Newtown School Shooting

Thoughts about Newtown, Connecticut School Shooting

Genesis 1:1-2 (MSG).  "First this: God created the Heavens and Earth--all you see, all you don't see.  Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky darkness.  God's Spirit brooded...above the...abyss."

I think about that description a lot when we are confronted with an event like the shooting of innocents in Newtown.  I think about the world before God.  A chaotic and disturbing world.  A world where there is nothing by which you can get your bearings.  A world where there is nothing solid upon which to stand.  A world where God has not yet arrived.

God is brooding, but has not acted.  God looms over the chaos, but has not yet landed in it.  God is over-shadowing the darkness, but the darkness doesn't even notice or care.

Then God stops brooding.  God speaks and everything changes.

What is troubling is that the order God brings to the chaos doesn't subdue that chaos.  All the levels of  order that were created by God weren't ironclad.

History becomes an ongoing story of how the chaos keeps leaking out, and God must brood again.  God must hover, and then speak in order to recreate order.  Fill the emptiness, again.  Shine light in the darkness, again.  Make something out of nothing, again.  Give the world a solid place to stand, again.

That's what Advent waiting is all about.  It's that certain understanding that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, again; that God is brooding over chaos, again; and we wait, crying out to God, "How long?"

Finally God speaks, but not like we expect.  Not with a booming, "Let there be light," but a whisper that says, "Let there be a baby. And let that baby be me."  A most mysterious utterance.  God is going to finally and utterly land in our chaotic world.  Maybe now, with the birth of Emmanuel--God with us--the chaos will be completely overcome.  Our prayers, and maybe even God's prayers, will finally be answered.

But even because of God's entrance into the world, in the baby Jesus, the darkness still has it's day through a man named Herod, who has all the innocent, two-year-old baby boys senselessly slaughtered in a deranged effort to secure his place in the crazy, swirling emptiness.  Even with God birthed into our world, the chaos is not stilled.  Did God realize that simply by enacting His plan of coming into the world, it would cause such a deadly backlash to a town and its two-year-old baby boys?

So we have been saved, by Jesus Christ.  But the chaos is still not completely contained.  Friday it popped out again.  Evil had yet another field day, mostly upon innocent, happy, once alive five and six year old children.  The incongruity of the powerlessness of five-year-old children, cringing before the empty-headed power of evil behind a gun almost slays us, who try to comprehend that gap.  One moment they were alive; the next dead.  How quickly eruptive chaos can make us question, and even despair:  will this pre-God world ever change?

Theologians call this the "yet/not yet" of God.  That "yet" God has acted and is acting, and will act upon the chaos, it is "not yet" over.  The final subjection of evil has "not yet" happened.  God has "not yet" finished the work He began at creation.  "Yet," there will be a day.  There will come a day when all emptiness will be filled with God, all nothingness will disappear in the substance of God, all darkness--even the corners--will be fully illuminated with the light that is God, and all that is bottomless will become the solid rock of God.

As the end of the book of Revelation says:
"Now God's home is with his people!  He will live with them, and he will be their God.  He will wipe away all tears from their eyes.  There will be no more death, no more grief or crying or pain."

With the martyred innocents who crowd around the altar of God in heaven, we add our prayers with theirs, "How long?"