April 17th
I am stunned by the shootings yesterday at Virginia Tech. I worked with the students and faculty there for several years. I am gripped by the media coverage and close to tears whenever I think of the moms and dads whose son or daughter is never going to come home for the summer. God be merciful to them.
We should give ourselves to this moment in whatever way the Lord calls each of us, to pray, or listen to someone, or reach out and call those we know in the Tech community.
I’ve been thinking about all this, and the Psalms continue to be a great comfort to me, particularly Psalm 46. Here are a few excerpts:
God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, thought its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging….
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God…
God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day…
Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.
The shootings remind me that life is a gift to us, every day. Every day that we get up and go off into the world, our lives are handed to us once again by God. And every single one of them is a gift that He gives us, not that He owes us. There is a river whose streams are meant for us to drink and make us glad - right in the midst of the “waters roaring” and the “mountains quaking”. The counsel of our more reflective brothers and sisters has always been: “Receive the day.”. Because on any given morning, God can call us home; call us before the judgment seat of Christ to give an account for our lives (2 Cor. 5:10). This is how we should live each day then, prepared to meet our God. With this attitude, our dear old friend Ida Wells always signs her letters to us, “Perhaps today…”
Times like these wake us up to the reality of evil in our world. Palpable, unrelenting evil is set against the sons and daughters of Adam. We cannot construct a security system that keeps evil out. The monks learned this when they tried to retreat from the world behind monastic walls and found that the world was still very much with them. Go ahead and second-guess President Steger all you want, but safety in our modern world is an illusion. “God is our refuge and strength”, Him alone. Until He calls me home, I am immortal. Our response should be the same as Christ’s who did not shrink back from entering a dangerous world in vulnerability. Jesus sent us into the world, not to scurry for cover into our gated communities and Christian enclaves. Being ‘out there in the world’ is surely going to be risky. Following Jesus in a fallen world is going to be dangerous. The fear of the Lord needs to control us (2 Cor. 5;11), not the fear of men. Jesus said, “Do not fear those who can kill the body, but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear Him who can destroy both the body and the soul in hell.” (!) Incidents like this wake us up from our preoccupation with the trivial and with our culture’s suppression of the truth about God (Rom. 1:18). We wake up and realize that souls are in peril: “that whosoever believes in Him should not perish”. People who die without Christ will die a second death. But for those who embrace the gospel, as John Donne says,
“One short sleep past, we wake eternally. And death shall be no more;
death, thou shalt die.”
But let us aim for some balance in our message. I do not think it is respectful for Christians, in times of great tragedy, to be insensitive to the great pain and loss of people by ONLY having ‘altar-call-comments’ to these events. Surely the good news of Jesus is more dynamic and multi-faceted than just “Are you going to heaven or hell?” How about the beginning of the ‘gospel chapters’ in Isaiah: “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem” (Isa. 40:1). Or the blessed comfort of God’s sovereignty? His sovereignty is not meant to be a puzzle for theolgians to try to figure out, but a comfort that we can hide our wee little selves in His greatness: “Be still and know that I am God”. Yes, these killings should give us some sense of urgency in our concern for our neighbors’ souls. Love of neighbor does not conceal the realities of either heaven or hell that await every single one of us. This is an excellent opportunity to talk about the big questions of life. These events pry open the normally well-guarded doors of people’s hearts. Suddenly there is a crack in all their well-rehearsed arguments. But let’s stick the right foot in the door when it cracks open: not first the message of judgment - “Will you be at God’s right hand in the after-life?”, but the message of compassion - “Will God be at your right hand in this life?”
“The Lord Almighty is with us, the God of Jacob is our fortress” - Psalm 46:11
Tom
