Sermon After Sandy Hook

Sermon for Year C, Advent 4

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

December 16, 2012

St. Thomas Episcopal Church

It is a common hallmark in the life of a preacher that in times of distress, well-chosen words and well-dissected thoughts must be dispensed with. Many a manuscript has been tossed aside at the last minute, and the preacher begun anew, struggling, as always, against time, yet working with time, to try to say something helpful that blesses the name of God and moves the people on ahead.

Sometimes, people need meaning. Sometimes they need comfort. Sometimes, challenge. On a good day, all three. And better than these, they need to know that God is always and everywhere; and deeply loves the creation; and that in Jesus, God comes to us as one well acquainted with suffering.

On Friday something happened that in a sense has already happened before, unfortunately in many times and in many places, on bigger scales and on smaller scales. Simply put, in Connecticut, a man named Adam killed 26 people – 20 children and six adults – before turning his gun on himself.

The priest in me wants to try and make sense of this. The writer in me longs to understand and to help others understand. The counselor in me wants to rush in and somehow fix an unfixable scene. The father of two small children in me can only turn away in disgust and fear. Honestly, right now very little of me is willing to sit with these facts and to let them sink in.

And I know that I am not alone. Denial can be useful, but only for a while. After that, how do we even begin to wrap our minds around such terror against some of the most helpless in our society?

For myself: today I am tired all the way to my bones of taking up the search for meaning within terrible, violent acts. I am as tired of it as I am sure that there will be more occasions to pursue it, and this thought all on its own is beyond exhausting, beyond frightening. For surely such acts are evil, and who wants to stare at evil for very long.

When these things happen, it has become commonplace to ask, Where was God? or, in a more ethical sense, Why would God permit such terrible things to occur? That’s a sensible question, and an honest one, but with respect, I think it may be the wrong one. For God is never not anywhere; God is always and everywhere; God is too big and too far beyond our understanding to be chased out of a school or any other place; and as a sign of God’s graciousness toward the whole of creation, we human beings are given free choice as to how we will behave. Quite a lot of the time we don’t pay much attention to that sense of free choice, and then something like this happens, and we have to face facts. People do murder; people do choose to do evil; clearly, they should be stopped.

So, setting aside for a moment the matter of why, what else might be the question we could be asking? It may just be this: Now that this has happened, what is God asking to us to do about it? Specifically, how are we supposed to be making ourselves useful for God’s purposes even in the midst of terrible tragedy? How can we create genuine community and stand with those who are hurting at this time?

How is God asking us to respond? A few thoughts.

1. Pray. Pray for the victims and their families and the people and places affected. Pray for anyone you talk to, that they would know peace. Pray for yourself, for from where else would you gather strength to face your own day?

2. Count your blessings. Love the people in your life. Tell them how much you love them. Don’t just assume they know. Find them and tell them.

3. Learn and repeat this small prayer from Psalm 90: “Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.”

4. If you have children or grandchildren, be honest with them. Give them the amount of information that seems appropriate. If you’re asked a question for which you don’t have an answer, don’t make one up. When a child asks to change the subject or to go off and play, recognize that that’s not an insult; honor it as best you can.

5. Recognize that compassion begins within. You can’t be compassionate with others unless you love yourself. Know when it’s time to pull back and gather strength. Ask for help when you need it.

6. Work to put a stop to violence wherever you see it, recognizing, as Jesus himself knew, that telling the truth comes with a cost.

In that spirit, I prayerfully offer this thought. The land where I was born and reared was, and is, gun country. A gun was a standard part of farming equipment and for many it  provided an essential source of food. I grew up with guns and hunters and marksmen in my family. I was first handed a gun and taught to respect it starting when I was eight – the age my son is now – and I still do the same. When one holds a gun, one is often made aware of the enormous responsibility to protect life and safety. This has been readily apparent to many over the years.

In the hands of those whose will is not aligned with God’s, that fact is overlooked. In the hands of those who are ill or who have a need to express power and control over others, a gun is an instrument of destruction or even death. In this age of ultraviolent culture, it becomes far too easy to violate the sixth commandment.

Christians stand against violence. Christians stand up against murder. Christians work for justice. This is plain and simple.

And so I say seventh and finally, that it’s time to have a forthright conversation about all this. If a moment like this won’t bring all parties to the table for real talk, I’m afraid nothing will, and therefore nothing will change, and the whole thing will have to somehow be turned over in our quest to protect life. The last thought anyone wants to have is that further carnage is inevitable because we were unable to prevent it because we were so intractable in our positions.

Even so – even though we are fearful and exhausted and sad for the present and sad for the future – we are still at the Third Sunday of Advent. We remain a people of hope who believe in our hearts that it’s better to live in hope than in despair. And we look to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, to come among us and to lift our faces and to show us how.

And so we say, Come, Lord Jesus. Come among us, and restore us.

Amen.

Awake

Sermon for Year C, Advent 2

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

December 9, 2012

St. Thomas Episcopal Church; St. Paul’s Indian Mission

Luke 3:1-6

“Awake”

You know how it is each week after we read the Gospel lesson.

In most places, it’s pretty quiet.

Folks generally stand up to hear the lesson

  And they say what’s on the page –

    “Praise to you, Lord Christ” –

  And then they sit down while the preacher gets his or her act together

  And right there, before much else happens,

    You could hear a pin drop.

