Our Violent U.S.: A Christian Perspective
Epiphany 4A. 1-30-11 St.
Augustine’s Church
Reverend Jennifer Phillips Micah 6:1-8;1
Cor.1:18-31;Mtt.5:1-12
Preface:
I find I am not
preaching the sermon I had planned at the start of the week for today. In fact,
you are about to hear the sort of message I do not often claim a bully pulpit
to deliver, and so I invite your response over coffee in a bit, or by email or
phone or in person later on, if you feel moved. I don’t like to proclaim from the pulpit the
first Sunday after some piece of major breaking news shocks us. I suspect we
all hear and see the news and are not unaware. It takes a little time to pray
things through, to read and think and reflect and respond. Reflexive instant
response breeds more violence in the heat of those many moments. But in the
aftermath of a shooting rampage in Arizona, a school gun accident in Los
Angeles, and this time in between commemorations of Dr. King and President
Lincoln I am left ruminating about guns and God.
What kind of sacrifice honors God? - the prophet Micah is
absolutely clear: Do justice, love
kindness, walk humbly with God. And what Matthew’s Jesus does not say on the mount: blessed are the
strong. Blessed are the powerful. Blessed are they who can take care of
themselves. Blessed are they who live by force!
In the week ahead URI is celebrating (a bit after the
date) the life of a passionate advocate for justice and nonviolence, shot on a
motel balcony by a fellow citizen with what was reported to be a rifle. We are
still collectively recovering from that shooting in Tucson which left several
dead and others including a congresswoman injured, and from two children
wounded in an inadvertent shooting by a loaded gun in a backpack in Los Angeles
this month. But then…
We in the United States are collectively willing to
sacrifice hundreds of children each year - and a lot of adults as well- to our
constitutional right to own and carry guns with little or no limitations.
*The CDC reports the United States has
the highest rates of childhood homicide, suicide, and firearm-related death
among all industrialized countries. Firearms deaths are the second leading
cause of death in our children and youth. (Bear in mind survey statistics
always lag behind the present year.)
*During 1950-1993, the overall annual
death rate for U.S. children aged less than 15 years declined substantially
(1), primarily reflecting decreases in deaths associated with unintentional
injuries, pneumonia, influenza, cancer, and congenital anomalies. However,
during the same period, childhood homicide rates tripled, and suicide rates
quadrupled (2). In 1994, among children aged 1-4 years, homicide was the fourth
leading cause of death; among children aged 5-14 years, homicide was the third
leading cause of death, and suicide was the sixth (3)
*The suicide rate for children in the
United States was two times higher than that in the other 25 countries surveyed
combined (0.55 compared with 0.27)
Worldwide, a firearm was reported to have
been involved in the deaths of 1107 children; 957 (86%) of those occurred in
the United States. (Div of Violence Prevention, National Center for Injury
Prevention and Control, CDC.)
* The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated 52,447 deliberate and 23,237 accidental non-fatal
gunshot injuries in the United States during 2000. for 2006, there were 30,896 deaths from firearms in our country.
* About 1/3 of U.S. homes have one or more
guns stored there.
*If you do own a gun and think your child
won't get to it, listen to this: A recent study published in the Archives of
Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine found 39 percent of kids knew where their
parent's guns were stored, while 22 percent said they had handled the weapons
unsupervised despite adult's warnings to stay away. What's more, age was not a
factor in whether children had played with the guns -- 5-year-olds were just as
likely to report doing this as 14-year-olds.
We, collectively as Americans approve of this,
our courts uphold it, our politicians by and large support it or leave it
alone. It is not a new decision for us as a nation. We are willing to pay this
price.
So when a young man with a gun goes on a
shooting spree to assassinate a congresswoman and take down in seconds several
citizens exercising their right and responsibility to meet with their
legislator in a public place, I have a hard time simply blaming a mental
illness (though this was a factor), or an individual bad character (maybe also
a factor), or even another irresponsible politician who places
target-crosshairs over pictures of her political rivals on a website, and
speaks of locking and loading to
prepare to retaliate for their successful elections to public office. A society
that neglects its mentally ill citizens, that equates manhood with firearm
violence, that fills its eyes with images of gun crime and gun revenge, and
that rejects even moderate regulations and limitations on gun ownership, and
the shame and rage of a young man - all these have collided in Tuscon - as they
might anywhere.
