Scriptures: Isaiah
5:1-7 Psalm 46 Philippians 3:4-14 Luke
13:1-9
The 2013
movie The Purge depicted a United
States in which, after an economic collapse, order was restored by means of The
Purge, an annual 12-hour period in which all crime was legal and all first
responders and emergency services were on orders to stand down – basically 12
hours in which everybody had a free pass to commit any mayhem that occurred to
them, up to and including murder – though there were some limits on weaponry –
no grenades or rocket launchers allowed. This annual tradition is credited with
reducing crime and unemployment to near-zero levels, while bolstering the
economy – of course, any persons killed or attacked during the Purge are seen
as collateral damage, as the unavoidable price paid to maintain the greater
good of a stable society. The movie
follows the Sandlin family, who have prospered by selling security systems to
protect their neighbors against the mayhem of The Purge – and of course their
home’s security system is top of the line, state of the art. On Purge night, a wounded man comes to their
door, chased by a group of thugs who want to kill him – and the family is faced
with the choice of what to do? Do they
protect the man or leave him to the mercies of the mob who want to kill him? They do end up protecting him, somewhat
unwillingly, and are set upon by the thugs that threatened the man – and the
family learns that the security systems they sold were essentially security
theatre, unable to keep thugs out of their homes, only giving an illusion of
safety. The movie seems to want to ask the question, what price are we willing
to pay for a comfortable life? And
having paid that price, are we as secure as we think we are?
In our
Gospel reading – not from the lectionary – Pontius Pilate, the brutal governor
of Judea, had conducted a sort of purge of his own. A number of Galileans – folks from Jesus’
neck of the woods – had gone up to Jerusalem to offer their sacrifices at the
Temple. Little did they know it would
cost them their lives – Luke puts it elegantly, saying that Pilate had mingled
their blood with their sacrifices. We’re
not told why Pilate had them killed, only that it happened. The news traveled and made its way to Jesus.
His response seems odd.
You’d have expected some offer of condolences, but that’s not what
Luke’s gospel gives us. Jesus said, “Do
you think those Galileans killed by Pilate were the worst sinners in all
of Galilee?” That’s not a question that would occur to us,
which might say something about the distance between our way of thinking and
theirs. In Jesus’ day, the prevailing
theology said that good things happened to good people, and bad things happened
to bad people. If people prospered, it
was a sign of God’s blessing. If people
suffered, it was their own fault.
Basically it was a theology of blaming the victim, kicking people when
they were down, on a cosmic scale. Perhaps even the people who brought the news
to Jesus thought that those killed by Pilate had only gotten what they
deserved. But Jesus pushed back hard
against that theology, answering his own question by saying they were
essentially no worse than folks who hadn’t been killed by Pilate – presumably
no better either, but certainly no worse.
But then he said something chilling:
“Unless you repent, the same thing will happen to you.” And then he brought up another recent
tragedy, the collapse of a tower that killed eighteen people. To us, that would seem like a totally random
happening, but likely there were folks who thought the tower collapsed because
God was angry and needed to smite some folks that day – God carrying out his
own little purge. But Jesus answered in
the same way – those who were killed in the collapse of the tower were no worse
than anyone else. But again, those
chilling words from Jesus: unless you
repent, you’ll all die as they did.
And then Jesus told an odd parable – a man planted a fig
tree in the vineyard where he was raising grapes. Grape growers would tell us that this would
be an odd choice – the fig tree would use up groundwater that the grape vines
need, for one thing – but this is Jesus’ parable, so he gets to plant the trees
where he wants. In any case, fig trees
would take three years to grow to maturity and produce figs – but we’re told
that this tree, despite having been there three years, was unproductive,
producing no figs. The man’s gardener
spoke up in defense of the tree, asking for one more year to give the tree some
extra TLC – tender loving care, in the form of turning the soil and adding some
organic fertilizer. Give the tree one
more year, the gardener pleads, and if the tree still doesn’t produce anything,
you can cut it down.
