Everything is Not Okay

Another shooting.  Another wave of “Our hearts go out…” and “Our thoughts and prayers are with…”  Not to say that they don’t or shouldn’t or that they haven’t.  The sad news among this terrible event in Florida is that we are becoming all too accustomed to this kind of bad news and seem to have learned how to react and what to say in the midst of such things.  We tweet, post, and so forth, then we go on.

When will enough be enough?  Why have we become so violent in our speech and in our actions culturally in what seems such a short amount of time?

Before we can even get to those questions, though, the very loud, very standard talking heads emerge saying that the gun laws are to blame for being too strict or too lenient.  That the people in the nightclub should have been better armed to shoot back.  Perhaps these voices will suggest that the people at the club are at fault for either their sexuality or that the lateness of their revelry provided opportunity for such a terror.  It could be said that the fault of this rests with the President or with a presidential candidate, or of the liberal media or the conservative media or of some larger, more nefarious agenda.  It becomes the fault of the shooter and the fault of the dead and everyone is responsible and no one is and we get no further down this dead end line of thinking than we ever do.

The humanity of the situation becomes lost in the desire to place or shift culpability without taking responsibility for the health and welfare of our fellow human beings.  The danger we face is not in a lack of compassion, but in our compassion being selective and time sensitive.  We only keep our thoughts and prayers with them for so long and only to a limited extent. 

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is asked if one group of Galileans were worse sinners than another because of the way in which they died.  Jesus responds, “No!”  He then encourages all to repent, which is to say change one’s mind toward God.  This is a recognition that terrible things can befall us all.  Therefore we should strive to be right with God at all times.  And that qualification of striving to be right is something that we can only know for ourselves.  God knows our hearts and, hopefully, so do we.  As for the sins or sainthood of another?  It is not for us to say.

So who is the worse sinner in all of this?  That is the wrong and foolish question on which we too often dwell.  We need to be asking instead how we, as a church that proclaims Christ and claims to follow him, can embody Christ in our actions and attitudes.  Let us be known by our love, our broken hearts, and our willingness to stand in prayer beside all in this time where the Good News is both desperately needed and also does have something to say to the violence of our times:  “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”

May we be the children of God who reach out to the rest of God’s children – those who believe, those who don’t, and those who have become estranged from the church due to our preoccupation with judgementalism and hardened hearts.  For if we lose civility, civilization will be hard to maintain.  If we do not have love, then we are noisy gongs.  We must bear the standard of Christ and, as Jesus said, let our light shine that others might see God.