Speaking to the unspeakable

Zephaniah 3:14-20
Canticle 9
Philippians 4:4-7
Luke 3:7-18

“Senseless.”  

“Incomprehensible.”  

“Unspeakable.”   

These are the words that people have been using to talk about the mass shooting on Friday at an elementary school in Connecticut.  And as I worked on this sermon yesterday in our kitchen while my third-grader painted with watercolors and sang Christmas songs next to me at the table, I knew what they mean.  I think we all do.  But we human beings are meaning-makers, and so it is only natural that we would immediately start trying to make sense of the senseless.     We start making psychological profiles and sociological analyses and calls to political action.  We observe moments of silence at sporting events.   We give sermons like this one.  We cannot hear about something like this and just go on with our lives as if nothing happened. 

And because we are in church we have to ask what, in particular, we should do?  Is there some way of speaking to the unspeakable that we, as a community of faith, are especially called to?  Well, certainly we can pray.  We can pray for the victims of this violence, and for their families.  We can pray for those affected by similar incidents in the past, whose memories of horror and grief have been reawakened.  As Christians we are commanded to remember that the perpetrator of this crime is also a victim of his actions, and to pray that it is not too late for him to be released from his torment. 

 

Yesterday morning I spoke with a young woman named Sally who recently moved to the Bay Area and who called our church because she is from Newtown, Connecticut and attended the Sandy Hook Elementary School.  She spoke of her home town the way I have sometimes heard Petalumans talk about the abduction and murder of Polly Klaas, of the pain of knowing that from now on it will be the place where that school shooting happened.  So we can pray for that whole community, and Sally asked in particular that we pray for Kathie Adams-Shepherd, the Rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, and all the religious and political leaders in Newtown who now must bear their people’s anger and horror and grief, and stand for God’s healing and hope.

But there is another thing that Christians are supposed to do in times like this.  It is work that the gospel calls us to in no uncertain terms.  When we are faced with evil, with the meaningless and incomprehensible, it is our responsibility to repent.  This is an assignment that comes down to us from the Hebrew prophets, who saw the corruption of Israel’s rulers, and the barbarity of her enemies, who saw cities fall and the bodies of children lying in the streets, who saw the land laid waste by locusts and by invading armies, and who said that these are not random, meaningless, disconnected events. 

 

There is a whole pattern here, say the prophets.  There is a judgment to be made about all of this.  We have a choice to make.  We could just give thanks that these calamities have not fallen upon us personally, and say a few sympathetic prayers and then keep going on the way we have been.  Or we can wake up and see that unless we do something collectively to turn our way of life around and bring it back into harmony with God, this kind of thing, and worse, is going to keep happening and we will end up destroying everything.

If we take the prophets seriously we have to consider the possibility that we really are all connected, and so we are all responsible.  The violence that erupts now and then, here and there in America, at places like Newtown, and Aurora, and Virgina Tech, and Columbine, is only meaningless if we believe that the young men who carry it out have nothing to do with us.  But if we see them as a prophet would, we know they are symptoms of a disease that afflicts us all.  They are the eruption on the surface of the virus of violence that is so embedded in the everyday operation of the world in which we live that we don’t see it anymore.    When we have the courage and the honesty to look at it that way, to say that we are implicated, we call that repentance.  Which is another way of saying that is that we keep alive the hope of transformation.

Repentance, as the prophets talk about it, is a positive act.  It affirms the existence of God, and God’s covenant with us.  It is a way of looking at the crimes and catastrophes of history and insisting that they do have meaning.  For if we acknowledge that we all bear at least some responsibility for the way things have gone wrong, then we can never completely cast aside the hope that God is just.  We can’t merely say to everything bad that happens that it’s somebody else’s fault.  We affirm that things don’t just happen the way they do without any cause, but that there are lessons for us to learn even from the unspeakable. 

And there’s hope in that.  There is the promise that if we really open our hearts to see others’ suffering as our own suffering, and if we can open them even more, and see other’s evil as our own evil, we will understand something of the true goodness, and mercy, and faithfulness of God.  We will no longer be simply victims of bad people, or helpless pawns of cruel fate.  We will be responsible, and if we are responsible we are also free.  We are free to choose a different kind of future.

This season of Advent is about hoping that God will come and open the eyes of our compassion.  It is about longing for God to come and teach us that we are free.  It is about waiting for God to come and help us choose a different kind of future, one where school shootings don’t happen anymore.  John the Baptist shows up in the Gospel readings every year at this time to wake us up, to get us ready for God to come to us in just this way.  And the first thing he tells us we have to do to get ready is to repent.  John says that the one who is coming after him is only interested in one thing—that our lives bear fruit, the fruit of repentance.

The one who is coming is less like a king, says John, or a warrior, than he is like a farmer.  He doesn’t wear boots, he wears sandals.  He’s coming to work, and his work is us.  There are trees in us that don’t bear—and he’ll clear them out, letting in air and light.  He’ll make a big bonfire, and the eggs of the boring beetles and the larvae of the codling moths, and the spores of the blight and the rust will be destroyed, and the ashes will fertilize a bumper crop of sweet and healthy fruit.  Or you could say that there is wheat in us, according to John, but it’s just kind of strewn around on the threshing floor, mixed in with the straw and the husks, and so the one who’s coming has his winnowing fork in his hand and he’ll toss us gently and let us fall, and the wind will blow away the chaff leaving only the grain which he will gather into his storehouse.  And the chaff he will burn in the unquenchable fire of God’s truth and love. 

Every year at this time John the Baptist stands by the banks of the Jordan and asks us what we really want.  Do we really want God’s justice to prevail in the world?  Do we really want to live in peace as brothers and sisters in a single human family?  Do we really want our lives to bear spiritual fruit?  Do we really want to be free?  Have we waited long enough?  Then we have to stop acting like the suffering in the world is somebody else’s problem.  We have to repent.  We have to be ready to be thinned, to be winnowed.  We have to understand that it may sometimes feel like part of us is being taken away and burned. 

But if we do want it, and we are ready, the farmer is on the way.  And we can trust him, because his whole life is repentance.  Because he identifies so completely with the suffering of humanity that he will take personal responsibility for it all.  His whole life will be turned back toward God, as our priest, his whole life a burnt offering of repentance so that we can choose a different kind of future.  So that we can at last be free.