Genesis 4:1-10
Most of you remember Bre Buentello, who attended our church, while a teacher here and a year ago took a teaching job in Colorado. I've been keeping in touch with her over Facebook. This past week she put up a picture of Florida, with the words, "Love Conquers Hate" (hashtag Orlando).
I wrote back:
That may be true in the long run as love will envelope and absorb this act; but still, a hater with a gun can can cause immense amounts of pain and anguish not only for the dead and wounded and their families/friends, but also the increase of paranoia in a population already looking into others faces trying to assess whether they are a friend or foe.
That may be one of the oldest traits we share with our caveman ancestors, and really, with all animals. One of our first instincts, when meeting a stranger, is to assess if this person is a friend or a foe, a good person or an evil person, someone with good intentions or someone with malice.
Evidently, after centuries of being human, we haven't gotten very good at it. People let Adolph Hitler take over Germany and then the European continent, eventually killing millions of people, not just the Jews, but all those killed by German forces during the war. A night club in Orlando let a young man in the front door who quickly killed 49 people and injured 54 more. 103 people. Wasn't there anyone watching the door, some huge bouncer, looking into people's faces to see if they were a friend or foe?
Many are quick to link this atrocity to radical Islamists. But the shooter told his mother that it disgusted him to see same sex people kissing each other. Now it has been found out that the shooter frequently visited a number of gay clubs in the Orlando area and was probably gay himself. I’ll say more about this in a minute. I think the complexity of the shooters motives will never be known, whether it be ISIS or homophobia or a cocktail of all sorts of evil spirits.
What I am more interested in, what I am more disgusted by is the senseless death. 49 people are dead because someone mindlessly took their lives--felt like he had the power and the authority and the mission to end lives. To make people dead.
At the last Presbytery meeting, Tom Sutter said to me, "I'm thinking you should have a law enforcement person talk to your congregation about what they should do in case a terrorist of some sort came in and took over worship and started shooting people. He said, "You have a law enforcement person in your congregation," and he was talking about Jason Harrold. I gave his suggestion a stupid smile and a light chortle. Now I'm not so sure he's right.
But that's what I was trying to say responding to Bre's post on Facebook. The shooting in Orlando certainly affects Orlando and the families and friends of those people now dead or wounded. It also affects us, over 1500 miles away, because are we not now looking over our shoulders a bit more fearfully and studiously? Is not our level of paranoia cranked up a few notches? Are we not more afraid today, than we were last Saturday?
The truth is, you never know. You never know anymore where the next tragedy of senseless killing will happen. At a Miss Kansas pageant? Think how easy that would have been, to come into Lesch Arena, and from the rail at the top, start taking out people down on the floor and in the stands--people who only have a couple of options for trying to get out of that place when all hell breaks loose. At a Walmart during a big sale (which is what happened this week). At the Olympic Games this summer in Rio? At a worship service, where something like that is the furthest from our minds. These kinds of atrocities tempt us to all become agoraphobics--just stay home and have Amazon deliver whatever it is we need, so we can stay indoors and "safe."
But the story of the first killing in the Bible let's us know we aren't even safe in our own homes with our own families. Brothers kill brothers, for what? Whose offering was better? The story of Cain and Abel let's us know how quickly things went from the Garden of Eden to family murder. Just one generation. One, stinking generation. That's all it took for senseless murder to enter the human storyline.
While most of the news since Sunday was about the night club shooting in Orlando, that story overshadowed another about a father in Roswell, New Mexico who shot and killed his wife and four daughters on Saturday, then fled into Mexico. The children ranged in age from 3 to 14. Why does a baby girl get born into the world only so she can be shot and killed as a 3 year old by her own father? Why does she only get to live three years? And why does an ass like her father get to decide when his family's lives will be over?
We are aghast at the killings in Orlando of 49 people, but the family killed in Roswell are a reminder that roughly 11,000 annual gun homicides happen within people's homes. So we can't even hide out in our homes with our families and feel safe. Like I said, fear and paranoia get ramped up considerably when we find out about these kinds of stories. That ancient instinct of trying to decide who really is a friend and who is a foe becomes fueled by that paranoia; and we can't even be sure about our family.
We end up making errors of judgement on both ends of that instinctual assessment: either we make everyone out to be the enemy, which is a horrible way to live; or, we decide to err on the side of being trusting in the goodness of human nature and end up murdered by someone close to us, which is a horrible way to die.
I want to spend some time thinking out loud about what the killings in Orlando are NOT about.
The killings in Orlando are not about gun control. That isn’t the main issue behind this atrocity. It is what most politicians are running towards right now, but they are wrong. Joseph Loomis put on his Facebook page this week, a picture of wrecked cars with the caption, “We don’t blame cars for drunk drivers. Why blame guns for violent people?”
Gun control is not going to solve the main problem. If not an assault rifle, then a hunting rifle, or some kind of semi-automatic pistol. If not a pistol a sword. If not a sword a hunting knife. And on and on. It’s not about the weapon. If you take all the weapons away from a demented human being, you’ve still got a demented human being. It’s about something else.
