A Different God, a Different Liturgy (18th Sunday after Pentecost; Amos 5:18-24; James 2:14-17; October 8, 2017)

A Different God, a Different Liturgy

18th Sunday after Pentecost
Amos 5:18-24
James 2:14-17
October 8, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

I’ve been thinking about a seminar I had in graduate school with Charles Long.

His theory of religion is centered in exchanges. Whenever a human being exchanges something with another human being (or, I would add, with the surroundings), there is what Long called "a surplus of meaning." That is, there is meaning leftover from what is contained in the exchange itself. For example, if I sell something to one of you, and I take that money and buy something from someone else, so that money and goods are circulating among us, there is not only the money and the things being exchanged. There is also meaning that is being produced by the exchanges. Now, for Long, religion is about this surplus of meaning.

Long was making this case one day and I was thinking about it, looking for an example that would throw him off his stride. "All exchanges produce a religious surplus of meaning?" I thought. "Aren't there exchanges that don't produce anything, let alone meaning? What about war?"

And so I said out loud, "What is the surplus of war?" Apparently, I wasn't the first graduate wise-guy who had thought of that because he didn't hesitate to answer, "Death. The surplus of war is death. War produces the sacred dead."

Death is an exchange that produces a religious surplus of meaning. Where there is death, especially where there is a lot of death, we can expect all the things that we think of as going along with religion. Especially, we can expect the development of ritual.

In the last week we've been enacting the ritual that we use when there is a mass shooting.

When the event is large enough--and the Las Vegas shooting was large by any measure--the entire nation is engaged. The exchange is not limited to a shooter firing hundreds of rounds from semi-automatic weapons; it's not limited to the dead and injured. The exchanges spread like ripples on a pond, or maybe like the storm surge of a hurricane. The families and friends of the victims are caught up. The first responders and the people who made the contacts with next of kin are caught up. city officials are caught up and become part of the exchanges. The media are engaged in exchanges of their own and tens of millions of us become participant-observers of the shooting.

Death produces a surplus of meaning. And death on this scale produces an explosive surplus. So we've been going through our ritual for the observance of a mass shooting, a liturgy, really, since its object is to contain the meaning produced by so much death.

The liturgy begins a little chaotically. Think of the conversations that go on each Sunday morning as we gather for worship, and of the slightly messy way that these conversations cease as a worship leader greets us and calls us to worship. A news announcement interrupts television programming to say that there has been a mass shooting in Las Vegas at a country music festival. A shared story is posted on a social media site. Reports trickle out from the site of the shooting. An unknown shooter has fired hundreds of rounds and dozens are feared dead. More details will follow.

Then, as the media start to arrive and connect with their news centers, details start to emerge, a video recorded on someone's cell phone, a short interview with someone lucky enough to escape with reports of fear, injury, and death.

Perhaps that is followed by an announcement from law enforcement officials, to reassure the public that the scene is secured and the immediate threat contained.

Then we move to the part of the liturgy that when it happens here we call something like the Proclamation of the Word. The media are our liturgists. They are in a very difficult position. Journalism is hard enough on ordinary days. When knowledge is scarce and the situation is changing rapidly and emotionally charged, it's even harder. Journalists do what human beings do. They to tell a story. That's how we make sense of the senseless. We should wait until we have a better picture, but we don't because we can't tolerate much senselessness, and a story--any story--makes sense of the senseless.

Proclamation of the Word in this liturgy as in ours is about myth-making, not in the sense of making up a false story or fake news. A myth, remember (according to me) is a story we tell ourselves to explain ourselves to ourselves. There is nothing wrong with myth-making. It's part of what humans do. But myth-making can be done badly, especially when time is short and pressure is high and we feel the unconscious need to remain ignorant of some things.

The perpetrators of large mass shooting are almost always white and they are always men, but instead of telling a story about the terrible things that white men think they are entitled to do when they are angry and get their hands on massive firepower, we tell a story about a deranged shooter, a lone wolf, a disturbed and troubled (white male) person who was driven by his inner demons to commit an otherwise senseless act. White men are the good guys, so the story we tell about something so horrid must be about an aberration, an exception to the rule.

Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, is really troubling our myth-making. He wasn't insane. He doesn't seem to have harbored paranoid delusions. He was against taxes and didn't like the government. Nothing unusual there. He was a middle class white man.

Paddock, though dead, is resistant to falling in line with our liturgy. But then, as preachers know better than anyone, the sermon doesn't always work.

Other parts of the liturgy are coming together, though. There are stories about the helpful people, people who aided others in finding safety. Some even died while doing it. One man stole a pickup truck and transported several loads of wounded to the nearest hospital. These are stories that fit. Tragedy brings out the good in people. It's helpful to think that we might respond like that, although I wonder how many people have been plunged into a nightmare of shame because all they could think of was their own safety.

The story is coming together and people are reacting in the movement that we might call the Response to the Word. Mourners gather and place flowers, candles, and messages on cards at the scene of the atrocity. They sing sometimes, pray sometimes, or just stand silently, some weeping. It's part of our liturgy.

Then comes a litany, a kind of call and response, a back and forth movement like a congregation saying a responsive reading:

"We need background checks."

"This time of grief is not the time for policy decisions."

"We need to restrict the ownership of assault weapons."

"Now is not the time."

"We need to close the loopholes on selling guns."

"Now is not the time."

Eventually the litany fades away into silence. The unspoken decision is that nothing will be done, at least not at a policy level. Those who thought that they were advocating for change were only necessary voices in a liturgy designed to restore the status quo before the shooting.

And so, there is nothing left to do but to "send our thoughts and prayers" to those whose lives have become nightmares of grief or of painful recovery from gunshot wounds.

"Now is not the time."

