Our hearts have been broken this
week, as we have read and watched coverage of the killing of 49 people at the
Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Saint Paul
urges us to “weep with those who weep,”[1]
and this has been a week for tears and prayers.
So many people slain in the prime of life, hatred that is difficult for
us to comprehend—the world seems a darker and more dangerous place.
Allison
and I had been in Orlando the week before last for a theology conference. We had dinner a mile and a half from the
nightclub the evening before the tragedy.
“It could have been us,” we thought.
If you are gay or Latino, I imagine you may be feeling much more
threatened. Another unpredictable act of
gun violence, another undetected terrorist, one of us turned against all of
us. “How long will it last?” we ask
ourselves. Is this just how it will be
for us now?
Terrorists,
and especially religious terrorists, claim to be acting on God’s behalf, to
taking God’s sword of judgment into their own hands. The shooter, Omar Mateen claimed to be an
Islamic State loyalist. I don’t expect
we will ever know precisely why he did what he did. He may have just been a bitter, self-hating
young man. But the official ideology of
the Islamic State is very apocalyptic, looking ahead to the day of judgement
when God rewards and punishes. Violent
acts like this, these fanatics believe, clarify the lines, and hasten the final
verdict.
But
this is not the judgment of our God, this bloody carnage and arrogant presumption
of a man who cannot see into the heart. God loves all whom He has made. All people bear the stamp of his image, no
matter their race or sexual orientation.
All people possess inherent dignity, and God has clearly forbidden
murder.
It’s
the Evil One who works through violence and sows division between groups of
people. It’s the Evil One who hardens
hearts and dulls the conscience, and awakens that which is most savage within
us. I have no reason to suspect that Mr.
Mateen was not fully responsible for what he did last Saturday night. But events like these also lay bare the deep
but mostly unseen struggle between our good and gracious God and Satan, the
prince of lies, that shapes the course of this world. We’re frightened by this event, and with good
reason, because it’s more than we can handle.
The
mass shooting in Orlando quickly brings to the surface several deep rooted and
long term social conflicts. They’re all
what strategic planners call “wicked problems”—issues that are very complicated
and seem to persistently deny consensus or solution. There’s the problem of radical Islam, and our
frustrating inability to predict and control terrorist events. There’s the continual escalation of gun
violence in our country, especially mass shootings committed by young men. Our continuing hostility towards sexual and
racial minorities is another deep problem, a hatred for those who are unlike
us, those we can’t understand. And
there’s the question of how keep culture wars civil, how to prevent our
disagreements about fundamental questions of human identity and common life
from becoming violent.
We
can’t create machines that will solve these problems. No grand theory will work them out. Some of them are based in issues that have
always been at the heart of our culture: tensions between individual rights and
social equality, a need for common values and a deeply diverse population.
Working through these problems must involve insights from across the
ideological spectrum, consensus developed through respectful and gracious
relationships.
These
are also all spiritual problems to one extent or another. We can only work at them by looking inward
and seeking God’s help. Problems like
these demand deeper patience and humility, greater compassion for the
sufferings of others, love that reaches across divides and establishes true
communion. It may be right that we have
problems to solve as a nation. But we
also have wounds to be healed, evil to be cast out.
Jesus
went to the country of the Gerasenes, and he found a tormented and miserable
man, naked and raving among the tombs.
His neighbors had cast him out, this man who frightened them with his
unpredictability and his tendency to show them a side of themselves they would
rather forget.
Jesus
recognized that the man was in the grip of evil spirits. He had compassion on the man, and drove them
out, in a dramatic show of power. Jesus restored the man’s freedom and dignity. His neighbors came to find him clothed and in
his right mind, ready to work and make friends, someone they had thought lost
forever now fully capable of taking a place in their community.
They
saw this wonderful work of healing and they feared the One who had performed
it. They begged Jesus to leave their
land. They surely had others who were
sick. There were people in their
community who needed to be reconciled to each other. There was so much that Jesus could have
taught them, so much wisdom He had to share.
But
they begged Jesus to leave. He’d set one thing right in their community, and
maybe they just couldn’t handle more restoration. His healing threatened them. It opened up questions about what else might
need fixing in their community. And they
were afraid of what His kind of change might demand of each of them. Jesus comes to bring the healing we need, you
see, but He also unsettles the ways we cobble together to make this broken
world work.
I
don’t know how your Facebook feed has looked in the days since the shooting in
Orlando, but mine has been fairly agonizing.
There were some heartfelt and generous words for the victims of the
attack and those who loved them in the first few days. But how much anger since then.
“We
could solve this problem,” one person says, “if only we got rid of those crazy people
who support the NRA.” Another voice opines: “If we could just get rid of this spineless
president and find one who takes Islamic terrorism seriously.” “If we could one
eliminate all those morons who continue to oppose gay marriage.” “Muslims are far too dangerous to let into
our country.” On and on it goes,
hundreds of voices all saying in some way: “this is someone else’s problem.” We can bring peace and unity to America, if
only we get rid of him or her or them.
Let’s cast out the demoniac, and then at last, we can be free.
And
Jesus stands on the shore of our land, as he stood that day by Genessaret. He points to the evil in the life we share
together, revealed so graphically in the events last Saturday night. He offers to bind up our wounds, to give us
freedom, to help us live together in peace.
But to be healed, we must recognize that this
isn’t all someone else’s problem. Our
anger, our harsh words, our arrogant impatience with those who we refuse to
understand, they too have brought our nation to this dark and troubling
time. He will heal us, but we must be
willing to change. Will it be said of
us, in this time: “Then all the people asked him to depart from them?”
Clarity and wisdom: what so few desire.
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