A good friend and retired U.S. Air Force chaplain sent me the link to a sermon given at First Baptist Church in Austin the Sunday after the Newtown shootings. I listened and was gripped with almost as much grief as when that unspeakable tragedy occurred. My chaplain friend has now sent a transcript of that sermon. You can still listen to this profoundly moving sermon by going to this link:
When you get on the web site the current sermon will begin to play. You must click on the button for "12-12-16" to hear this sermon.
It will begin with scripture readings. Here is the transcript:
An Advent Word for Newtown
Sermon by Rev. Dr. Roger Paynter
Senior Pastor
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Jeremiah 31:15
Luke 3:8020
It happened in a place called Newtown. Yet, what occurred on Friday of this week was the oldest story known to humanity; Cain killed Abel. Only this time, for reasons unknown to us, and unlike Cain and Abel, no one stood a chance.
According to the play 6 Degrees of Separation everyone is approximately 6 or few steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world. The “friend of a friend of a friend” can connect any two people in 6 steps or less. If there is any truth to that, then the shooter, who grew up in the same small, idyllic Connecticut town with these children, was, in essence, killing his own brothers and sisters.
Even more, in the days and weeks and months ahead, we will relive this tragedy in so many random conversations and occasions that we may well discover our own connection to people whose lives have been directly affected. But all of that matters little because the truth is: these babies…these “innocents” belong to all of us. Just as we say when we dedicate a newborn infant into our congregation, “they belong to all of us.” And so, this morning we gather in heartbreaking grief because these are our babies.
The idea of these being our children is addressed so beautifully by our own Linda Miller Raff in a poem she wrote last Friday:
They will walk now with their bodies forever leaning-
their balance
gone-
their imagined worlds tilted and spun
to a lunatic axis.
They will wake every agonized morning to an unanswerable
why shattering their lives over and over.
They will clutch to their breasts
every scrap of left-behind life
and sob and curse and wail and pray for this please oh please not to have happened,
for one more chance
for what might have been.
They will
never
ever
be the same.
Yet in their brokenness today and in the worse days yet to come they will be held together by love more fierce than any violence,
by grace more deep than any wound.
They will not recognize it,
or maybe even want it,
this love and grace,
in their tilted and shattered world,
but it will be there
standing in strong and holy vigil with them.
As will we.
God, my God, bless these your children.
Amen.
There are days when sermons flow. And there are days when one stares at a blank screen forever. But there are some days, some moments, when you simply want to runaway as fast as you can from the task at hand.
Reading Linda’s poem made me want to say, “Maybe today we’ll just read poetry and grieve.” I wrote another sermon for Advent Conspiracy. I was actually finished ahead of time!
But I threw it away and started over. I tried Friday evening to write, but it took me until yesterday afternoon to find it within myself to stay in my seat and write. I needed to be
quiet, to listen, to listen to my own immense sadness AND my outrage. I needed to listen to Scripture and its profound words, to listen to what others in our nation were saying, some helpful, some purely evil. But most of all, I need to listen quietly for and to the Spirit of the Living God.
Where was God in all of this? Well, Mike Huckabee, whom I knew in a former life and whom I once admired even if we differed on some fine points, Mike Huckabee, attempting to answer that question, sought to answer as a conservative politician and not as the pastor he once was. But he gave a theological answer with a political twist. “God was not in that school because we no longer allow prayer in public schools.”
What an idiotic answer to give, especially for a Baptist.
Baptists NEVER supported prayer in public school because it is always COERCED prayer. Which prayers would have been prayed over the intercom at Newtown? Catholic prayers? Buddhist prayers? Hindu prayers? Islamic prayers? You think in a town that is essentially a short train ride from New York City that ALL of these faith traditions are not represented in that school? Of course they are! But Huckabee wasn’t just showing his ignorance as a Baptist; he was making political hay over this.
So let me ask you…that extraordinary woman who was the principal at that school lunged forward to stop this insane killer and sacrificed her life on behalf of these precious children, and you DARE say God wasn’t in that school?
Teachers throughout the school hid the children, held the children, some of them staying with the children as they themselves were being killed. They gave their LIVES for these children. Is there anything MORE CHRISTLIKE than that? And you say God wasn’t in that school?
And Brian Fisher, a right wing nut job from the American Family Association (the most poorly named political organization in America) said that because there was no “prayer” over the intercom that Satan was there and God was not? I do not doubt that Satan or Evil was deeply present in this. But where Evil is present, God is there, even more strongly,
suffering with us all the more strongly.
