Among the Tombs

Then Jesus asked him, "What is your name?"

He said, "Legion," for many demons had entered him.

-Luke 8: 30

Again, there is nothing new under the sun.  The aftermath of these mass shootings is all beginning to make me feel like I'm living that movie Groundhog Day, except I'm in one of the many implied repetition days where we don't actually learn anything that advances our self knowledge.  Seriously, the articles I've read are all starting to sound the same, the same as they did after Sandy Hook, after Virginia Tech, Aurora, all of them just repeating the themes of "thoughts and prayers," guns, mental illness, ISIS and/or radical Islam, terrorism, racism, and this time the cause du jour is homophobia.

It's a toxic stew to be sure.

Everyone has a favorite "ingredient" in this toxic stew, which they blame for the over all damage.  But I think the demons are working as a gang, and banishing all of us to the tombs, driving us out of our homes and into filthy stinking places where we can beat ourselves with rocks and rave like lunatics.  It's no wonder that people have come to believe in a malevolent, demonic, counter-persona which we name the Devil, it would seem that evil very much has a specific modus operandi: prey on hate, alienate and isolate an individual, use their natural fear and loathing to wind them up, give them the tools of destruction and watch them go.  It can happen to anyone, it can happen to nations, but honestly why even go to all the trouble of raising up another Nazi party when you can get such random and senseless massacres using such rudimentary fear, hate and giving them perfectly legal killing tools?

I'm convinced that we have been conscripted into a religion of violence, all of us, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Atheists, Hindus, Buddhists, and all the rest.  Despite the fact that all of our approaches to faith and life would tell us, in their best expressions, that non-violence and care for the vulnerable are important attributes of the Divine, or fundamental virtues in the case of those who don't want to believe in God or gods.

I believe that worship of something is a fundamental human characteristic, we are made for it, we need to do it.  As Bob Dylan said in his brief foray into Christianity, "It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody."  The fact of the matter is that we have collectively chosen to serve a god of violence and death masquerading as an angel of freedom and liberty.  This god tells us that, if we're going to truly be free, we must accept these sorts of calamities as the price of freedom.

I'm going to call B.S. on that one, and I'm going to thank John Calvin for introducing me to Christian Freedom, which is freedom from sin and death through the Way of Jesus Christ.  Here's how it works: God has given us status as children of the Kingdom of Heaven, demonstrating God's love for us in Christ.  If we accept other terms, such as the Law, or if we do good things out of dire feelings of duty, then we are servants, and not free, and not capable of living up to God's plan for us. God has forgiven us and set us free for what Calvin calls, "Joyous Obedience." (Institutes III.19.5).  I'll just let Johnny say it for himself:

And we need this assurance in no slight degree, for without it we attempt everything in vain. For God considers that he is revered by no work of ours unless we truly do it in reverence toward him. But how can this be done amidst all this dread, where one doubts whether God is offended or honored by our works?

Now, if you divorce the confidence that should come from that assurance from the Gospel witness to Jesus of Nazareth and how he actually lived, this idea could create a monster for sure. But if you pay any attention to the other 1200 pages of The Institutes of the Christian Religion, you will clearly glean the message that Calvin would in no way, shape or form, wish to divorce this idea of freedom from the person of Christ, and the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit, to do so would be to commit a foul kind of idolatry.  In fact, if you read the whole stream of Calvin's argument here you will find him weaving back and forth over the idea of freedom and the insistence that it must be subject to the will of God, or else it is just another kind of bondage.
Which is what I'm driving at here.  We have made an idol of freedom, and in doing so have created a trap for ourselves.  Freedom, unshackled from the love of God in Christ, and from the way of Jesus, can become an unholy terror.  Freedom to do whatever you choose, if you are not constrained to love one another will get you right where we are now, and no law can fix that.  You won't be able to legislate this evil away, it requires a change of heart.
How do we work for this change?  It can seem so hopeless because the demons are indeed legion.  The first thing to do though is for all of us who claim to follow the way of Jesus to cease worshiping our idols of violence, stop looking for the solution in force, power and intimidation.  It's not as simple as guns, but guns and our faith in them is part of it. It's not as simple as tolerance of those who are different, but if we can cease hating people just because we don't entirely understand them, it would be a step.  If we stop believing there is some sort of magic bullet to solve this problem, then we will be in the right frame of mind to do something meaningful.  Our freedom is given to us so that we can glorify God, not so that we can bitterly defend our own rights, or stomp on others before they stomp on us, which is the demonic ideology that gets us where we are right now, again, and again, and again.