Month: May 2022

Responsibility, Freedom and Uvalde

It’s incomprehensible that 325 million people can’t figure out how to keep their 18-year-old males from killing us and our children and grandchildren. We will hear a barrage of excuses, arguments, high-minded rationalizations and fatuous fears in the days ahead. I am feeling the despair I had after the massacre of babies that happened at Sandy Hook. We will pit gun rights versus safety for children, argue about paranoid conspiracy theories and generally avoid doing anything. Because that’s how we’ve turned away from the crisis.

Here’s the deal for me. You let an 18-year-old stroll in and buy body armor, unlimited ammunition, and long guns designed to kill masses of people legally. Now, would not let a five-year-old do the same. Guns are already regulated. We just debate how. You can’t buy nuclear bombs legally or bazookas or hellfire drones, so we’re simply dithering about the line.

To me, regulation and freedom cannot be separated because it is really about responsibility and freedom. Freedom can only be entrusted to people responsible enough to have it. You have to prove you’re responsible enough to borrow money to buy a house, drive a car and fly a plane. Politically we simply decide how hard or easy that is.

Cars don’t kill people, people in cars do. But we still require that you take Driver’s Ed to know what your’re doing, understand the laws, demonstrate ability to handle it and have insurance to cover liability for it. You can’t drive drunk or you will go to jail. Yes, people can ignore the law, but at least the police have the teeth to get you off the road.

When any 18-year-old male (I haven’t noticed masses of 18-year-old women doing many of these killings) strolls into a gun store and buys these weapons, I’d say red flags should go up. What to do? Ban or limit the purchases of mass-killing weapons? Limit ammo? Strengthen enforcement? Universal registration? Raise the age of ownership or put limits on it? There are hundreds of ideas out there. What isn’t out there is real leadership that refuses to do nothing yet again.

This isn’t insanity. It’s cynical and cowardly calculation. The people who can deal with this won’t. And we put up with it. And that’s it in a nutshell.

The funerals in Buffalo aren’t even finished. And now we have to bury teachers and sweet children and grandchildren. The right to life counts, too. I believe in the right to own a weapon. But I also believe in the requirement that you be responsible enough to operate it safely, with training and accountability and liability that goes with it. Until we come to terms with that, we’ll just continue offering lamentations and grief and sit helplessly by in the richest and most powerful nation on earth and wring our hands helplessly and tell our children, “That’s just the way it is.” Otherwise, Senators and Representatives, and governors and mayors and state representatives, do something new. This isn’t working.

Thoughts on Suffering

From a sermon two years ago. This was a post from a listener (and one of my staff) from that day.

I am not fond of theories and theologies that discount the depths of human suffering for some exotic notion of “making us better people.” It can pass over the misery and sorrow too quickly. Better to see it, as perhaps the Ukrainian people are teaching us (as did Jesus), that sometimes suffering is the only alternative to yielding to wickedness and evil.

I prefer Romans 8 which pictures the entirety of God’s good creation yearning for wholeness and completion, even as it battles against all that resists it.

“For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8:20-21). Only by affirming this are we entitled to hope that ” in all things God is working for good.”

This is significant as it describes where God “stands” in relation to us–is the suffering of Christ passivity and yielding to the anger of God against us? Or is it the resistance of God in Christ against the powers of evil that would destroy us all? For us or against us? Is this God’s own internal war with God’s own being and intentions being resolved by self-suffering for those who deserve it instead? Or is it a frontal attack against the very kingdom of violence, coercion and cruelty, unmasking its shame and ultimate impotence to bring about peace and reconciliation? Worth pondering.