Any preacher worth his or her salt knows how to harness that quiet moment.

It was in one of those fine moments of sleepy quiet on a blue-sky Colorado morning

  That I once heard a priest start a sermon on John the Baptist

  By slamming his fist down on the pulpit

    And by proclaiming, in a very loud voice, “WAKE UP!”

He let an awkward silence ring in the air between us.

I’m sure that in that moment none of us particularly liked Fr. Rick for doing that!

I’d have thrown my shoe at him if I’d had the presence of mind.

We were offended, but in a way we couldn’t really explain.

Maybe it was because this was the sort of preacher

  Who as a rule didn’t put a lot of screaming into his sermons.

Maybe it was because a lot of folks had put their trust in him as their priest

  After growing up with quite a lot of screaming on Sundays,

    And Rick’s usual way of gentle teaching was seen as a vote for something better.

Maybe – shame on us – it was because we thought church

  Was supposed to be some sort of escape from reality.

But in any event there it was. And I have never forgotten it. He was right.

“WAKE UP!”

(Let it be mentioned that this was a man trying to raise teenagers at the time.

He didn’t need lessons to sound convincing on this point;

  It was a sentiment conveyed with real authority borne of actual, recent experience!)

John. The man in the desert, baptizing and preaching repentance and forgiveness of sins.

Armchair theologians like me enjoy plastering John with all sorts of titles:

  Baptizer. Revelator. Forerunner. Prophet.

I think, though, it might be more accurate to name him for what he truly is.

The cousin of the Christ, who comes before the Christ,

  Must be an Annoyance. An irritation. An alarm clock.

  A bucket of cold water on a slumbering teenager.

John’s job is to relentlessly poke at us –

  Get up … get up … c’mon, get up right now –

  Until at last we rub the sleep out of our eyes

    And find, to our great surprise, that we are standing before God …

      In the holy presence of God! – the holy joy and comfort and judgment of God …

And having made such a realization,

  The next announcement immediately follows on:

  That God is doing something new, and that it’s still time to pay attention,

    And that in this something new that’s about to happen,

      Every uneven thing shall be made even,

      And every crooked thing shall be made straight:

        That the mountains will be sanded right down,

        And the low fields pulled up to the same height;

      That every last little dangerous road that used to be so filled

        With so many curves and switchbacks and falling rocks and thieves

        Will now be a straight shot. A way that is safe to travel.

Translation:

  Pay attention to the One who is to come, this Christ,

  Because God is about to to level the playing field and make things right;

  Bigshots will be humbled, and humble things will be placed in the spotlight.

Now, do you think that that came as good news

  To a people and a culture and a religion

  That had been as perpetually and chronically oppressed as the Israelites? –

  The same small group of people that had been under the thumb

    Of Assyria and Greece and Babylon and Persia for more than a thousand years

      And was now barely scraping by under the harsh and sharp edges

      Of the sword of the Roman regime?

Of course it was good news! Terrific news. Amazing.

The sort of news worth waking up to hear.

As wake-up calls go, this is already the second of its kind in the Gospel of Luke.

We’re only in chapter three, but wake up and look:

  In the very first chapter of this saga,

    An unprepared, frightened girl named Mary has been told that she will be the mother

    Of Jesus, who will ascend to the throne of David,

      And whose reign will be just as great as David’s, even greater, lasting forever.

It will be this young, unprepared girl – already one of the least –

  Whose song about Things Made Right

  Is echoed by John in the desert in substance and in heart.

Hearing this proclamation of the angel about her child, she will sing out,

  God has looked on my lowliness and somehow I am blessed.

“He has shown strength with his arm;

  He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;

  He has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,

  According to the promise he made to our ancestors,

  To Abraham and to his descendants for ever.”

A level playing field.

Oh, and do you remember Abraham?

The childless one, the one without a legacy,

  Whose disappointed face God turned to the night sky,

  And said, Don’t worry, Abraham; it’s okay; just wake up and live – open your eyes:

  Someday, Abraham, you’ll have more descendants than there are stars;

    Many long years after you’re sleeping in your grave, Abraham,

    You’ll have more children than there are grains of sand on the seashore.

The lowly lifted up once again … blessed beyond measure.

The humble brought up, and the mighty humbled.

It is an old, old story in the Bible, and very good news indeed.

We just have to be irritated from sleep and to wake up long enough to be able to hear it.

Every time we worship:

  Every time we bow our heads, pause, give thanks …

  Every time we acknowledge God’s presence and power in our lives …

  Every time we come into this building to take Christ’s body and blood …

  Every time we hear a lesson of God’s unlikely power and providence,

    It is as though we’re pushed to wake up just a little bit more,

    Build up the capacity to pay attention just a little bit more,

      Increase the chances we might hear the message just a little bit more.

It’s easy to succumb to sleep;

  But that’s not why we’re here.

We’re here because Christ has called us here,

  Because we need to wake up

    So we can hear the good news

    That the One who is coming into the world

      Is going to show us what the world looks like

      When the humble are lifted up and the proud are scattered.

Jesus will do that with his life time and again, leaving us countless lessons,

  And then he will do it in his body –

    Being humbled and lifted up, upon a cross which is also a throne –

    The seat of God’s holy judgment and comfort and joy and presence.

First, we awaken. Then we see and we get the message.

Thanks be to God. Come, Lord Jesus. Amen.