“The Need for a U-turn”

• Scriptural Reference: Revelation 5:11-14; Luke 13:1-5
• April 22, 2007

We have had one horrific week, haven’t we? Last Sunday when we met here for worship, the last thing any of us thought was that the next day, thirty two people would be murdered in our own state, at Virginia Tech, no less, and then their murderer take his own life. It has slugged all of us in our souls. Everywhere, people are still trying to deal with the aftermath. We joined thousands of other congregations Wednesday night when we held a prayer vigil here at WGBC in our New Worship center. Like thousands of others, we lit candles, repeated litanies, read scripture, prayed, and wept. That helped a little bit. In time, worship will help a lot. In fact, over a life time worship will be the only thing that will help.

An article on the first page of the Metro section of Saturday’s Times-Dispatch asked the question in bold faced letters, “Where was God?” There followed a pretty good little article which would not have satisfied me very much if I didn’t already have a deeply held faith in God. Nevertheless, the question IS on many minds. Why do things like this happen?

I’ve been asked that question several times over the last week. At Panera on Wednesday morning, the lady behind the counter, Kim, attends WGBC and often she greets me by saying “Hello, Pastor!” After she greeted me and gave me my empty coffee cup, I turned to the dispensers. A woman came up behind me, poked her cup under the decaf carafe and said, “You’re a pastor. Tell me, why did God let that happen?”

I almost said, “Come to church Sunday, put a substantial offering in the plate, and I’ll tell everyone – you included – exactly why God let that happen. After all, I am the pastor, and I DO have all the answers. Got ‘em in seminary.” Well, I didn’t say that. Instead, I was honest. I said, “I don’t have all the answers, but that murder was NOT God’s will. None of those people deserved to die, but it does go to show you what kind of pain people can inflict when we misuse the gift of our free will.”

She nodded. Then her cell phone rang, she said, “Oh, excuse me,” and she walked out the door, elbow bent into that posture that pre-cell phone humanity rarely assumed. I thought, “Isn’t that a picture of how our world works? Just when we’re on the verge of dealing with the profound issues that underlie everything, the little clattering fidgets of our everyday world interrupt and we break off the conversation.”

I have exchanged emails this week with a young woman at UVA named Katie Alley. As we’ve shared our struggles concerning this tragedy Katie has sustained the conversation. Katie struggles with how to explain this thing, and she’s felt much that all of us have felt – anger, helplessness, and confusion. Katie works with children and one of her four-year olds saw Katie wearing her VT shirt and commented that “some Hokies died this week.” Katie felt a new wave of grief and anger that kids so young shouldn’t have to deal with such stuff. And on top of that, Katie was feeling tremendously angry for the way this tragedy has stamped itself into the consciousness of VT students for the rest of their lives.

I’m not sure that Katie and I arrived at any firm answers, yet, in our email correspondence, but she gives me much hope. She’s sustaining the conversation. She’s digging. She’s asking questions. AND, she’s staying connected with her community of faith. When enough people do that, when enough people stick with the issue rather than trying to avoid it, then we might find some answers, but one of the most important things Katie is doing is staying connected. She said:

If I can make it to Richmond on Sunday, I'll stop by and say hello and get my hug from you. If not, I'm sure I'll see you sometime. Either way, I'd love to continue the emailing, even after the incident from Tech heals.

“. . . get my hug.” You’d have to have been blind not to see the images of hugging that have filled the news. That’s exactly what we need to do. We need to embrace and feel embracing when these tragedies happen. Embraces say what words cannot. Hugging explains what rational talk cannot. And when we get together and just talk, express our pain, our sorrow, our consternation, our confusion, our anger, our helplessness, then we feel in our souls the embrace of community.

And that brings me back to worship and the unique healing that worship brings. In worship, we feel the embrace of the community of faith, and by being surrounded by our kindred in Faith, we experience the embrace of God. And as Romans 8, verses 26 and 27 express it:

. . . the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.

Such tragedies rob us of our voice. We feel helpless. Hopelessness often follows helplessness. In worship, we begin to reconstruct our ability to hope as God begins to put back together our shattered souls at a level deeper than language. When that restoration matures, then we can begin to express ourselves better. Then we can begin to grapple with why such things spring from the twisted will of some persons and what we can do as a community to make whatever changes we need to make. But our responses to such tragedies will never be what they need to be unless they spring out of the well of worship.

Two scripture references lie underneath the sermon title today. The passage from Revelation follows what millions of Christians read today as suggested by the Revised Common Lectionary. At first blush, it may sound like it has nothing to do with such tragedies as the VT murders. However, it most emphatically does.

You see, the book of Revelation does not contain secrets that only specialists can unlock. It is, after all, entitled “Revelation,” which means, even in its Greek original, “revealing, unmasking, or opening.” Revelation makes things obvious, it doesn’t keep secrets in some cryptic code, and what is obvious in Revelation is what happens in this fifth chapter in the verses we’ve read for today. At the center of the universe, at the center of all reality, at the center of all that is and will be, is a cosmic worship service. Revelation repeats this in seven grand scenes spelled out with all the eloquence, symbolism, and linguistic majesty at Saint John’s disposal.

Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing, “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!”

John is telling us that the entire cosmological order subordinates itself to and draws its life from God, the Creator, as made plain in the character of Jesus Christ, who was the Lamb that was slain. We can understand nothing about the Cosmos in which we live and the events that take place in it unless we root our deepest selves in the living person of Christ. That’s what we do in worship. With our deepest selves rooted in Christ, we come to the questions that erupt from our souls when innocents are murdered.

