Sunday of Advent,

and the words of our first scripture readings for today,

clash with our reality.

It shouldn’t happen.

The blood,

the guns,

the police,

the media,

the empty children’s rooms

   with weeping parents,

the questions.

I threw away my sermon.

And then I asked myself:

why don’t I throw away that sermon every week?

Where, in our sermons,

in our prayers,

in our community work,

are the names of the children

who die of gun violence

every day?

 In 2008 and 2009

—these figures are from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention— [1]

5,740

children and teens

were killed by guns.

Five thousand

seven hundred

and forty.

In two years.

This number would fill more than 229 public school classrooms

of 25 students each.

More than 170 of the children

killed during those two years

were pre-schoolers.

Black children and teens,

who were 15 percent

of the total child population in the US

during those two years,

accounted for 45 percent

of all child and teen gun deaths.

Trayvon Martin.
We remember his name – do we?
But do we know the other names?

Do our news media publish them?
Do we pray them?

Do we remember them?
Do we weep for them?

This shouldn’t happen

in a quiet suburban community.

It shouldn’t happen in a noisy urban community.

It shouldn’t happen to any mother’s child.

Or to any mother.

Or father.

Or human person of any kind.

Columbine High School, Colorado.

Wedgwood Baptist Church, Texas.
Atlanta day trading, Georgia.

            I know you want to put your hands over your ears–

bear with me and with this list for another minute—

Lockheed Martin,  Mississippi.
Living Church of God, Wisconsin.
Red Lake High School and Reservation, Minnesota.
Amish School, Pennsylvania.

Virginia Tech University, Virginia

Northern Illinois University, Illinois.
American Civic Association center, New York state

Fort Hood Army Base, Texas

Tucson congressional constituent meeting, Arizona

Oikos University, California

Seattle café, Washington state

Movie theatre, Colorado

Sikh temple, Wisconsin

I skipped some.

We don’t feel much like rejoicing on this Gaudete Sunday.

And religious platitudes won’t help us.

The voice and visions from today’s scriptures from Zephaniah and Isaiah,

words of justice and joy,

speak to some of us

but fail to reach others among us.

Some of us feel more like the passage from Jeremiah,

the same passage quoted in the gospel of Matthew on the massacre of the innocents:

“...a voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping.

Rachel is weeping for her children;

she refused to be comforted for her children,

because they are no more.”[2]

When children die,

our God dies.

Our faith is shaken.

Our hope begins to faint.

Our visions and dreams turn to nightmares.

Into this world

this very world

Jesus was born

and is born

and will be born.

In this world,

John the Baptizer

spoke,

and speaks,

to both rich and poor,

to the occupied and the occupiers,

the conquered and the empire,

the religious and the not so religious,

the violent and the silent.

Last week we encountered John already,

preaching repentance –

-- repentance and forgiveness.

Repentance first.

And did you notice that the author of the gospel of Luke

very carefully named the context, political and economic,

of John’s preaching -- do you remember?

"In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea..." and so on –“the word of God came to John...”

We might well say:

In the seventh year of the Roberts Court at the Supreme Court of the United States, the seventeenth year since the founding of the World Trade Organization,[3] the one hundred and twelfth Congress, the fourth year of the presidency of Barack Obama, when Bev Perdue was governor of North Carolina, the word of God came...

This week,

the gospel’s author, and John the Baptizer,

get very practical.

 
What should we DO?

What should we do?

One of the things we tend to do when a catastrophe happens is to simplify.

We want a cause. We want a reason. We want a simple answer.

We want it theologically

and we want it socially.

We want it theologically:

You know that saying, “Everything happens for a reason”?
What a load of theological hogwash that is. 

As if we could know.

 

On an emotional and spiritual and theological level,

we don’t know.

We need to sit, in Advent, in the night,

in our not-knowing,

the not-knowing in which faith is forged,

the place where hope will be born

–in this we trust—

in the faint light of the rose and purple candles.

But this will not happen fast

or easily.

And socially, we want a simple answer too.

That is another kind of “everything happens for a reason”

which might be rephrased as 
“everything happens for one reason.”

No; I think

that things generally happen

for several reasons.

In the case of the Connecticut killings,

and of other killings by gun violence in this nation,

the lax gun laws, yes.

Yes. Yes.

AND

the fact that it is easier to get a gun

than to get mental health care.

The lack of good mental health care.

The stigma

that those of us who have suffered from mental illness still bear.

The glorification of violence in our entertainment industry

and the shaping of our desires

through this industry.

The images and models of masculinity in our culture.

Social isolation.

And this country’s particular sin:

We enslaved each other through violence.

We are a country enslaved to violence.

AND

whatever it is

that causes humans to kill each other,

as the ancient story of the brothers Abel and Cain recounts.

We are all entangled with this.

Call it evil, call it sin, call it the way of the world;

call it what you want.

We are, one way or another, a part of it –

- some perhaps more than others, but all of us.

Today’s collect[4]

puts it in old-fashioned language: “we are sorely hindered by our sins.”

We hear this against the backdrop of last week’s gospel:

the reality of repentance

and that of forgiveness.

What should we DO?

Say the people

in today’s gospel.

John the Baptizer,

in the Gospel of Luke,

encounters different audiences

who ask what they should do

to change.

The crowd asks.

The tax collectors ask.

Even the soldiers ask.

John takes these groups of people

where they are.

They are not starting from the same place.

No hoarding, he says to one group.

No skimming, to the other.

No extortion, to the third; no abuse.

It’s not everything.

But it’s a place to start.

In Advent,

we live

between God’s patience

and God’s impatience.

Advent is a time to rediscover

both of these,

God’s patience

and God’s impatience,

and to discern

when and where 

to respond to them

by living in them:

Living God’s patience:

in grieving together,

in holding each other’s hands,

in listening,

in doing the small, daily things

that assure us, after the catastrophe,

that we are still alive.

Living God’s impatience:

in outrage

and action

for justice;

for change.

Dorothee Soelle, the German theologian,

has always been helpful to me.

She grew up during the Shoah [the Holocaust]

and after World War II, she said,

she didn't have much stomach for

“the God who so gloriously reigneth."

For her,

in that period of history,

God was weak

and did not have enough friends.

The God who is with us

in Advent,

and who will be with us at Christmas

as a fragile child,

needs us 
as friends.

Let us pray.

Come, o brother Jesus.

Come, o wounded savior.

Come, weak God who shows us strength where there is none.

Come, challenger of empires

and of the language of empires

and of the weapons of empires.

Come to us and make us your friends.

Come to us who are charged with protecting

you,

your children,

your life.

Come to us who fail;

come to us who struggle;

come to us who need forgiveness.

Come to us

and teach us to work

patiently

stubbornly

together

for life.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Weep with us.

Hold our hands.

Stay in our hearts.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Anger us.

Be our guide.

Teach us to be your friends.

Teach us your hope.

Amen.

---

[1] These figures and others are detailed and analyzed in the Children’s Defense Fund report on children and gun violence, "Protect Children Not Guns 2012." http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/data/protect-children-not-guns-2012.pdf

[2] Jeremiah 31:15.

[3] In a shorter, related meditation for an Advent retreat, I also included in this enumeration “in the sixty-eighth year since the establishment of the Bretton Woods Institutions.”  I include these transnational economic institutions (the Bretton Woods institutions –the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund— and the World Trade Organization) because politics and economics, as they were two thousand years ago though in different ways, are deeply connected, and because our lives are affected by economic as well as political institutions. You can replace the names and institutions above at will. Try it.

[4] Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen. Collect for the Third Sunday of Advent, the Book of Common Prayer.