Hearing a New Thing in a Time of the Gun
Posted on
March 17, 2013
Trinity Church, Hartford
Fifth Sunday in Lent
Isaiah 43:16-21, Philippians 3:4b-14, John 12:1-8
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
“Hearing a New Thing in a Time of the Gun”
Through the mouth of the prophet Isaiah God tells the people “I am about to do a new thing”. God then asks: “Do you not perceive it?” How can we hear that question today as we struggle to find our way through massive social and religious challenges to established ways of doing things and the prevailing ideologies that justify them? As we begin the process here at Trinity of trying to think about new ways of doing God’s mission in the world, established ways will be under question in a world of swift and varied changes, as today’s collect puts it.
In the midst of these changes it is quite natural for us to try, as best we can, to hang on to old certitudes, customary habits, well-tested, habitual patterns of living and ways of thinking that have served us well in the past as a buffer against unsettling and destabilizing changes. This tendency to rely on old truisms is an inevitable part of being human. No one likes to ride the sea of uncertainty with no helm, rudder, or sense of direction.
And yet, we also know that too much stability, too much certainty, can be imprisoning and stifle our creativity. It can make us less open to hearing and responding to new things. Some vulnerability to change is necessary if we are to allow new things to find entry into our lives. We know that clinging too tightly to the past runs the risk of being buried in the past, just as too much change too quickly can unhinge us entirely and set us adrift with no further shore in sight.
How startling then to read Paul’s words in this morning’s epistle: for Christ’s sake, he cries, I have suffered the loss of all things; and yet I regard them as rubbish. We are tempted to ask, can Paul really mean this? ALL lost things are now regarded as rubbish? Surely the accumulation of things through hard work and diligence is a testimony to our worth? If he had been a twenty-first century American, he would have known that the only way to tell whether someone is a ‘winner’ is by the amount of ‘stuff’ he has acquired. As a bumper sticker once put it, “He who dies with the most toys, wins.” To accept the loss of these things and to call them rubbish makes no sense whatsoever in a society built on the right, even the moral imperative, to engage in unlimited accumulation and profligate consumption of ‘stuff’ as the measures of what it means to be successful and powerful, as having ‘made it’.
But if we are going to ‘think outside the box’ and be truly open to new ways of doing things, as Don’s sermon last week urged us to do, in the context of trying to discern God’s mission for the world, then let’s be willing to reconsider some old but now outdated assumptions about what we as a faith community can do in the wake of continuing gun violence. The Washington National Cathedral has called this weekend Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath Weekend. If we are to honor its intent we must be willing to drill down to the basic assumptions on which we have built much of our present practices and policies regarding lethal weapons.
If we live from the philosophy of accumulation we are inevitably driven into its corollary: the philosophy of fear; if we’ve accumulated a vast pile of goods, we will necessarily fear losing what we’ve acquired. And this fear will lead us to protect what we have from those who, in our fervid imaginations, are threatening to take it all away. This is the philosophy that enshrines the almost sacred worship of our right to possess personal weapons to defend ourselves against the threat of others. The second amendment’s original rationale was perhaps understandable in a time when the defense of a small community without the protection of a national army was provided by a militia composed of citizens who were primarily farmers or merchants.
But might we be bold enough to hear a new thing? To imagine that the original rationale for the second amendment might no longer be serviceable? Might we be at a point in our history when we might ask if the right to possess arms has outlived its usefulness? Is the right to possess guns a right which ought to be repealed if God is really to do a new thing in our corporate lives in this country. Can we perceive a new thing being started in a society in which the legal protection ostensibly provided by the ownership of guns might give way to a more fundamental and overriding right for all people to be safe from gun violence? Has the second amendment become a fetish, an idol, whose time has passed because gun violence on such a massive scale is a fundamental denial of our basic human right to live without fear? Paul says that we cannot become righteous through bondage to legal principles or by avoiding suffering, but only through our willingness to share in Christ’s sufferings, and in the sufferings of those who have been the victims of gun violence. Legal principles from an earlier age may well need to be re-examined in light of the vast violence carried out by means of lethal weapons throughout our country. Are we ready to at least open ourselves to the possibility that a new thing is beginning to happen in our collective lives? Repealing the 2nd amendment would not mean the abolition of guns. But it would put guns in the same category as automobiles: we have no constitutional right to cars but we allow them even while we subject the ownership and use of cars to stringent regulation on both the cars and their drivers and owners.
There are of course many reasons why people want to exercise the right to bear arms. One is simply because they enjoy being able to shoot a gun at an inanimate target. Others, though I suspect they are a small minority, claim that they need to shoot animals in order to get food to eat. But the primary justification given by many Americans for the right to own guns is fear: fear of losing the goods that they’ve acquired; fear that their accumulated stuff and even their lives might be taken away by others who are envious of what they have. This includes the ever pervasive fear that our even our freely elected government is out to get us, that they are coming for us in our homes with their black helicopters and assault weapons. And so in a vicious cycle of ever escalating fear of others, we seek to arm everyone so that the fear we have of others is shared equally among us all and the mutuality of fear is our bond with each other. But surely true life, the kind of mutual life God intends for our well-being and flourishing, cannot be found in a mutuality of fear and defensiveness. A philosophy built on fear and the need for the lethal protection of the gun is a philosophy at odds with God’s intention for what it means to live in love, and just may be a philosophy that we can allow to fade away, to abandon as rubbish because it is built on the irrational and the dangerous belief that only by threatening others or defending ourselves with guns against the imagined threat they pose to us can we live meaningful lives.
No life based on the new thing God is doing for us can be built on this kind of fear. Living out of a pervasive fear of others destroys the very foundations of living out of love for others, a love that we know only because God, in Jesus, refused to be afraid and allowed himself to die at our hands because he knew that new life can arise even out of death at the hands of others, and not from destroying those who might threaten to take our lives.
Now there are many sensible steps that can be taken to limit the danger posed by unlimited accumulation of guns. We’ll talk more about these in the education hour following this service. At this point we need only to consider the possibility that living by the philosophy of the gun is living the old life, living in a way that has not yet been opened up to living by God’s grace, not by the protection of armed self-defense. Now there may be times and places when self-defense is morally appropriate. But this appropriateness should not be used to justify a culture in which everyone is armed because everyone fears everyone else. If a world of completely reciprocal and interlocking fear is the world we are in, then, in Paul’s words, it is truly rubbish and we should be well rid of it and not count it as loss.
But in the wake of Sandy Hook there are signs of new thing that God is doing. God is opening up to us a way of thinking about life that is not built on the primacy of fear and protectiveness, but on love and the delights of living in and among different people with different gifts dedicated to a common life together. To perceive this new thing will be difficult. Our culture is saturated by images on TV, video games and films in which people right wrongs by ‘blowing away’ the ‘bad guys’ with deadly weapons. This resort to violence is a long-established pattern of response to our fear which has become ingrained in our culture. It is a pattern that depends, in the words of the collect, on our unruly wills and affections becoming attached to taking our protection into our own hands because we fear everyone else.
But a new thing, a new way of thinking, a new perception of life together is still possible if we are only prepared to live without fear because we live by God’s grace. To embrace the suffering of others and to live in hope and in vulnerability to others is the polar opposite of fending off the threat of suffering by taking human life ourselves at the end of the barrel of a gun. Until we can give up our reliance upon weapons and our passionate but perverse devotion to the sacred right to own guns, we cannot begin to bring the healing power of love and mercy to a broken world whose brokenness the philosophy of the gun only perpetuates. Instead we need to embrace Paul’s words that there is nothing, neither principalities or powers, nor life, nor death, nor the instruments of death, that can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.