That’s what Jesus is saying in Luke 13. As I pointed out some weeks ago when we considered these verses in worship, a group of people brought to Jesus similar pain as we have felt this week, and similar questions. They wondered why apparently innocent people had been murdered by Herod’s soldiers in the midst of their worship. Jesus responded first that those victims didn’t deserve their fate and then told his questioners to repent, or they’d perish. He wasn't saying that these folks who were deeply saddened by the events recounted in Luke 13 should just suck it up and do their religious duty.  I believe he was instructing them to examine how their own attitudes tacitly lend support to – even enable – pathological attitudes to go unchallenged. They need a change of thinking, of attitude.

When I lived in Austria and was learning German, I discovered that the German word for U-turn was only a two-letter prefix different than the word for repentance and conversion. In German the word for U-turn is “umkehren.” The word for conversion is “bekehren.” When you decide to follow Jesus, you make a U-turn. You go in another direction. You change your way of thinking like the mainstream.

After I have deeply considered the character of God as revealed by Jesus – which is what we do in worship – I begin to wonder what Jesus would say about the effect on our society of the proliferation of violent movies, television shows, and video games.  Would he suggest some changes, that is, some repentance, a conversion? I wonder what Jesus would say about the fact that a certified mental patient can legally and easily buy a gun that no hunter ever uses to drop a deer.  Would he suggest some changes, that is, some repentance, a conversion? I wonder what Jesus would say about the fact that our very government invests billions more dollars in administering violent responses to world crises than to non-violent responses.  "Unless you repent (turn in the opposite direction, literally), you too will all perish." Worship can call us to a new direction, a turn around.

And then one other thing hit me this week.  In Iraq, a car bomb went off in a market place.  One hundred and forty people died, many of them women and children.  In Iraq, this is a nearly daily occurrence.  This tragedy in Blacksburg can serve to make us more sensitive to the suffering other members of the human family experience, suffering at least as painful and disruptive as the shooting at VT. I think one of the things we as the church can do to repent as Jesus would have us is to boldly proclaim the kinds of methods Jesus advocated for confronting evil in the world.  We need a whole new way of thinking about the myth of violence-as-a-solution.  It would take a generation or two before it would infiltrate our society, and it will never be completely successful this side of Heaven, but when the Lord comes, will he find us faithful? Worship calls us to change our direction, change our thinking, be transformed by the renewing of our minds, as Romans 12:1&2 state the case.

Worship does something else – it reminds me that this whole thing is NOT about me. It’s not about my church. It’s not about my state, or even my nation. It’s all about God. That means that when I consider tragedies such as the 33 who died so senselessly at Virginia Tech – or the hundreds of innocents who die in places like Iraq and Darfur on a daily basis, whose societies don’t even have a chance to mourn as we have done this past week because more bombs go off, more villages are invaded, more men killed and women raped – that I need to begin with God’s concerns and not my individual rights.

Worship centers us on God’s concerns. God is concerned, I am convinced, with the profound grief of the families who lost their children and spouses at Virginia Tech. God is concerned with the well-being of the care givers who are immediately involved in facilitating the process of healing. God is concerned with the law enforcement personnel who dealt with the terrible crime scene and with the medical workers who took care of the bodies. God is concerned with all of us who struggle to come to terms with this particular recurring event in our society.

And I think God is concerned with the family of Cho. I’ve wept much for the parents who lost children, but I felt hot tears again when I read the statement issued by Cho’s family, read by his sister. I never want to have the choice, but if I were to choose, I’d rather know the pain of the victim’s families than the family of Cho.

Worship re-centers us when tragedies throw us off-center. Worship reminds us that too often, we walk around hooked up to a sort of cultural anesthesia. Worship lets the cultural Novocain wear off so that we feel the pain and know that more surgery is necessary. And worship provides us with the sure knowledge that not only is the surgery necessary, but we have the skills to perform it.

And when worship re-centers me, a new awareness strikes me. Those were normal families who lost their loved ones. They weren’t any different than you or me. I agree with Jesus in Luke 13 – they were no worse or better than me. That means that the chances are very good that when one of the kids called home asking for money, say on Sunday evening, the dad got mad and they hung up in a huff. It could very well be that one of the daughters who died had had a spat with her father and they hadn’t talked for a long, long time, both refusing to give in. Now the reconciliation is impossible. Some parents could be lamenting how often they dwelled on the little things their son did that irritated them, some dad might be thinking of the harsh words he had for his boy when he had his ear pierced, some mom might be wishing she had taken that shopping trip with her daughter rather than work that extra couple hours trying to close that deal.

When I center my heart in worship, I refocus on the important things. My wife and my daughter are tremendous gifts to me. If that had been my daughter I’d be feeling like I would give anything for her to come back home and mess up her room.

Men and women, what unfinished business do you have with a family member? What rift needs to be healed? What words need to be spoken, what words need to be forgotten, what deeds need to be apologized for? What habit needs to be overlooked? What habit do you need to give up? What do you need to do to express your love? Do NOT put it off.

It is my absolute conviction that God did not want this thing to happen. I am convinced that God had other plans for those people. God does not will evil. Evil always interferes with God’s intentions. This tragedy was not a good thing at all, but as Romans 8:28 states, “In all things, God will work for the good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose.” We can become bitter. We can guard our political turf and blame our usual suspects. Or, we can bow before the God who made us and set us free to make our own choices. Let us choose to renew our commitment to the God who fashioned us, who sent us Christ Jesus, a Savior who set aside his own rights and privileges for the good of us all.

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” People of violence will not fashion the ultimate reality. They will not have the final word. The final word belongs to the Prince of Peace who will establish a new heaven and a new earth, this Prince of Peace who too was slain, will “. . . receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise.” And that same Christ Jesus who was slain will wipe every tear from our eyes and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away before the power of the One who will make all things new.