North Carolina today has the distinction of being the location for the latest newsworthy and horrific sin. Some self-consumed, morally numb man ushered himself into a nursing home, a freaking nursing home, and opened fire. He probably had to shuffle his firearm into his left hand and then push the button at the door before entering. Allegedly the connection he had to that place was that he was involved with a woman of course, and that she worked there. Speaking today on NBC, a woman paid tribute to her father who was among those killed. Her dad had spent 30 years crafting a single violin. Just one. I used to hate how the violin's sound cut through the air. Now I'm haunted by it, and I love it.
In other news, this time from Massachusetts, a man interrupted his sister's 5th birthday by stabbing her to death. He also killed his 17-year old sister. The 9-year old sister called 911 and the shooter was killed by the cops. He was 22.
I remember someone talking about a trip they took to the Holy Land. This was many years ago but I think the image still applies. She told me that while the tour group was busing around those communities she saw some difficult images. The one comfort was that she could pretend the window of the bus was a TV screen. She found comfort in that.
Which to me begs the question as I watch the pixels that represent what I type: Can video (the TV, the computer...) insulate us from the sin of the world? Not only that, can it also insulate me from my own sin? Not the reality of it certainly, for sin is sin at the moment of its conception; it is now registered in the mind of almighty God. Cross reference Martin Luther's thinking about when Eve sinned in the biblical story. It wasn't when those perfect pearly whites broke the skin of that fabled apple that Eve sinned, it was when she responded to the Enemy, that sly serpent, with a teeny tiny drop of doubt inside her mind, doubt that God's Word, God's promise was somehow not true. I'm sure Jesus was thinking about this when he proclaimed that we are to have a childlike faith, which is to say that the Word creates what it says, and like children, we human creatures are to receive it with joy and above all certainty. When Eve began the family tradition of doubt, she did not fall FROM something, she reached upward into what Brueggemann calls "the prerogatives of God".
How often do you hear the survivors say, or their neighbors, that they wouldn't in their wildest dreams think that this could happen to them, to their community, to their family? Ah! It's because you've been hooked by the soap opera, the narrative, which pretends to be a narrative and not the real thing, because the psychosocial network of our communities are at the same time repulsed by and desperately infatuated by sin and the details of its carnage.
"Come to me," says a teacher from the north country, Jesus of Nazareth, "and I will give you rest."
