I had a long, substantial discourse about this whole "Happy Holidays" vs. "Merry Christmas" thing. Basically, it boiled down to two points:
1. This isn't a Christian country anymore, get over it, and
2. Christians have better things to worry about.
The second point seems rather pertinent this morning, in the wake of the New Life shootings. The church is across the street from my place of business, and for the second time in 13 months there's a swarm of news vans gathered outside of it.
I can't help but feel angry at this. I don't even really know why though. Most of the time when I hear of a mass shooting incident, I start to think of what could have been so wrong in the shooter's life that made them snap. I think we often lose focus on the fact that the shooter's life is thrown away too, as if their humanity was revoked the minute they picked up a gun. But this morning I'm not at all thinking sympathetically about the killer. It's hit a little closer to home and I'm finding it much more difficult to stick to my principles about the value of all human life.
And I hate to be glib about this, but this incident adds to the already large case for attending a smaller church.
1 comment:
I'm having my own thoughts about the value of all human life. I don't think the shooter's right to live was revoked the moment he stormed in and started shooting. The struggle for me is trying to figure out Jesus's crack-headed gospel that says our right to control, safety and security is revoked the moment we commit to following him. I'm only freshly processing this myself, but I think this is part of our faith in God and our looking forward to the restoration of all things in the age to come. Somehow we as Christians have to submit to creation's biggest enemy, death, to rob it of its power, as Jesus did (and Paul calls us to imitate in Philippians 2). Not in a masochistic way, but as the broken creation demands it. I think that's when the kingdom comes and God's rule over creation is demonstrated most fully. At the resurrection, we get our life back!
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