A Disturbing Trend

Today's blog entry could be considered a serious downer, and will not win me any popularity points. On Wednesday, June 10, a gunman in his late 80’s entered the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC with a gun, killing a security guard. Three Sundays ago, on May 31, around 10 a.m., on Pentecost Sunday, just about the time I was standing up to go into the call to worship before our first hymn, at the Resurrection Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, Dr. George Tiller was gunned down while handing out bulletins and greeting churchgoers as an usher. Scott Roeder, the suspect in his murder, has said that he saw Dr. Tiller – an ObGyn who performed abortions - as a murderer and felt justified in gunning him down. In April, a gunman who posted on the white supremacist site Stormfront gunned down 3 Pittsburgh police officers. In July of last year, at the Knoxville Unitarian in Tennessee, another church shooting; the gunman, Jim Adkisson, said that he’d have liked to gun down Democratic members of Congress, but they were far away, so the folks at nearby Knoxville Unitarian would have to do.

What I’m concerned about is that Roeder and Adkisson and the shooter at the Holocaust Museum and the shooter in Pittsburgh didn’t come to these decisions in a vacuum. Nationally prominent TV pundits, talk radio hosts, internet websites, political leaders and, yes, religious leaders maintain a constant drumbeat of hate that goes beyond disagreeing with opposing viewpoints, to dehumanizing the people who hold them – seeing Jews, muslims, racial minorities, immigrants, gays and others with whom they disagree as “not quite human” or at least not human on quite the same level they are.

One of the strengths – though it comes with many frustrations – in the United Church of Christ is that we don’t have to agree with each other to be in community with each other. As a former Association moderator, I can tell you that leading an association of 2 dozen or so Philadelphia-area UCC churches is like herding cats – our churches and our members are all over the place, but the covenant that binds us is stronger than our varied responses to the hot-button issues of our day.

When we think of terrorists, I think there’s a tendency for us to automatically think of Muslim terrorists – and, indeed, less than three weeks ago, a convert to Islam shot two soldiers at an Arkansas recruiting center. However, we’ve seen a string of “lone wolf” acts of terror by folks who are not Muslims, people who - at least until they opened fire - would not stand out in a crowd here in Bridesburg. Some of them consider themselves good Christians doing God’s work by killing evildoers. One of the dangers of fighting against people we may consider monsters is that we can in the process become monsters ourselves – as it has been said, when we gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into us.

I would urge us, as strongly as I can, never to lose sight of our own humanity and the humanity of those who differ from us, even those with whom we vehemently disagree. Everytime we overhear a conversation in which someone goes on a rant, spewing hate and says they’d like to line all those ______ (fill in the blank) up against the wall and shoot them, everytime we get some rancid email dripping with hate toward this group or that group, imploring us to forward to as many friends and acquaintances as possible, I’d ask that we take a minute, catch our breath, and consider whether we really want to participate in this.

I’ll close with these words of Martin Neimoller, a Protestant pastor in Germany during Hitler’s Third Reich who ended up in the concentration camps….perhaps you’ve heard them before:

"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a communist;

Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a socialist;

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak out for me."