It's more than a ritual; it's religious ritual, an act of worship, an act of reconciliation as we adjust our expectations to a reality that is sometimes callously deadly and cannot be changed.

It's a religious ritual that contains the surplus of meaning produced by an unbearable numbers of deaths to make them bearable and acceptable.

But I'm not just a student and sometime scholar of religion. I am also a baptized Christian, an elder of the United Methodist Church, and a pastor. As anyone who is any of these is, I am a theologian. This theologian has a question: "If our liturgy on the occasion of a mass murder is a religious ritual, then what religion is it? Because it is not Christian. What god is being worshiped? What divine dream is being enacted and called forth? Because it is not the dream of the God of Jesus."

The popular theologian, Bill O'Reilly, says of the shooting victims in Las Vegas that their deaths are "the price of freedom." In the context of a religious ritual, they are sacrifices, nearly sixty people who thought they were attending a country music festival and found themselves stretched across a blood-soaked altar becoming "the price of [Bill O'Reilly's] freedom." No one asked them. They didn't volunteer. They were conscripted into a deadly sacred rite of human sacrifice, an observance of the importance of our easy access to arms designed for the sole purpose of killing many human beings quickly.

We should at least send an honor guard to the homes of the bereaved and present them with a flag and the thanks of a grateful nation. To imagine that sending our thoughts and prayers is any kind of recompense for their involuntary loss is obscene.

The rites we have been observing have nothing to do with the God whom we worship nor with the Christ whom we follow. Nowhere in our sacred texts are we called to put our trust in our firepower, nor to call freedom the ability to kill or wound five hundred people in the space of eleven minutes. The national liturgy is not our liturgy as Christians. We will support our nation when we can, but only with the recognition that its gods are not our God and its myths are not ours.

Still, we have prayed and will pray for the victims, for their families and friends, and for those who face long recoveries to new normals that may not resemble their previous lives. Amos reminds us of how nauseating God finds our worship if it is divorced from justice. James tells us that it does no good to wish or pray someone well if we do not do them good. So other than "sending our thoughts and prayers" what are we to do?

It's a hard question to answer. Across the nation, even across this congregation, we have vastly differing experiences of guns. You might be surprised to know that as a teenager I was a member of the NRA. On a twenty-five foot range with .22 caliber caps I had an average of 49.7 out of 50. I could fit a five-round shot group under a pencil eraser. In the Army I qualified as an expert with the M-16 and could field strip and reassemble it in less than two minutes, blindfolded. I enjoyed target shooting. Lots of people do.

Others enjoy hunting and, since we've killed off all the top predators, some of us must hunt game animals. It would be too hard to do it with a knife, so we use rifles and shotguns.

Law enforcement officers need handguns both to protect themselves and as the last resort in keeping the peace.

For these folks and others, firearms are recreational equipment or occupational tools. There are other legitimate reasons to have and use guns, too. While Christians have warnings from Jesus not to take up the sword, we have never argued that people do not have a right to self- and other-defense.

But guns have become objects of nearly magical power in popular thinking. We imagine that having a gun will make us safer, when the one thing that we do know about guns is that the more of them there are, the more people are killed. People who live with a handgun in their home are far more likely to be killed or injured by it than they are to stop a home invasion. But it isn't so much the reality of gun ownership or their use for protection that concern me here as it is the emotional attachment that our nation has to guns, the visceral engagement, the, dare I say, worship that we give them. For some of us they are little gods that we have fashioned and to which we pray, "Save us from our enemies." And that makes our relationship to them idolatrous.

So what do we do? I'm not terribly optimistic about the chances for real change in our national policies. I believe that serious gun debate ended in early 2013 when as a nation the United States decided that twenty first-grade children were not too high a price to pay for Bill O'Reilly's freedom.

But that doesn't mean that there is nothing we can do. We can begin with taking a hard look at our personal relationship with guns. Are we willing to allow that relationship to be swayed by reality or do we insist on denying facts that threaten that relationship? Have we put our trust in them? Are we willing to put our own lives and the lives of those whom we love at risk for the sake of holding an illusion.

Some of us who own guns for what are legitimate reasons may decide that we can give them up. We could consider doing that for the sake of our neighbors and friends. So many people respond to a mass shooting by buying a gun that the stock of gun manufacturers increased in value last Monday. We hear news of a shooting and on some level we think that we can be safer with a gun. What if there were people who said, "Guns make the world a more dangerous place. I've had mine destroyed." That's not for everybody, I know, but it might be for some.

Those of us who own guns and have them in our homes can take great pains to insure that they are secured under multiple layers of protection. If you have your guns locked in a gun cabinet and your keys are in your dresser drawer, your seven year old grandson has access to your guns. Experiments show that a five year old who finds a gun will not only pick it up, but will point it at a friend and pull the trigger.

On a slightly bigger scale, we as a congregation can decide that it is our intention that this building be a gun-free space, that guns are not welcome here, and that anyone except for law enforcement officers and others whose jobs require them to bear a weapon who is unwilling to leave their firearm outside the building is welcome to be somewhere else. We could post notices to this effect at the entrances to our building so that there is no confusion over our commitment.

But positively and above all, we can be serious about learning more deeply a better way to live together than the mutual assured destruction
of a gun- and violence-saturated culture. That means understanding ourselves more deeply. It means learning the skills of conflict management. It means learning to meet strangers with acceptance. It means learning to deal respectfully even with our enemies.

These are little acts, all done on a very local scale. But the local is part of a wider system and systems can be changed from anywhere with purposeful, sustained, courageous, and intelligent action. It is late for us, but not too late. It will be hard, but we can do hard things. It will take all that we have, but we have all it takes to midwife God’s dream into reality.

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