I would not want to spend time arguing with
NRA pronouncements that gun deaths have actually decreased per gun-toting
capita in recent years. I simply ask the question of you all for your prayer
and consideration - are you willing for a few hundred children to die by gun in
this new year, and next year, and the year after. Or for that matter, to lose
over ten thousand adults to suicide, homicide, and accident by firearm?
I would ask you whether we collectively are
satisfied with the constant diet of bloody death and gun-wielding fed to us on
all our media every day? On TV, movies, video games, in magazines and papers,
in our music, our comedy, in war, in sports, everywhere, everyday. And do we
believe that this massive exposure when it intersects, in particular, young men
is irrelevant? Will we accept that (as Jackson Katz wrote in the Huffington
Post recently:)
“How we socialize boys, and yes, how young men learn -[is] how we as a culture teach them - that blowing
people away with guns represents the ultimate assertion of manly resolve,
competence, and reclaimed honor.”
“According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and as reported
in Bob Herbert's New York Times column on January 11, more than one million
people in the U.S. have been killed with guns since 1968, when Martin Luther
King [Jr.] and Robert Kennedy were killed. According to various researchers and
law enforcement agencies, 85-90 per cent of those killed by guns are killed by
men and boys. This is not a peripheral part of the story; it is the heart of
the matter. What is going on with men in our society?” (The Huffington Post,
January 19, 2011.)
When a gun in the hand, often an automatic
weapon, mixes with shame, fear, and rage, it spits out death and
destruction…and 90% of the time, the shooter is a male under the age of 50.
Let me say straight out that it is not pleasing
to the God who instructed that human beings “choose life” that we conduct our
society this way, nor that we are willing to accept this human price as worth
it for “my right to own and carry a gun under the 2nd amendment of
the Constitution.” Now, I say this as
someone who is not opposed to hunting - and who notes that hunting accidents
make up a miniscule portion of gun deaths. I don’t demand for us to ban all
firearms. I think there are differences between northern Wyoming and downtown
Providence calling for different restrictions. I don’t claim to be
violence-free. I am carnivore. But…
I am pretty clear from reading the Gospels all
my life that Jesus of Nazareth was opposed to violence and killing, even in
self-defense. He pushed aside the sword a follower tried to use to defend him
at his arrest and scolded the man - he said that living by the sword would mean
dying by it. If Jesus were walking the earth today, he would not be carrying a
gun, nor approving of his disciples to do so. The church since the 3rd
century not been able to completely accept his path of pacifism that was so
obvious to Christians of the 1st and 2nd centuries, and
has reached some compromises to accommodate our need to wage wars and enforce
laws. But if you ask today What Would
Jesus Do? the answer is perfectly clear. It was clear to Blessed Jonathan
Daniels who stepped in front of a shame-and -rage-filled man with a shotgun to
save at the cost of his own life the young black woman Ruby Sales targeted
because she had served the civil rights demonstrators in her shop in Hayneville,
Alabama in 1965. It was clear to Dr. King facing down angry armed opponents
weaponless. It should be clear to us.
A good number of other nations have looked at
the equation of guns and lives, and have decided that they are not willing to pay the price for
unimpeded gun ownership with their children’s lives. We are unusual in our
choice. Some who most want to claim the U.S.A. as a Christian nation are also
the first to oppose even modest regulation of the most dangerous automatic
weapons. It is simply not part of being a follower of Jesus to shoot someone
(including yourself) with a handgun.
Though I feel so sad for the parents of a dead
nine year old, for a gravely wounded Congresswoman and her family, and the
relatives of others killed, and those injured, in Tuscon, and for a
schizophrenic man for whom our society exercised so little care, and for his
family, and for a Los Angeles schoolboy toting a loaded handgun in a backpack
who shot two classmates when he dropped it on his desk in class while never
intending to, I feel more grief for the choices we make together that produce
such events - that though shocking - are unremarkable. And I name it as a
symptom of spiritual unwellness, that I would call sin, in our society that we
lack a majority will to do anything to change our way of life so that more
citizens can live to enjoy it. Changing the collective will requires individual
commitment. So I do not ask What would
Jesus do? I ask What would you do as
one marked and sealed as Christ’s own for ever?
