After watching last week's news stories about the gunman in Colorado, I was completely flabbergasted. The response of the church in Colorado Springs may be born out of trauma, but their justification of violence is inexcusable. "The Holy Spirit was with me," the security guard said. "My hand was steady. I didn't shake at all." At some point, God guiding this woman through an incredibly difficult situation became God pointing the gun at another person. The pastor continues to argue for armed security guards in churches. And everyone seems OK with it.
For millenia (and maybe forever), people have used God to justify violence. Old Testament scriptures ring with battles in God's name. The Crusades took on a life of their own as "Christians" paid their way into heaven by fighting for "Christ" in the Holy Land. World War II saw contemporary Christians participate directly and indirectly in the slaughter and genocide of millions. So this isn't a new thing - this idea of using God to aim the gun. History books are full of people apologizing for the wrongs their ancestors did. Haven't we learned? What's it going to take?
It may be naive to hope for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s hopes, to pray like Gandhi, to serve like Dorothy Day. At some point humanity must stand up and hold itself accountable. It is irresponsible to hold the "why didn't we see/know" until 20 or 30 years have passed. It is shameful to never be able to see ourselves as the guilty or unjust.
I don't know what I would do if a gunman walked into my congregation. I don't know how I would respond if I had been there. But I don't think that it is acceptable to praise God for the murder accomplished. The act and justification are both sin. Taking someone's life does not please God; they were part of God's "good" creation originally, too. Let's call it as it is: badness, violence, ugliness, brokenness, sin. This is not a blessing. We shoudn't be congratulating each other. This is the world gone wrong.
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4 comments:
Meg:
I appreciate the forthright way you call all of us to think about the violence that is so prevalent in this broken world. I also appreciated your not knowing what you would do if a person came to your church and began shooting. I have to say, for me, I would have to try to stop the person because the perpetrator has made the decision (in his or her right mind or not) to come kill. If this act of restraint ends this person's life, I am hesitant to label it murder as you do, though. But since the other set of the Decalogue says do not "kill," I do not want to focus too much on word choice. I am struck by the different reaction the Amish gave to the perpetrator's family in PA. Both of these communities are Christian, both are hurting, but one seems to have their fingers more on the pulse of God's intention for the world than the other. So I wonder what our prayer should be for both communities, indeed, for all victims of violence. Maybe, that we would be more like the Amish and be in the world but not of the wold.
Yes!
Wow, David Forney never reads my blog, and it's been up for longer;) You must just be way cooler.
Glad to find you hear. You're in my RSS reader now. I'm a fan of the blogging lifestyle, though it does come with its challenges.
-A Wee Blether
FROM JOSH TREVINO
There’s an illuminating historical incident from the tenth century that, if I ever entered academia, I'd love to write a book on. The Byzantine Emperor Nikiforos II Fokas was a longtime foe of the Muslim Caliphate, and he observed that a signal advantage of the Muslims was their jihad doctrine. The Orthodox Church then — as now — regarded war as a regrettable necessity, with emphasis on the regrettable part, and soldiers returning from war would be made to perform some manner of penance before again receiving communion. By contrast, Nikephoros II Fokas observed that the Muslims who went to war were directly fulfilling the commandments of their faith, and were accordingly more motivated, violent, and relentless. The Emperor decided that the Christians needed a similar spiritual edge, and so he asked the Patriarch Polyeuktos in Constantinople to declare that any Christian who fell in battle was automatically a martyr. In effect, he requested a Christian version of jihad. The Patriarch and the entire Church hierarchy, so often in that era mere tools of Imperial policy, refused. The Emperor was forced to back down, and within a few short centuries, the Empire was overrun by the Muslims. Anyway, all of this is to say that while it does seem that the Church historically comes down on the side of violence as an inherent wrong, I'm not sure that the security guard here is totally off-base. If she's thanking God for the opportunity to kill someone, then yes, that's wrong. But it strikes me that she's not doing that at all: rather, she thanks God for helping her save, as own pastor put it, "over 100 lives." That's a moral good. It does not negate the inherent wrong of killing a person; but it does seem to render that killing emphatically not, as you term it, a "murder." Note that while the (old, unified) Church of the tenth century regarded wartime killing as a wrong demanding penance before Eucharist, it did not regard the soldiers performing that penance as murderers. It seems to me that the security guard who killed the killer, Jeanne Assam, is not a murderer -- not, at least, in any Christian sense -- any more than those soldiers were. Just my $0.02, of course. Josh
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