A church member noted this week that I seemed particularly affected by the shootings in Newtown, CT. She was right. The news of 20 children and 6 teachers and staff gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School is terrible enough to affect anyone. I felt the pain of the news on many levels: as a fellow human being, as a Christian, as a father of two boys near to the ages of most of the child victims, as a UCC minister in the same denomination as many who were killed, and so on. I think, however, that I felt most viscerally connected to the shootings in Connecticut, because I know firsthand what life will be like for that community.
When
I heard horrific news of the massacre in Newtown, it brought back
memories of life on Long Island after 9-11. The two events have many
differences-most notably that on 9-11 the killers were terrorists and
the dead did not include any children. Yet, there are many similarities:
sudden violent deaths on a large scale on an ordinary day where the
victims felt safe, first responders helpless before those already dead,
the world watching a community mourn, small towns where everyone knows
the victims.
I arrived at work at my UCC church
on the North Shore of Long Island (just across Long Island Sound) from
Newtown two weeks after 9-11. I did not know any of those who died, but I
got to know their spouses and children. Two men in our church died in
the World Trade Center and at least 25 more from our church's town (a
Wall Street bedroom community) also died along with many more in
neighboring towns. Although I was just the associate minister charged
with keeping the church program going while my senior minister did much
of the heavy lifting of grief work, there was plenty of grief and trauma
to go around.
Early on, the UCC helped Church World Service bring in a social worker
who had experienced the Oklahoma City bombing, and she explained that
grief from a community-wide mass killing would unfold over years. She
charted out how at one year, two years, three years. . . rates of
suicide, bankruptcy, divorce, domestic violence, substance abuse and
more occurred in Oklahoma City. Her words were prophetic, because things
unfolded just as she said they would. I guess that's why the pain of
Newtown hit me so hard, because I know that their nightmare will not end
when the TV cameras and reporters leave town; then it is only just beginning.
I
also fear for our culture. The grief of 9-11 did not lead our culture to
self-reflection. We gave little or no thought to the inadequacy of
responding to violence with violence. We chose to deal with our fear by
making others more afraid. Two wars and hundreds of thousands of dead
and wounded later, we still give little thought to a better way to
respond when we are attacked. The grief of 9-11 led to the grief of
thousands of families of military service members and thousands of more
families around the world.
Newtown is
a different event than 9-11, but we have evolved with an instinct to
protect our young when they are threatened. I think everyone who loves
children saw in the faces of the Newtown children a connection to
children they love. At some level we all felt attacked, so how will we
respond to this attack and to this fear?
Searching for theological perspective on the Newtown shootings, I
read a review of America and Its Guns: A Theological Expose by Jim
Atwood. The review was by a Lutheran minister who was a first responder
at Columbine named Rick Barger. As someone who experienced the trauma of
mass violence, Barger knows that how we frame a violent event matters.
He praises Atwood's book and writes, "Atwood
reminds us that when President Bush addressed the community at Virginia
Tech, he said that the victims happened to be in the wrong place at the
wrong time. Actually, they were in the right place at the correct time.
They were doing what college students do-going to class. The students
were shot because of the "Empire" and
the "principalities and powers" (cf. Ephesians 6:12) created by
America's love affair with violence, guns, and power. This obsession has
created in our minds enemies we have to fear, cemented a God-given
calling to arm ourselves, and raised weapons that kill to idolatrous
levels. The result is a culture in which guns-even weapons that have no
purpose other than to kill-are readily available to anyone."
America's love of violence permeates our culture and language, and it
has replaced our religion, so that Christianity (as it has done
throughout its history) becomes a justification of violence rather than a
protest against it. Barger writes, "So religious is our faith in power
defined by weapons and the ability to use them that we coined the term,
'redemptive violence.' Redemptive violence is a way of justifying the
use of force if we believe that we are threatened. The creed of the gun
religion is 'Guns do not kill. People do.' This creed has resulted in a
constant escalation of weaponry and guns and laws that protect gun
owners and manufacturers more than the public. This reality is built upon the lie that the more people are armed the less likely there is to be violence."
So
how do we respond to Newtown? It seems to me that the worst thing we
can do is shrug and turn away shaking our heads only to forget about the
children killed once the media spotlight is off of them. What does it
mean for our church? A few miles away from our building a 4 year-old was killed by bullets fired into the car he was sitting in. A few blocks
away from our building residents are protesting a pawn shop which sells
guns, including an assault rifle recently stolen from the store that is
now somewhere on our streets. What should a "Peace with Justice" church
like ours do? Do we really believe in a religion that declares
self-protection is not the greatest good or do we in truth cling to an
idolatry of violence that declares anything is justifiable as long as
you label it "self defense?"
I
have no easy answers to such questions, but as your minister I invite
you to search for answers along with me. There will be more events like
Newtown and how we respond matters.
Grace and Peace,
Chase
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