Where is Jesus going with all this? Again, the prevailing theology of the day
said that good things happened to good people, and bad things happened to bad
people. Jesus pushed back against both
parts of this theology. On one hand, he
said that those killed by Pilate or the collapse of the tower weren’t being
singled out for punishment. On the other
hand, he’s also saying that those who live comfortably aren’t necessarily being
blessed for their faithfulness – indeed, God may just be giving them a chance
to repent and change their ways, and if that doesn’t happen, God may let the ax
fall for them as well.
It’s an unsettling message.
I think we’ve largely gotten past the idea that bad things happen to us
as punishment for past sins, which is a good thing, a healthy thing. We don’t want to kick people when they’re
down. We know a lot more about what
causes disease than folks did in Jesus’ day – for example, we know that people who overeat – like me –
are at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and a host of other health problems…my
blood glucose numbers are creeping up, as it happens - and that some occupations
carry higher risks for specific illnesses than others – for example, coal
miners get black lung. We can see cause
and effect, but we don’t attach any moral stigma to it one way or the other,
and that’s good and rational. The
“misfortune as God’s punishment” theology does flare up periodically, though,
when we don’t understand the cause and effect, as it did during the early years
of the AIDS crisis in the 1980’s and 1990’s, when people who were already
suffering horribly from AIDS were told by many in the church that their illness
was God’s punishment. The theology that says “bad things happen to
bad people” is just bad theology, and we can be grateful that Jesus spoke
against it.
The flip side, though, is just as dangerous. If we’re living comfortably, we may think
it’s because we’ve merited God’s blessing.
Or at least, if we’ve lived comfortably to this point, we may think that
no harm will come to us. Most of us
don’t have a sense of how precarious our comfort is, don’t realize how much of our
comfort may rest on the discomfort of others, and how quickly that rug of
relative comfort can be pulled from under us.
We may not have a sense of how reliant we are on God’s grace, and how
much we are in need of repentance.
I say all this in the context of the mass shooting in Las
Vegas, in which, at a country music show, nearly 60 people were killed and ten
times that number injured. It goes
without saying – though I’ll say it anyway – that those who were at the concert
did not deserve what happened to them.
The deaths and injuries were not God’s punishment on those at the
concert. This should be straightforward
– though it’s notable that at the Pulse nightclub shootings roughly a year
earlier, a number of sick religious leaders slithered out from under their respective
rocks, hissing that the folks at the Pulse nightclub deserved to die, because Pulse
was a gay nightclub. Somehow at that
shooting, it was a more complicated question, which said more about the poison
in the hearts of some religious leaders and their followers than about the
folks at the nightclub.
Proposals for change are made, of course. Gun control legislation is proposed – and
immediately shot down because of the influence of the NRA and the congressmen
and women they own. Gun ownership in
America is off the charts, as are deaths and injury from gunfire – it’s a
negative example of American exceptionalism. When it comes to guns, we’re in a
class of our own, with more than one gun in America for every man, woman and
child. But those guns aren’t distributed
evenly – many, perhaps most, Americans don’t own a gun, while a small number of
Americans own many guns – Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, owned at
least a couple dozen, one of which was equipped with a bump stock to make it
fully automatic. Guns are a part of American
culture – where I grew up, out in Berks County, kids routinely took off school
for the first day of hunting season.
There are legitimate uses for some types of guns, particularly in rural
areas. A rifle to hunt game – fine! An
AK-47 to hunt people – maybe not so fine! And the 2nd amendment protects the right to
bear arms – though if we want to be 2nd amendment absolutists, why
stop at guns? If I have the money and
believe in the 2nd amendment right to bear arms with no limitations,
why can’t I buy a grenade, or lots of grenades? Why not a rocket launcher? How about a small nuclear weapon, just a little bitty one? Of course,
you probably think that letting me have grenades or rocket launchers or nuclear
weapons is a really bad idea, and so do I.
