Christmas
Where was Christ in the Newtown Massacre?
As I am sure many clergy throughout America did this past Sunday, I preached about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut that occurred on Friday, December 14.
Update: If you would like to hear the recording of this sermon as it was preached, go here.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.
I normally do the major part of my sermon composition on Thursday, and as with most Thursdays, I had my sermon completed by the end of this past one. But then Friday happened, and I realized that I had to write a new one. So please forgive me if it’s not quite as organized and polished as I would prefer.
If by some happy chance you have not yet heard, on Friday morning in the city of Newtown, Connecticut, a young man killed his mother and then went to the elementary school where she worked and proceeded to gun down twenty children aged six and seven, as well as six women who worked at the school and then, finally, himself.
Newtown is only about thirty miles away from my father’s hometown of Southington, Connecticut. My grandmother still lives there. I’ve driven through Newtown many times on my way to see her, and I’m fairly sure I’ve stopped there a few times. I know what towns in that area are like, and they are deeply ingrained in the years of my father’s youth.
I don’t watch television very often, so when I heard about the shooting, it was through reading it in online news, as well as some reports on the radio. The sense of spectacle that television brings to the news is not really something that I prefer to have in my life. So the means through which I learned about the shooting were somewhat less sensational. Nevertheless, no matter how we learned about this story, it is horrifying.
I’ve thought a good bit about what happened over the past couple of days, as I’m sure that most of you have. Some of us have children about that same age, including me. I’ve also read lots of analysis on this, including a lot of strong political opinions about things like gun control, school security, mental illness, and so forth. No doubt there are politicians already poised “not to let a good crisis go to waste” as soon as a few news cycles have passed and it wouldn’t be too unseemly to seize the moment and turn it to political advantage. If there is one thing we can count on from our political class, it is that they will use moments like this to advance their particular agendas.
What I want to address, though, is the horror of this experience and its spiritual impact, something that the politicians cannot really help us with, though I think some folks want them to and therefore trust them a bit too much in moments like this.
There are many things we could say about the spiritual basis for what happened in Newtown, which of course is now at least the seventh killing spree we’ve had in America this year. We should rightly point out that such things are simply another extension of the culture of death that our society pursues. Is it any wonder that human life occasionally can mean nothing to someone in our nation, with decades of pursuing a foreign policy in which we have trained young men and women pre-emptively to kill an “enemy” who has never attacked us, with decades of pursuing a national lifestyle in which the lives of the most innocent and helpless of us all are at the whims of “choice,” with presidential “kill lists” and drone assassinations, with the dehumanization of nearly anyone accused of a crime as an “animal” or a “monster,” with the militarization of our police forces who all too frequently conduct SWAT team style raids on the wrong houses and kill and traumatize innocent people with near impunity, with the subjection of the God-given sanctity of the human person to the whims of social redefinition and the shifting winds of culture? Is it any wonder?
We could also lend some perspective here and point out that, even while we stand horrified at what still is fairly rare in statistical terms, on the day that twenty children were gunned down in Connecticut, nationwide more than 3,500 children were killed by abortion, never seeing the light of day. While we are shocked at what happened in Newtown—and rightly so—there are people here in our own parish community for whom mass killings, even of children, at the hands of gunmen and suicide bombers is the normal, daily life of family members and friends in the Middle East, where people have been driven out of their homes, their schools and churches burned to the ground, their priests tortured and murdered, their families attacked, held for ransom, killed, etc., etc.
There are many things we could use to gain some perspective—not to tell us that what happened in Newtown on Friday wasn’t that big of a deal, but to help us make some sense of it all. And it may also help us to gain some wisdom for what we can do and what we can say.
At its base, our problem is this culture of death, the culture of the diminishing of the human person. And there are moments when we see this diminishing go too far, like on Friday, and we may be tempted, perhaps momentarily or perhaps more compellingly, to begin to lose our faith. How could God permit this? Is the price for us to know God’s goodness really so high? How can we say that suffering can bring about redemption with this kind of suffering?
Such a question is asked in extreme poignancy by the character Ivan Karamazov in the Dostoevsky novel about the brothers by that name, and yesterday I read it quoted by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, a devout Roman Catholic, in a column he wrote for this horrible tragedy. Here’s the passage he quoted from Ivan, along with some of his commentary:
“Can you understand,” he asks his more religious sibling, “why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? … Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much?”
Perhaps, Ivan concedes, there will be some final harmony, in which every tear is wiped away and every human woe is revealed as insignificant against the glories of eternity. But such a reconciliation would be bought at “too high a price.” Even the hope of heaven, he tells his brother, isn’t worth “the tears of that one tortured child.”