Pat Anderson is the Executive Director of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and he writes:
For many who will go to church today, the words they hear will be about the fault of taking God out of the public square, as though this is a THING one can move about at will. REALLY? God can be PUT somewhere? Or REMOVED from somewhere? Who do you think you are, that you have the power to determine the Presence or the Absence of Almighty God?
I do not want or need to hear from religious blowhards who find in every tragedy, evidence of God’s absence and our sin of “putting” God somewhere. We need to grieve. Our sins and the role they play in the evil that surrounds us will be evident enough later.
I agree so strongly with Pat. First, we need to grieve. We NEED to grieve. And grief includes shock and anger and paralyzing sadness and fear and disorientation and leaning on each other and looking to God for strength and looking to God for answers, for a way to be in the world.
Those children who survived this event have had their innocence ripped from them. They will need our prayers and the care of their parents, their faith leaders, trained counselors, their teachers…and the healing Spirit of God, as will all those teachers and administrators who were in the midst of the nightmare.
And the parents, what will they need? They will need endless love and caring and they will need permission to be outraged and devastated and permission to express it all. They will need long-term care, which mostly comes from long-term friends and family and communities in which they participate.
Some of those communities, maybe most, will be faith communities. They will not need to be told that “God needed another angel” or “they are now twinkling stars in the heavens” or “thank goodness you have other children or you are young enough to have more” or “he/she was on loan to you from God” or “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle” (which, by the way, is NOT scriptural), or, worst of all, “This was God’s will” (which is utter blasphemy!).
They will be and probably already have been told some of these things. And those who say them are at a loss for words and so they say what they think needs to be said. And most mean no harm and don’t know what else to say (maybe nothing?), but they need to listen carefully to what they are saying.
Mostly, they need love. They need love that hangs in, love that does not abandon, love that endures everything, hopes everything, suffers everything, receives everything, the kind of love that St. Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13…the kind of love that is seen in Christ.
And the first thing love allows to happen being grief. Rachel weeps for her children. This was screamed by the Israelites in captivity as “Rachel WAILS for the fate of her children,”and it was quoted in Matthew as Herod the Brutal killed all the little boy children under age 2 and Rachel refused to be consoled because they were no more. I can imagine not wanting to be consoled, can’t you?
In Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick a desperate captain of another whaling ship approaches the infamous Captain Ahab. He’s looking for a small vessel that is lost at sea…a boat whose crew includes his own son. He’s frantically searching for his lost child. As the whaling ship turns to leave, Ahab sees the name of the boat: Rachel.
Rachel, who was “buried on the way to Ephrath” (Genesis 35), who later is pictured weeping as she “watches” her great, great grandchildren led away into exile by the power hungry, violent Babylonians (Jeremiah 31). Rachel who is remembered by Matthew when mothers around Bethlehem were weeping at the senseless slaughter of the innocents by the madman Herod (Matthew 2).
In Genesis, Rachel is not buried in Hebron with her husband and relatives; rather, she’s buried out there, all alone. Lonely tomb, but alive in the Hebrew tradition. She’s there in the biblical witness as the patron saint of all those who have lost a child, all those who’ve suffered greatly, all those who think God has forgotten them.
Where is God? According to the extraordinary theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, in his book The Crucified God, God suffers WITH us. God in Christ, Moltmann reminds us, weeps with us, absorbs evil for us, endures hate and lays down his life willingly. God in Christ teaches us what Dawn Hocksprung and Victoria Soto and all those other teachers taught us, “Greater love has no person than they lay down their life for a sister, a brother, a child, a parent.”
The other text for this day is that lectionary text of John the Baptist calling the religious fundamentalists of his day,“You brood of vipers! Bear fruit that demonstrates repentance. Even the axe is laid to the root of the tree; every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
As I said, I agree with Pat Anderson, first we grieve…but from there, we repent. And there is need for repentance all around us.
I recognize that what I am about to say will undoubtedly make some of you angry. But I am not alone in being outraged at the violence of our culture, fueled by this endless need for revenge found at every level. Politics these days is founded upon revenge. Sports is all about revenge.
Families are too often about revenge. Business dealings are very often driven by revenge. The story line of most video games seems to be about revenge. Too much of the violence in our culture is aimed at impressionable males in video games and movies that numb us to the sacred value of each human life and fed endlessly by the easy access of all kinds of guns.
Before you tune me out, please know that I am a gun owner myself, having a .22 rifle my father left me at his death, which I have never used since, a .270 deer rifle I was given for performing a funeral, and a 12 gauge shotgun I purchased for myself to go bird hunting. I enjoy hunting. I’ve had fun firing pistols once or twice. I applaud the need for registering handguns. But the gun culture is out of control, especially around the easy access to assault weapons.