And if you don’t think I should own nukes or rocket launchers or even
one itsy bitsy tiny little grenade, then you’re admitting that the right to
bear arms is not absolute, and if that’s true, then perhaps there should be
limits to the number and kinds of guns I can own as well. Somewhere between nobody having anything more
lethal than a water pistol and everybody having their own private artillery, we
need to balance the right of Stephen Paddock to own dozens of guns against the
right of country music fans not to get their heads blown off. More than that, while we in America are
obsessed with gun rights, we need to talk about gun responsibilities. Because mature adults learn that with rights
come responsibilities. And the general
rule of thumb is as follows – my rights end where your nose begins. That is to
say, my rights come into question when they infringe on the rights of others. Gun rights are no exception.
We need to look at gun rights and responsibilities. We also need to look at our country’s
policies of care for the mentally ill. Decades
ago, we shut down most of the large mental institutions – many of which were
snake pits, with residents living in abusive conditions – but we didn’t replace
them with anything. I remember when I
lived in Spring City back in the late 1980’s and Pennhurst closed down, some former
residents were left wandering the streets.
Those with sufficient resources can pay to be pampered by the best our
healthcare system offers. For those with more limited funds or on public
assistance, underfunded clinics may offer pills and some limited counseling by
harried, overworked counselors. For
many, prisons, homeless shelters, and the streets are the settings of mental
health care, or lack thereof. It has to
be said, the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of mentally ill people are
nonviolent. But when guns are easier to
get than medication and counseling, we shouldn’t be surprised when a small
number of mentally ill persons try to end the pain within them by ending lives
around them. Would better access to
mental health care reduce the number of mass shootings?
These are the usual proposals that are made. But I think we need to go deeper, beyond
technical fixes. Mass shootings, while
horrific in themselves, are symptoms of a greater disease within our society,
and while we need to treat the symptoms, we also need to get at the disease –
and the disease is our society’s love of violence. Our country is addicted to violence. We’re drunk on it. We glorify violence in our entertainment,
promoting it as a way to end conflict, whether it be in an old black-and-white
John Wayne western or in the video games our children play. As a country we’ve
bought into a lie that guns will keep us safe, which is part of a bigger lie
that we can inflict violence on others without it coming back at us. The
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, speaking during the Vietnam era, called America
“the world’s greatest purveyor of violence,” and it’s still true. King also said humanity was faced in the long
run not with a choice between violence and nonviolence, but with a choice
between nonviolence and nonexistence. Violence of action is fed in our polarized
society by violence of thought and speech, in which we are taught by talk
radio, TV commentators, and extremist websites to see those who disagree with
us not only as different or misguided, but as evil. There’s a reason Jesus told his followers it
wasn’t enough not to kill people, but that they also had to be on guard against
anger and name-calling before they escalate to murder.[1]
And so it is in this sense that Jesus
would say, with reference to the mass shootings in Las Vegas and elsewhere, the
violence we spread around the world, the violence of speech and action we inflict
on our neighbors, “Unless we repent, we will all die as they did.”
In
effect, while we may think the premise of movie The Purge – an official 12-hour
period of legalized murder each year - is far-fetched, we’re living some
version of it today, not as official policy, but as unofficial reality. We’ve had large mass shootings year after
year, and smaller mass murders – according to the FBI definition, shootings
with four or more victims[2] –
nearly every day, though not publicized nationally. And in our minds, we’ve normalized it….we’ve
come to the conclusion that this is just how life is. We say we can’t change it – though other
developed countries have nothing like our rate of gun violence – again, this is
American exceptionalism. It’s more
accurate, I think, though impolite, to say that we as a country have decided
that a large mass shooting every year and smaller mass murders nearly every day
are an acceptable price to pay for maintaining the status quo – for not having
to change. Can it be acceptable to
people who call ourselves followers in the way of Jesus? We pray to God and ask, “Why don’t you do
something to stop this?” Might God be asking us the same question.
I’ll
close with this promise of God, from 2 Chronicles 7:14: “If my people, who are called by my name,
will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked
ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal
their land.” May it be so. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment