So Many Children

So Many Little Children                        The Dover Church
January 6, 2013 - Epiphany.                  Matthew 2

Each year at Epiphany, we hear the story of the three magi following the star to Bethlehem. This morning we have heard the whole story, the heart warming manger scene followed by the flight into Egypt and Herod's massacre of all the young boys in Bethlehem. This adjacent proximity of great light and hope right next to great darkness and despair struck me, with the Newtown school shooting coming just two days before our Christmas Pageant three weeks ago. It was very challenging for me, as a father of a 5 and 8 year old in our pageant, to balance our happiness, peace and joy in this meeting house with what the people of Newtown were living at the same time. Three weeks have passed and Sandy Hook has faded to the back pages of the news cycle behind the fiscal cliff, congressional politics, Syria and Kim Kardashian, but the second chapter of Matthew brings us right back, rightfully so. I just do not want move on.
I think about those little, innocent children, of their fear and pain. I think of their lives cut so short and what they might have become, the joy and new life they never knew.
I think about the parents, getting the phone call, going to claim their child. It makes me shudder. I wonder which couples will survive the tragedy and which ones will be understandably unable to go on together with so much loss in the middle of their life.
I think about the siblings who will have to live the rest of their lives with those ghosts, that story.
I think about those brave administrators and teachers who did their best and still died, and all the life and love still before them.
I think about all the unopened Christmas presents, the end of semester art work, pictures and other things our boys brought home from the Chickering School in their backpacks that day, and what has become of it all. So much giftedness. So much light and wonder.
I think about the police officers who didn't get their chance to protect lives and could only tape off the crime scene for the detectives.
I think about the kids and teachers in the other classes and how they are going to a school in another town.
I think about the town, forever carrying the shadow of this obscenity.
I think about the pastors, priests, rabbis and counselors, looked to for words of hope and comfort and how inadequate they must have felt and feel.
I think about the killer and what madness could have possibly lead him to do this thing.
I think about his father and brother who have to live with this.
I think about the President, having to go to yet another ordinary American town to be the mourner in chief.
I think about our society, why we of all societies do this sort of thing, what makes us so prone to violence, why we fatalistically accept this sort of violence, fear the next insane murderer ready to attack and yet won't move beyond this cycle.
I think about Wayne LaPierre, spokesman for the NRA, when he says that this is not a gun problem but a mental health problem. I find it hard to believe that he really thinks that. When he says that the problem is that the teachers were unarmed, that we need armed guards at every school. I don't want my children going to that kind of school.
I think about all the Congressmen and Senators who have come out saying that tighter gun regulations are not an option, who fear for their political careers and fail to lead.
I think about all the folks in the gun lobby, after yet another one of these incidents, Columbine, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Tucson, Sandy Neck, western New York, Aurora again, who say, that's not us, we're law abiding citizens and we need our guns for just this sort of thing, to protect ourselves from madmen like this one. They go out and buy ever greater stockpiles of heavy weapons and large capacity magazines, which only causes me more fear. Because the next killer is, right now, a law abiding citizen just like them, exercising his constitutional right to bear arms, until he crosses the line and walks into a school or a theater. And then it is too late, again.
I think about the unique American idolatry of guns, our idolatry of personal liberty when it comes to possessing the tools to do this sort of thing, of the idolatry of individualism which would seem to prefer an even more heavily armed population, an Iraq or Afghanistan sort of environment in which everyone is armed, where everyone is both the first and last line in defense, ultimately individually responsible for our safety.
I think that talk about the Second Amendment is cheap and that some of the most ardent pacifists I have met are combat veterans.
I think about all the people who have done these things, mostly twenty something, white men, loners, lashing out at a society that rejected them. I wonder what we are doing as a society to create them and what we might do as a society to redirect or restrain them.
As a fisherman and as someone who has enjoyed both skeet shooting and target practice, although I do not own a gun, I know how much fun shooting is. Hunting is too much for me, but having killed both fish and animals for food I think all meat eaters ought to do so just to understand the enormity of what taking another life feels like. I was a member of the NRA when it was a firearms instruction and safety organization.
I think about the many concerned neighbors Marie-Laure and I have spoken with and who agree with us that something needs to be done, and the sense in many that nothing can be done, that our leaders are just not up to leading our nation to a better place on this issue, that one industry and four million members of the NRA will have the power to prevent anything from changing for the 308 million rest of us Americans.
I came across the Nobel Prize winning Portuguese novelist, Jose Saramago, a number of years ago. In one of his novels, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ from 1991, Saramago writes a life of Christ in which the slaughter of the innocents, as Herod's massacre of the children of Bethlehem is traditionally known, is one of the defining episode in Jesus' life and the life of the Holy Family. Imagine that, something we skip over year after year a definitive lens for understanding the life, message and ministry of Jesus.
In Saramago's imagination, all the days of his life Jesus is never able to wash off of his hands or conscience all the blood of all the children who died in the attempt on his life. He is haunted by questions of why he lived and they died? Was his life meaningful enough to somehow atone for those innocent deaths? Was being  the Son of God worth that?
Joseph, Mary's husband and the man who raised Jesus, is destroyed by guilt for having run away to Egypt with his little family and not warning everyone else in Bethlehem so they could have escaped too. Saramago sees this guilt of omission, of what Joseph didn't do, as one of the reasons he disappears from the Jesus story in all the Gospels. It is just too much for him.
The questions that have haunted me this week as I have thought about Bethlehem and Newtown are the same as those that haunted Jesus and Joseph in Saramago's novel: can I live comfortably and safely in our little town while hundreds of people are dying all around me in our country? Can I throw my hands up in resignation, indifference or apathy, when I know full well that my faith insists that I stand up and do something? What is the meaning of my faith if I do nothing worthy of those children? Can I accept the evil of the world when God's vision for all of us and all creation is so very clear in the words, life, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ? Am I supposed to run off to Egypt with Marie-Laure and the boys or hide out in Nazareth and hope this darkness never visits my family, our boys' school, our town, this church some Sunday morning?
The entire scope of salvation history in the Bible is the story of God trying to save us from our violence. When Jesus was being arrested, one of his followers attacked an assailant with a sword in self defense, and Jesus said, "put away your sword. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword." I think we have seen the truth of Jesus' words. We cannot support ownership of these kinds of weapons in our society. Guns may not kill people, but people with guns in their hands do. As disciples of Christ, we are to here to do nothing less than carry on God's salvation work and save creation from the violence of humanity.
Our country has amended the Constitution, the original intent of our founding fathers, seventeen times, righting many things which were either wrong or no longer relevant: slavery, the right to vote for African-Americans and women, the prohibition of alcohol and then the repeal of prohibition, the popular election of Senators, term limits for Presidents, the voting age, federal income tax, and others. If we can do these things, we can surely amend the second amendment, make it better for our time and the future, transform our culture of violence into a culture of community and remove unnecessary opportunities for individual outrage. Jesus, Mary and Joseph never went back to Bethlehem. When he was ready, Jesus went to Jerusalem instead. Are we going to be a country in hiding, on the run from one tragedy to the next? Or are we going to face the violence head on, trusting in the power of the Resurrection over death? When are we going to be ready?