Tragedy in Newton

Long before the horrific tragedy of Newton, CT assaulted our consciences, there was another tragic massacre of children half way around the world. The same epic display of grief, horror, and loss was recorded as an entire town’s population of boys was wiped out in one moment, carried out by an insecure tyrant afraid to lose his power and wanting to make a statement about himself.

This time, the scene was Bethlehem. About two years after Jesus was born, Herod the Great received news via the wise men that a king was born who would rule the Jews. Well that won’t do, he thought. So he ordered the execution of every male child two years and younger, just to keep it that way. It was an act of brutality simply because he perceived a potential future challenger. A senseless crime if there ever was one.

The prophet Jeremiah touches on the intense ache and pain of this kind of loss:

"A cry of anguish is heard in Ramah -- mourning and weeping unrestrained.

Rachel weeps for her children, refusing to be comforted -- for her children are dead." (31:15)

How heart breaking this tragedy was. No parent should ever have to bury their child. Estimates are that in Bethlehem there were around a dozen boys murdered in this sleepy remote town due to the incredibly evil intent in a person’s heart. No evidence exists, but one has to wonder whether or not some families might have been related to Mary and Joseph, or each other. It was a tragic, horrific event that served no purpose other than to feed a madman’s spite.

It brings me to today, with the scope of the Newton massacre still fresh in our minds. Here are a few thoughts swirling around in my heart and mind as I process this awful catastrophe, ranging from evil to mental illness to Christmas.

The evil that has overrun the world is even greater and more pervasive than most of us give credit.
Like a dark stain we try to scrub and bleach out, or a germ we attempt to wipe out with massive loads of disinfectant, we’ve tried to erase the presence of evil and injustice in our society. And we’ve done a fairly good job at certain levels in our culture of eradicating some of the more obvious issues. But I think our very success has lulled us into a false sense of complacency. The truth is that evil will never be wiped out this side of death. We must always be vigilant. We can never declare “mission accomplished”—at least not till Jesus returns and ushers in a new existence. That can be a challenging and demoralizing truth, but it is the reality we face.

We also don’t just face the issue out there; we also wrestle in here. The inconsistencies of our own hearts, the selfishness we too quickly activate, the messes we make and must own up to are all evidences that we, too, are not a finished product. I like to say that we are works of art…in progress. Both realities are present: the beauty of our design, mixed with the mistakes and flaws that try to drag us down. Sometimes, these mistakes are pain-free. Other times, they hurt the very ones we love tremendously. I found myself thinking more than once this weekend “there but the grace of God go I” – whether as a grieving parent who lost a child, or as a lamenting parent of a child who is mentally ill and full of rage.

We can also detect a sense of irrationality as we try to analyze evil and sin. It makes no sense. Why does someone return acts of love and care with rejection, hatred, or harm? Why would they choose to walk away from a healthy loving relationship for the inferior alternatives? I actually have in mind Adam & Eve, the ones who started this disastrous merry go-round of futility. But it could sound like almost anyone, because we’re all like them. Possessing the seed of Adam means we all contain the same elementary impulse to do something that is just odd or bizarre with respect to loving relationships.  Sin makes no sense, but we all do it. Evil is the most ridiculous conclusion one could arrive at, but yet we can be blinded and bamboozled into thinking “maybe it’s not so bad”. Oh, it may be obvious when the contrast is stark and severe – but what about the subtle choices, the ones that don’t seem so blatantly depraved?

Even mental illness is a reflection of the brokenness of this earth caused by evil.
Please hear me - mental illness is not a sin at all; but it is a reflection of a severely and deeply broken world. No healthy human mind would arrive at the conclusions that young man did. A healthy heart does not attack children. A healthy soul does not conclude that killing little ones for no sound reason is a good decision. Adam Lanza sure sounded mentally ill. His mind was defective by his illness. It's part and parcel of a broken world that some children will carry defects throughout their lives - some physical, others mental.

My bet is that we all know families who have a member that might remind us of an Adam. We see the odd eccentricities, the loner or anti-social behavior. Our natural instinct is to recoil and avoid someone like that, but this begs the question – is that what might have precipitated his murderous rage, or fed his sense of resentment and antipathy for people?

Mental illness is not easy, fun, clean, or quick. I’d argue it’s one of the most challenging aspects we face while living in community. I know from some personal experience. Dealing with someone with mental issues is a long-term, draining existence, especially if they’re a loved one or relative. Would it have helped Adam’s mom to have a network of loving support around her as she wrestled through the daily rhythms and rages that awaited her? I don’t know, but it’s worth asking every person who has a situation like this one.