The killings in Orlando are not about the gay-homophobic issue. A bunch of Facebook posts are all over that, asking everyone to claim solidarity with the hurting gay community. The fact that the nightclub was a hangout for LGBT people is not the main issue here.
Nor is the issue about homophobia or Christian teachings, as one article in the Washington Times wrote about. The headline was, “LGBT Activists Blame Christians For Orlando Attack.” In the article there was this paragraph:
Several prominent gay-rights activists took to social media to blame Christians for Sunday’s massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Chase Strangio, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, on Sunday said the “Christian Right” is implicated in the slaughter by passing “anti-LGBT bills.” “The Christian Right has introduced 200 anti-LGBT bills in the last six months, and people are blaming Islam for this!? No!?,” Mr. Strangio said in a Twitter post.
Sorry, Mr. Strangio, but you are way off, too, in taking aim to blame Christians. The main issue, the main problem, isn’t a LGBT one, nor a Christian one.
The killings in Orlando are not about “radical Islamic terrorism” as both presidential candidates are stumbling over themselves trying to make us believe. According to reports, the shooter had pledged himself to at least four Islamic fundamentalist groups. (But here’s my paranoia leaking out—how do we know we are being told the truth about that by our government law officials? How do we know that the FBI isn’t just trying to play on this tragedy to ramp up our fear of radical Islamic terrorism.). But two of the Islamic groups the young man mentioned are at fierce odds with each other; and so are the other two. So did the young man even know who he was pledging himself to?
Bill Keller sent me a link to an article this week asking the question, “How is it that these homegrown people are allying themselves with and becoming terrorists?” What is it that’s missing in our culture that makes a person try to find personal meaning and purpose, not in something our culture offers, but that a terrorist culture does?
Those are intriguing questions, and they are getting a little closer to the main problem, but ultimately, the Orlando shootings are not about Islamic fundamentalistic terrorism.
And since this issue isn’t about terrorism, it is therefore not an immigration issue, as one of the presidential candidates keeps saying. It isn’t a “build a wall” issue. It isn’t about limiting the amount of Islamic people to immigrate to our country. It isn’t about deporting a bunch of Mexican people or Islamic people back to their countries of origin. Thinking that if we limit the number of “those kinds of people” in our country we will somehow take care of this murderous problem is magical thinking. All of the school shootings that we’ve had to deal with were not done by “those kinds of people.”
So what is the main issue behind the Orlando shootings, and the school shootings, and the 11,000 family gun deaths, and all the rest?
The main issue is that we are all human beings. As human beings we have the capability within each of us to do atrocious things. Human beings have been doing atrocious things through out human history—from Cain and Abel until today.
Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome:
For we have already charged that all…are under sin, as it is written:
“None is righteous, no, not one;
no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”
“Their throat is an open grave;
they use their tongues to deceive.”
“The venom of asps is under their lips.”
“Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
in their paths are ruin and misery,
and the way of peace they have not known.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
What we have to take seriously is human sin. Human sin is the main and underlying problem to all human atrocities. Human sin is, as I just said, the capability to do Godless violence against each other. We also have the capability to do amazing acts of compassion—to be a Mother Teresa or Gandhi. But we have to acknowledge, that as humans, we have BOTH capabilities within us. We can just as easily become an Orlando shooter, or a murderer of our families as we could become a Mother Teresa. We have to acknowledge that fact.
Gun control, building walls, deportation, LGBT civil rights, whatever! None of those are going to solve the underlying problem of our human nature and it’s inclination and proclivity toward violence. Ultimately it is an issue of our hearts and spirits. None of the solutions being chased after this latest shooting are going to make us safe or better human beings. That also is magical thinking. The truth is, I’m sorry to say, is that none of us are safe, not even from ourselves, because of our basic humanity and what we might call sin.
One article I read this week talked about the Orlando shooter using the term, “self-radicalization.” That the shooter was basically a loner, and not part of any radical group. That he had worked himself into this state of violence through a process of "self-radicalization". Maybe that’s an apt term to describe a person’s basic humanity out of control, or in the control of sin. In the control of a tainted and misguided heart. The answer is not to take the guns out of the “self-radicalized” person’s hands, but to change the person’s heart.
It’s not the before-and-after picture I was talking about a couple of weeks ago when I told the story of my conversion. I talked about how I wished I had a before-and-after story like the apostle Paul, or some Christians I knew at that time I became a Christian. But I came to realize it isn’t the before-and-after picture that’s important. It’s the now-and-future picture that is. It is not just what Jesus saved me from in the past. It is more what Jesus has saved me from becoming in the future. It is what Christ is changing my heart to become—His person—so that my baser human inclinations will not take over, so that I don’t become self-radicalized, so that I don’t become an Orlando shooter, or a guy who murders his wife and four daughters and runs to Mexico.
Christ is the only one we believe who has that kind of power to save us from ourselves. To save us from our future selves. To change our hearts from within, today, so that we might be molded after his humanity, and not our inhumanity, for our future.
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