Recovery or Redemption?

Yesterday, if only for a moment, the Dow Jones Index crossed the 12,000 mark for the first time since June of 2008, since immediately prior to the crash which brought us this most recent version of the Great Recession.

My IRA is not unhappy, which is nice for me. Nor, should I imagine, are any number of stock brokers and commodity traders, who are surely enjoying a seeming return to the profitable days of yore.

Of course, this does not say much for the more than 9 percent of us who are still looking for jobs.

Corporate profits, I read, are good this year, maybe great, large and getting larger. Whether that is being fed by the markets or vice versa, I do not know. Nor, on an even more significant level, do I understand where all those profits are going. I guessing not so much for hiring or wage increases. Not into the hands of the people who need them so that they can put bread on their table or roofs over their children’s heads.

No, what seems to be recovering is the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor in our society.

I am not an economist. I hear politicians arguing about what is best to fix the economy, but I hear few arguing about what is right to do to fix the real problem in the world. For I am quite sure that the real problem in the world today is not so much our fiscal deficits as it is our moral bankruptcy. The problem is not how we are managing our wealth but, as our Lord would surely remind us, how much we love it.

We have created a world engineered for the high purpose of accumulating wealth, holding wealth, worshipping wealth. We cannot afford to provide needed health care for everyone, but we are un-American if we dare to burden the passing of moneyed estates to moneyed children. We thrill at the sight of enormous mansions but look the other way when we see the homeless. We have completely lost track of what really matters. In a world where bankers and commodity brokers are the highest paid among us and the teachers of our children are the least, it should be obvious that our sense of what is actually valuable is far and long gone.

And we should know better.

The Lord enters into judgment with the elders and princes of his people: It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor? says the Lord God of hosts. Isaiah 3:14-15

The price of our guilt stands ever before us, the wage of our accumulated wealth is the slow death of our soul, our life, our hope. We have convinced ourselves and each other that it is our inherent right to have and hold as much as we dare – we have ignored the truth that such pursuit is, in fact, the judgment against us. Our unwillingness to confront our own greed and selfishness has become the prison that will ever confine us to this continual destruction.

But there is a path.

It leads away from the name-calling and false security and self-serving politics of wealth. It leads us away from our love of financial institutions and our faith in market performances to the love of our neighbor and our faith in the greater good for all. It changes our perspective from winner-take-all to I-am-my–brother’s-keeper. It measures us by radically different means.

It is not going to be a hard path to find. It will be an ever harder path to keep. But we are called by our Lord and Savior to this path because it is the only way to peace and true joy. It is our only recovery. It is our only salvation.

Justice, it turns out, is even better than good economic news.

It’s a small (handgun) world …

This is the week of the 9mm Glock, evidently the handgun of choice for shooting members of Congress and Vice-Principals. Thank goodness for our second amendment rights and those who fight so diligently to protect them.

That small detail is, of course, the least (though not unimportant) connection between these two headline tragedies in my world. The more significant and valuable one is our national addiction to anger. That it is a more subtle and complex relationship makes it all the more deniable, of course.

But no less real.

Is it a failure of memory, or was there once a time when anger was a bad thing? I seem to recall a day when decorum and protocol required good and gentle manners, when polite behavior was taught in schools, when bullies were avoided and not given their own talk shows on television. When did we stop teaching our children to mind their behavior and their temper? When did we stop lifting up examples of adults with impeccable conduct, gentle rhetoric and visible dignity?

I suppose you’re going to blame that on the 60’s too.

Well, are we witnessing now the far-right in its own state of acid-like hysteria?

Now the works of the flesh are obvious… enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions … and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. Galatians 5:19-21

Our national love of edgy commentary and impassioned demonstration at the expense of civil conduct has loosened the lid on Pandora’s box, and it’s time we quit closing our eyes to what we’re letting out. If our national political, social and religious language is not the hand holding the gun, then it is the devil’s whisper in the ear of the shooter, the flow of adrenaline in the veins, the ringing in the ears. It is the silence-gives-consent permission for the otherwise unspeakable act.

Maybe it’s time to stop before we speak any more.

For this is undeniable true - we cannot speak violence without expecting to beget violence. We cannot use violent imagery in our discourse without taking responsibility for violent acts. Angry words birth more anger. And in the end, that anger can only go to one place.

But even on this dark day I have hope, for the better way is immediately available to us. We belong to a Savior who did not respond in anger but turned another cheek, who did not raise his voice but rather stretched out his hands on a cross, who did not grasp at power but willingly acceded to the greater and better power from above. We have seen his example, we have his words, we need only bring them into our hearts and heed them.

Before it’s too late.

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Galatians 5:22-25

And then it happens to you ...

Is this not what happens when we don’t take sin seriously?

I did learn this at the seminary. The importance of taking sin seriously. I do remember the words from my childhood liturgy. We are BY NATURE sinful and unclean. We are IN BONDAGE to sin and cannot free ourselves. I know that human brokenness is real and tragedy is its consequence.

Taking sin seriously is the true work of faith.

Yesterday in our community we saw what can happen when we do. And when we do not.

There is a particularly gut wrenching kind of fright that comes to a parent when you hear that first report of a crisis at your child’s school, an experience that cannot be fully imagined until it happens to you. It is your primary vocation, after all, to keep them safe, a Godly charge to protect them and help them, and it hurts to find out that you cannot. The only, really only, help is to know that there are other responsible, professional, well-prepared people who willingly and competently share that charge and do their jobs well. Somewhere along the way, a group of teachers and administrators at our school overcame the “it would never happen here” mentality (the first symptom of sin denial) and planned and practiced and prepared for something horrible to happen.

Because they took sin seriously, they kept my children safe. Today I am thankful to God for them and their faithful work.

Sadly, though, we did not take sin seriously enough to stop this before it happened.

We will tell ourselves, of course, that we could not have known, that we could not have foreseen, that it is the nature of tragedy to be inexplicable and inexorable.

But that’s just an excuse.

I think it’s time to admit that we can do better. It’s time to admit that we have the tools and the ability and the wherewithal to identify our neighbors and children who are particularly in danger and at risk, who have become disconnected in whatever fashion from community and reality and hope and are just waiting to be picked off by the devil and used against us. It’s time for us to admit that we do know what’s wrong with our world and do something about it.

It’s time for us to admit that we are slaves to sin and be responsible in whatever way we can. To have the will to admit that we are in trouble and that we need to do something about it.

Can we now begin to own what we are doing to our children and to each other and to ourselves, how we are neglecting and abusing one another, how we have disowned and discarded too many of God’s children, how we have become miserly in love and kindness and gentleness and patience where we need it the most? Can we now own the profligacy of our anger and our addiction to violence and our worship of guns?

Can we finally take seriously the brokenness of our own creation, that our sin is killing us and can we try to do something about it?

Can we grieve?

For that is, I think, the bottom line, that we merely pass through these events now and do not grieve them. Rather than face down our denial we have become inured to our pain. This is, after all, just another school shooting. It’s news for today, until the next. And then it passes.

Except that it’s not. Except that another exceptional person has been lost to us, and the grief is becoming unbearable. Paul says that the wages of sin is death. Are we not dying enough yet?

Let us grieve fully this loss, let us capture its pain and sorrow, that we would fully experience the price of our smallness and our brokenness and our failure. Our sin. That we might change, something, someone, if just some little bit.

If not for what has been, then for what will be, let us take this moment this sin, seriously. And let it be enough.