When I was only a little bit older than the
children who were killed in Newtown on Friday, Simon & Garfunkel recorded
“7 O’Clock News/Silent Night,” the lovely carol being overdubbed by the awful
news of the day. The dissonance is
chilling.
We
shudder, and can’t stop crying, when we hear the names of schoolchildren who
were robbed of life just days before Christmas: Charlotte, Daniel, Olivia, Josephine, Ana, Dylan, Madeleine,
Catherine, Chase, Jesse, James, Grace, Emilie, Jack, Noah, Caroline, Jessica,
Avielle, Benjamin, Allison. How could this happen?
We gather and sweetly sing carols about
“peace on earth, good will to men,” but we are willing participants in a culture
that is rife with anger. Politicians can’t get along,
and there’s rage on the roads, in our cities, in our homes, and even in our
hearts. Flip to almost any channel from
the news of Newtown, and you’ll see violence, somebody getting shot or beaten
up. We have a taste for violence. The shootings in Newtown are appalling, but
not surprising.
If
we dare sing carols about “peace on earth, good will to men,” we had best
reckon with radical changes we need to embrace.
How do we turn the temperature down on the rancor and learn to be
peaceful people?
And I can’t fathom the politics of guns and
the second amendment, but let me suggest as a starting place something I am
100% sure is true: Jesus does not like
assault weapons, and does not wish for us to use them, or have them. After a mass shooting in 1996, Australia
banned rapid fire guns, and saw a steep decline in gun deaths, and have had
zero mass killings since. How can
Christmas carolers not even budge on the right to own guns like the one used to
slaughter twenty children on Friday?
Perhaps the more important conversation we who sing of “good will to
men” must have is about mental illness.
Thirty years ago we rolled back support for programs for the mentally
ill; slashed budgets for a generation have made help for the mentally ill hard to
access, and we as a people avert our gaze instead of dealing with troubled
souls. When Jesus came, he made it a top
priority to help the mentally ill.
Mike Huckabee placed blame for the Newtown horror on the removal of God
from the schools. God is not removable
from any place, thankfully. We are not
big enough to shove God out – and we forget this until tragedy strikes. At 9-11, and on Friday, crowds flocked to
places of worship, and even secular newscasters kept muttering, “We need to
pray.”
Indeed:
the worst news drives us to pray as we might when the news is good, the
kind of prayer that listens to the desire of God that we enact what we sing in
our carols and Christmas Scripture readings.
“Peace on earth, good will to all.”