The following statistics are from a report by National Public Radio and war statistics from the various military websites.
Almost 30,000 Americans die each year due to senseless gun violence in this country. To put this in perspective, the Viet Nam War claimed 58,000 lives; the Iraq War claimed 4 486 between 2003 and 2012; the war in Afghanistan, as of September, claimed over 2,000 American lives. In our country we have an average of 150 mass shootings per year(which the police forces define as more than two people killed by gunfire.) Time and again, those armed enter shopping malls, college campuses and secondary schools, armed with semi-automatic rifles, ready to kill, yet armed to the teeth to protect themselves. They are cowards of the highest order.
We criticize the suicide bomber in and from other countries, and have spent TRILLIONS to stop them, yet in our own country, WE DO NOTHING. One terrorist boarded a plane ten years ago with a bomb in his shoe, which fortunately, did not detonate. From that point forward, we cannot board a plane without taking off our shoes. Yet, 30,000 Americans die each year in senseless gun violence and I repeat, WE TAKE NO ACTION. WE ARE ALL A PART OF THIS MADNESS!!!
Twenty children, between the ages of 6 & 7 died on Friday. Our right to “bear arms” does NOT include this insanity. “Bearing arms” is a military term that was meant for a militia. Yet it has become the slogan of the NRA that spends endless amounts of money to buy our political conscience while helpless youth and children and adults are gunned down by people owning semi-automatic weapons that should be in nobody’s hands, EVER, other than military and police.
Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (see Leviticus 18& 20). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, according to historian Gary Wills, the worship of Moloch has been a sign of a deeply depraved culture. NO OTHER COUNTRY has the terrible record of gun deaths that we do. OUR COUNTRY CAN DO BETTER, BE BETTER, ACT BETTER. But until we choose to have the courage and spine to deal with this issue, (and a whole other sermon could be preached on the issues of care for mental illness) until we have the willingness to repent that John the Baptist calls for and the courage to change, then the almighty gun will be the god Moloch in our midst.
Guns have the power to destroy the reasoning process. It forbids making logical connections. We who worship guns are required to DENY that there is a direct connection between the fact that we have the greatest number of guns in private hands and the greatest number of deaths from them.
Guns have the power to turn ALL POLITICIANS into a class of invertebrate and mute servants of Moloch. If any politician goes against Moloch, they are called un-American, huge amounts of money are spent against them by the NRA in their next campaigns, they are accused of wanting to do away with ALL guns (which is not what I am suggesting), and they claim they never entertained such heresy. Up until now, it’s been far better to allow students or shoppers or moviegoers to die than for a politician to risk an election by being against illegal weapons. They put their damned reelection concerns over our children EVERY TIME because they are terrified of and owned by the gun lobbies!
But maybe if there is anything redemptive in this tragedy, maybe the sickening feeling running through this country will be the tipping point. 741 mayors of small to large to metropolitan cities around the country are forming a coalition to deal with illegal weapons. And why not? The mayors are politicians who are on the front lines. They deal with their local schools, with their police forces, with the endless killings.
Mayor Bloomberg of New York is taking the lead. Good for him. In Texas, only the mayors of Austin, Brownsville, DeSoto, and Hurst have signed on. Surely the mayors of Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Waco, Lubbock,Amarillo, Ft. Worth and El Paso will join them!
Surely, surely, surely we have had enough. Our babies were murdered, by an assault rifle that was LEGAL. The shooter did not even use his pistols. He used a Bushmaster assault rifle with hundreds of rounds of bullets against 6 and 7 year old children and their teachers.
Our teachers, the most underpaid and under appreciated professionals in the world, are on the front line. You think we don’t need SERIOUS REPENTANCE?!
We are a broken people. And we cannot afford to just be sad. WE must find courage and organize and speak up and wield our votes and write our congressman, and we must, above all, hold to that sacred duty of prophets…righteous indignation!
Our hope for healing lies in the Resurrection of Christ. In the midst of death, there is life. This is our faith. In the face of a culture of death, we must be Easter people who have already died to Christ and find our life in serving him and his children. We are a Resurrection people who, like Victoria Soto, must we be willing to risk everything, that our precious children will live and know joy and discover their purpose and bring goodness into the world. May God give us courage and fill us with hope and may all things be done in the Love that is willing to suffer for the sake of the Gospel and for the sake of God’s children. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Roger A. Paynter Preached on Sunday, May 16, 2012 following the massacre
of 26 people at Sandy Hook elementary, Newtown,Connecticut.
