Woe!

The bible on my desk was open to this:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

For you tithe mint, dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the Law:

justice and mercy and faith.

It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.

You blind guides!

You strain out a gnat, but swallow a camel!

-Jesus of Nazareth (Mt. 23: 23-24)

Because the text for last week was the beginning of Matthew 23.  The whole of Matthew 23 is more or less devoted to Jesus ripping the religious authorities of his world up one side and down the other.  The newspapers this morning are full of the story about the Church near San Antonio where a man walked in and started shooting.  The event itself is tragic and leaves us groping in the dark for some sort of reason or meaning to it all, but we don't come up with one.  After Sandy Hook, where the victims were mostly elementary school children, and where we had an actual grown up occupying the Oval Office, I thought, "surely something will be done now."  I think that's where I first started to notice that the only thing that was really being done was "thoughts and prayers."

Now, after a list of tragedies that has grown so long I'm ashamed to start actually start naming names, we come to another senseless violent act that happened to a church full of people who were in the middle of worship.  The usual "thoughts and prayers" are going out, the tithes on mint, dill and cummin are being paid in full, but the weightier matters of justice and mercy and faith... not so much.

I used to think that gun control was the answer, but I'm increasingly thinking that is just the gnat we are actually arguing about straining out, not the camel we are swallowing.  Don't get me wrong, I agree with a lot of common sense gun regulations (here I will add my usual disclaimer that I am a gun owner, I like shooting, but I despise the NRA and their totalitarian approach to the issue), but honestly this goes deeper than guns.  This is a blasphemous spirit embedded deep in our psyche, and I think "thoughts and prayers," are the idolatrous offering to that blasphemous spirit.  They are window dressing, offered as sympathy by people who have the power to change things, but refuse to do so.  More from Jesus' burn fest in Matthew 23: 

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!

For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, 

but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and all kinds of filth.

So you on the outside look righteous to others,

But inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

It may surprise you to learn that what happened in that little Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs Texas is actually something that many churches have considered a definite possibility for a while now.  Years ago, the insurance company that covers a lot of churches sponsored a seminar, which was actually hosted by the Presbytery at the church I served at the time.  There they gave us the run down on armed security guards and the possible response measures to an "active shooter" situation.  To be clear, the church I served, along with most of the churches represented that day were no bigger than Sutherland Springs Baptist church, which means we had limited resources for things like security. We mostly got a nervous laugh out of the idea of having armed security guards and so we had to sort of think about much more modest responses to what was being pitched as a "real danger."

The conclusion I have come to over the years is that there really is very little we can do about the deranged individual that seeks to do us harm. The people in Charleston welcomed Dylan Roof into their prayers and they treated him kindly before he shot them, their families forgave him, illustrating Christ's compassion in the world.  The response of Sutherland Springs is still in progress, but I believe that we as the church must have another way of responding to the violence of the broken world. We must, therefore attend fully to the "weightier matters of justice, mercy and faith."  That means we cannot give up our hope and faith in the God that conquers death in exchange for an idol that promises to help us avoid it.  Idols cannot deliver on their promises, because they are not real.  The expressions of "thoughts and prayers," has become trite and hypocritical at this point.  The thoughts aren't going to change anything and the prayers are misdirected, vague and sentimental.

I believe in the power of prayer; I believe there is a God who answers our prayers, but I do not believe that the prayers of "thoughts and prayers," are being actually offered to that God, they are being offered to the blasphemous idol of our own arrogance and stubborn pride.  They are being burned on the flaming idol of our power hungry, violence loving, fear-diseased egos.

I'm not giving thoughts and prayers to the people of Sutherland Springs this morning.  I am offering them my lamentation, and my cry to God for comfort.  This is not a prayer, it is a yell, perhaps even a scream, I want it to be something that only a holy and loving God will be able to receive, because I believe that only a God who has a heart capable of breaking will understand:

Lord God, Enough!

Enough of the desolating sacrilege.

Enough of the whitewashed tombs.

Enough of our own sense of self-importance.

Enough of our blasphemous addiction to power.

Enough of our idolatrous craving for security.

Enough of our consuming fear of death.

Enough of our paralyzed, helpless prayers.

Enough, O God, Enough!