“Now Is the Time”
October 8, 2017
Jeremiah 6:13-15
Romans 5:1-5
If it is possible to be both numb and outraged at the same time, that is how I went through this past week.
Waking on Monday to the news of the shooting in Las Vegas that would leave 58 people dead and over 550 injured, I was horrified and saddened. Even now it seems strange to just say those words—“58 people dead and over 550 injured”—and to say them so easily. What is happening that we have to speak like this—that we are able to speak like this and hear such words in the stillness of this sanctuary?
I was horrified and saddened. And yet part of me felt that I just couldn’t go through this again. I wanted to turn off not just the news but my feelings.
Someone told me that they were neither surprised nor shocked by the news, their personal experience echoing what Monica Hess wrote last Monday: “The mass shooting body count is so high now, so breathtakingly high, with exponential increases from Aurora to Newtown to Orlando to Vegas. A dozen, 13, 15 dead barely registers as news now. It’s part of the American experience: We deal with mosquitoes in August, airport delays around Thanksgiving, expensive health care and the potential of being shot, at any time, by a semiautomatic weapon as we try to go about the most boring, precious, asinine aspects of our daily lives.[i]
59 people dead and over 550 injured.
The numbers—58, 550—the numbers mask the lives. Each individual life ended too soon. Each individual life that touched so many other lives and left a gaping hole in all of them. Each individual life wounded and facing the months, the years of rehabilitation that a gunshot wound requires.
On the way over to the church this morning I heard that there have been—what?—four, five mass shootings in our nation since last Monday.
Slowly we become numb.
Slowly our souls are deadened and we settle into hopelessness.
It is as though we were just waiting—just waiting for the next mass shooting, just waiting for the next worst mass shooting. Knowing that it would come but not knowing where or when, we have been psychically bracing ourselves for some time now.
The T. Anne Cleary Walkway a half block from here serves as a reminder that it can happen here, that it has happened here.
Those, like myself, who haven’t lived here all that long, might forget or might not know of the day almost 26 years ago now when gunshots were heard just to the east and west of this building. The Walkway is named for Anne Cleary, the Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs who was killed when a graduate student went on a shooting rampage that left five dead and one critically wounded.
The history of our city and the university unite us with many other places—tying us to incidents of violence that shake not only a local community but the nation. Old memories, old wounds, old fears mingle with the new dread and foreboding of current events.
Iowa City. Newtown. Orlando. Las Vegas.
Slowly we become numb.
Slowly our souls are deadened and we settle into hopelessness.
In this gathering gloom and growing despair, somehow—by the grace of God?—somehow I came across the words of the great 20th Century rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel: “I would say about individuals, an individual dies when he ceases to be surprised. I am surprised every morning that I see the sunshine again. When I see an act of evil, I am not accommodated. I don’t accommodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere; I’m still surprised. That’s why I’m against it, why I can hope against it. We must learn how to be surprised, not to adjust ourselves. I am the most maladjusted person in society.”
Heschel called me back to being surprised. Maybe he just did the same for you.
Heschel called me back to being maladjusted, to not fitting in. Maybe he just did the same for you.
Heschel called me forward into hope. Maybe he just did the same for you.
It is time once more to recover hope in a world that can seem hopeless.
It is time to recover hope in society that can create so much despair.
Hope asks the question: “What kind of future are we building for ourselves?”[ii] In other words, hope is not about positive thinking or wishing hard that something might happen. Hope asks about what we are doing.
So the question comes to each of us as individuals and all of us as a congregation: What kind of future are we building? What action can we take—even today—to bring us closer to our desires? What harvest do we want to gather?
“Hope does not disappoint us,” Paul writes. He doesn’t say: “Our hopes are not disappointed.” He knows, as you know, that our hopes can be and often are disappointed.
When 20 people, mostly children, were killed in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, it seemed as though as a nation we might have had enough of that kind of violence. But as the efforts for stronger background checks for those who would purchase guns grew, our own Senator, Charles Grassley said: “Criminals do not submit to background checks now. They will not submit to expanded background checks.”[iii] And nothing happened.
Hopes are disappointed.
Even if it is crushed, however, genuine hope does not disappoint us because it is grows from the conviction that we are at all times held in the empowering and sustaining love of God.[iv]
We are invited to live in hope—to live with the conviction that even now there is a future to build. “Stand at the crossroads,” God says through the prophet Jeremiah. “Stand at the crossroads and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies, and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.”