We have to figure out how freedom and responsibility are going to exist side by side.
Because the reality is that you cannot have one without the other.  Whether you favor gun-possession or elimination, the truth is that there needs to be a better way to prevent mentally ill people from obtaining access to firearms. I don’t have an answer, and I strongly doubt whether the simplest answers are the best ones.

But if we are to be a free society, that means we need to develop responsibilities that match the freedoms. Wild-west anarchy and totalitarian shut downs are two extremes being tossed around the internet, and it’s a shame – because we should be better and smarter than that. Or maybe we are not a culture that is as far removed from the days of brute survival as we initially thought.

We discover that most things in life are secondary to being alive.
Nothing beats life. We grab and hug our kids more. We watch them with a more alert eye. We take their immature moments and tantrums with a little more salt because in the final analysis, they are alive. And we want to keep it that way. Living in an affluent society like we do can sometimes mask the truth that for all of our advances, we are just one incident shy of injury or even death. None of those things can insulate us from the frailty of our existence. Having lots of belongings may deceive us in thinking we’re shielded from the hard ravages of a broken world full of evil, but it doesn’t. At any moment, on any given day, we can meet the moment that will be our last on earth. And no amount of control on our or anyone else’s part is going to alter that.

Maybe this Christmas should be a simpler, humbler expression of love for Jesus and each other.

Jesus himself said that a life does not consist in the abundance of possessions. I say this because Christmas has been so commercialized over the years, that I think we’ve become numb to the idea of celebrating the Savior’s entrance into our world with simple acts of affection, worship, or love to others—and nothing more. Maybe this year could be a year we practice a simple and plain Advent.

 

Truth is, we desperately need a savior. We've needed one for a long, long time. The joy of Christmas is that God has answered our cries with a definitive "yes". We celebrate the baby Jesus this month, but it was the adult Jesus that took the weight of all our combined sinfulness on his own and paid the price to enable us to experience true freedom. That hope, that these burdens and demands of life we flail over will not be the final chapter or the end of us, is stil real and alive today as it was almost two thousand years ago.

 

Perhaps this year could be a year where we celebrate the true meaning of Christmas with more meager and simple expressions of love, joy, and appreciation, and leave the volumes of gifts and goodies in the garage (or at the store) for another day.

In the company of good friends...or familiar strangers?

Which is your experience of the Christian life– being on a journey with good friends, who know you and most of your quirks; or with transitional groups of strangers, who barely know you enough to ask more than ‘how was your week’?

Increasingly, in churches, it is becoming more of the latter.

Chris Gambill, of the Center for Congregational Health, says that “Increasingly in congregational life we have a growing deficit of what might be called ‘social capital’. In many contexts — not by intentionality, but by accident — churches are a company of familiar strangers.”

Social capital is the relational connective tissue for the soul. God designed us to be in significant relationships with others through whom we can grow and develop into mature social beings that live in harmony in community.

But because of the mobility of our culture, the transient nature of fast change today, the massive amount of everyday choices set before us, and the advent of invasive technology, we are distracted and obstructed from having those relationships around us become such a force for good relational development.

Instead, we are delayed or even stunted in our relational capability. This has a profound effect on how we manage life with others, especially the more challenging and difficult moments. This is particularly so when it comes to having difficult conversations with people.

Gambill: “It’s difficult to have a significant conversation with someone you don’t know well. For one thing, you don’t trust them, and you don’t know how much you can say. So when we have a difficult conversation at church, we don’t have a group of people who have a deep relationship they can build off of — we have a group of strangers.”

Think about it – how intimate will we truly become if all we ever discuss and share are surface facts and opinions? The road to closer relationships has to run, at some point, through the land of difficulty and conflict. If we never head that way, how can we be a people who know each other well enough to speak truth lovingly to each other?

It wasn’t always this way. In the past, church members’ daily activities kept them in close contact with one another throughout the week and outside the church.

But those days of repetitive connections with the same people over the span of days and weeks are gone. Now, it is possible to not see the same people for more than once a month, or even longer. This either hinders the development of social capital or delays it significantly from growing .

If there ever was a screaming, crying need for the role of small groups in the life of the church as a central means to help people get relationally connected [even before beginning the growth process!], this should help spell it out clearly.

We need to be in relationship. And if our culture is going to delay, distract, or even obstruct that from happening, then we need to be intentional and prioritize our time and space to help create it.

A healthy small group is what every individual serious about becoming mature in Christ, relationally speaking, must be involved in.

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