Even today we hear of a path that is good. Even now we are invited to walk in way that will provide the rest that our souls need.
It is a way of active hope.
Hope does not disappoint.
We were told once more this past week that “Now is not the time to talk about gun control.”[v]
We can pray, we are told.
We can keep people in our thoughts, we are told.
But now is not the time to talk.
Certainly there is a kind of silence that is appropriate: a silence that respects the horror; a silence that respects one another. In the wake of the shootings in Las Vegas we need each other, not to take away our pain, not to speak, but to simply share the burden of sorrow, of grief, of fear.
We need one another—in silence, in support. We need as well the peaceful presence of God in the midst of the swirling chaos of our lives. We need the healing and the forgiveness of God for our broken lives. We need the comfort of God when life is brutal—as it often is.
And so once more, in our sorrow and our despair and our anger we gather together. Each day we seek to make real in the world the peace, the healing, and the comfort of God. Each day we live out our faith in difficult and challenging situations, coping with daily experience.
Those who say, “Now is not the time,” are like the leaders of old who took the wounds of the people lightly.
Those who say, “Now is not the time,” are like those who cry “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace.
Keep quiet. Do not say that there is a deep, intractable problem in our nation.
Keep quiet. Do not speak out against a gun industry lobby that has convinced us that one absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment is sacrosanct, written in stone for all ages.
Keep quiet.
This is not the time for the silence that stifles the outrage we feel.
This is not the time for the silence that stifles calls for change.
Now is the time for prayer that first of all changes the hearts of those who pray, leading them along the path where the good way lies.
Now is the time to speak.
Now is the time to seek change.
Greg Sargent wrote this past week that mass shootings “are the right occasions for intense arguments over how to prevent them in the future. After all, if we aren’t going to talk about what to do about mass slaughter when it happens, when are we going to talk about it? Treating these massacres as inevitable or beyond the capacity for human problem-solving — something that becomes easier when they recede in the news — isn’t an option.”
Sargent concluded, however, with what he called “a major caveat”—he said “We need to keep focused on the crucial distinction between mass shootings and the broader problem of gun violence.”
I don’t know.
Yes, the issues—and the solutions—are different.
But we need to be talking. And we need to be talking both about preventing mass shootings and about reducing gun violence in general.
And if we don’t know what the solutions are, we can at least call on our leaders to allow a resumption of research into gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control—research that has been banned for the past 20 years.
We find encouragement for this from Caleb Keeter, the guitarist who made it through the shooting unscathed. He wrote early last Monday morning: “Enough is enough…We need gun control RIGHT. NOW.” Adding, “My biggest regret is that I stubbornly didn’t realize it until my brothers on the road and myself were threatened by it.”
We find encouragement for this in our own community as well. The University of Iowa declares that “The use of T. Anne Cleary Walkway as a public forum for speech, assembly, and petition is encouraged by the University.”
Walk a half block from here and find that place where the memory of gun violence calls to each of us and all of us to raise our voices.
The faith we know is not about adapting and adjusting.
The words of Abraham Joshua Heschel that came to me this past week echo the words of his dear friend, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. who said: “I never did intend to adjust to the evils of segregation and discrimination. I never did intend to adjust myself to religious bigotry. I never did intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many and give luxuries to the few. I never did intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence. And I call upon all [people] of goodwill to be maladjusted because it may well be that the salvation of our world lies in the hands of the maladjusted.”
Friends, now is the time.
Live in hope, for hope does not disappoint.
Continue to let yourself be surprised, whether by the sunshine or the violence that you encounter.
Do not accommodate.
Do not adjust.
Do not—as the late Tom Petty implored—do not back down.
The salvation of the world lies in your hands.
[i] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/what-were-really-saying-when-we-say-dont-politicize-tragedy/2017/10/02/33e28fb8-a784-11e7-850e-2bdd1236be5d_story.html?utm_term=.c0f8e3d99650
[ii]
Kennon Callahan, ‘Hope, ” in Twelve Keys for Living
[iii] http://www.npr.org/2013/04/18/177812397/conn-governor-lambastes-senate-after-gun-control-bill-fails
[iv]
Patrick Henry, The Ironic Christian’s Companion
[v] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/10/02/white-house-now-is-not-the-time-to-talk-about-gun-control-but-if-you-look-to-chicago/?utm_term=.d2c36dfca169