Douthat goes on to point out that Dostoevsky does not provide any rhetorical argument against Ivan’s complaint against God, a God Ivan might be willing to admit exists, but Whom he rejects because His “price” is “too high.” Rather, Dostoevsky instead demonstrates the goodness of God through the love of his characters in transcending suffering. Douthat writes that this pattern is also found in the New Testament itself, in which God’s love for mankind is established not through a philosophical argument, but through the suffering and death of God Himself as one of us. The cross is the hour of glory for the Son of God.
In case you did not hear, there were also some moments of glory on Friday. At least three of the women killed that cold day in Connecticut put themselves between the shooter and the children—a 27-year-old teacher named Victoria Soto, the school’s 47-year-old principal Dawn Hochsprung and special education teacher Anne Marie Murphy, who was 52. Victoria hid her students in a closet, confronting the shooter and telling them the kids were somewhere else. He gunned her down. Likewise, Dawn physically tried to apprehend the shooter and was also killed for it. Anne Marie died shielding students from the shooter with her own body.
There may well be more stories like these, and we can also compare them to the account of the 14,000 innocent boys two years old and under who were killed by King Herod as he turned his rage toward the infant Jesus, the King of the Jews who threatened him so much. We celebrate their feast just a few days after Christmas.
While reasonable people can disagree on the causes and remedies for evil moments such as these, we ultimately should remember that all death, no matter its cause or its character, is fundamentally evil. All death strikes against God’s purpose for His creation. He did not create suffering. He did not create death. Death is a declaration of war against God Himself, because God is life. God not only creates life by beginning, but He continues to give life, even after physical death.
While of course we have many theological explanations that can be given for how evil came into this world and why God permits man to continue to have free will even in the face of man’s evil, what we should remember and what we must live in our lives is not any explanation. Explanations are useful only insofar as they get us to the business of living. Rather, what we should live is Christ’s conquest of death. We don’t have to figure out death. I don’t think we can. Rather, we as Christians are here to grapple with death and to engage it as an enemy.
As Fr. Alexander Schmemann wrote in his brilliant little book For the Life of the World: “Christianity is not reconciliation with death. It is the revelation of death, and it reveals death because it is the revelation of Life. Christ is this Life. And only if Christ is Life is death what Christianity proclaims it to be, namely an enemy to be destroyed, and not a ‘mystery’ to be explained.”
The truest answer to violence is love. The truest answer to death is life. The only prevention for violence is for the heart to have no violence within it. We can legislate all we like, but the violent heart will still find a weapon and the opportunity to use it. We cannot prevent evil through any system devised by mankind. But we can grapple with evil and defeat it, but only with love—real love, too, not just some sentimental feeling, but self-sacrifice. Those women who died with those children demonstrated love. In that moment when they chose to give their lives for the children in their care, it did not matter if they had happy feelings about them—probably some of those kids annoyed them on one day or another. What mattered was the act, the act of defeating death with life. Christ said, “Greater love hath no man than this, than that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
There is no argument, no philosophy, no policy that can properly answer what happened on Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. It all rings hollow in the end, doesn’t it? But as the columnist Ross Douthat also writes, this horrible story comes to us at a time when another story is almost upon us.
You see, in nine days, we will celebrate Christmas. And yes, the story and spirit of Christmas are largely the stuff of sentiment these days. There is the cute baby Jesus, the happy shepherds, the adoring wise men, and so on. But if you look at the icon of the Nativity of Christ, you will also see that the manger is shaped like a coffin, that the myrrh brought by the wise men is the kind of thing that will be used to anoint the dead Jesus, that the swaddling clothes are very much like burial cloths. In the true story of Christmas, Herod rages and the road to the Cross is already begun.
And that is our answer. We stare evil in the face, and we say again and again: Christ is risen!
To the Christ Who is our life be all glory, honor and worship, with His Father and the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.
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The Incarnation and the Lament in Ramah
The following sermon has been preached by me in several slightly different versions a number of times over the years. This is the one I preached on December 27, 2009.
For the Sunday after the Nativity
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.
Christ is born! Glorify Him!
There is much confusion in today’s world. A great many things which have been taken for granted for centuries are all being called into question in our time. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? All of these things, so well-known to our forefathers, are now all up for grabs in a kind of almost universal cultural delusion, where if we pretend long enough like we don’t know, then eventually we discover that we really have forgotten. This is a relatively new state of affairs.
What is not new, however, is delusion. Since the Fall of Adam, mankind has been living under a veil of darkness, unable to see what God created him to see. But in this holy season we are now experiencing, a light is shining into the darkness. The people that sat in darkness have seen a great light! That light is the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God-man.
If we look at the world around us, the Incarnation almost seems like a non sequitur. Most of us are so busy trying to survive or trying to earn more or achieve more or get more that it almost sounds silly simply even to say it. It sounds even more irrelevant to ask why God would become man. For many of us, God is so far away and so irrelevant in our lives that the idea that He would become flesh and dwell among us might sound a bit interesting but really has nothing to do with us.
But here’s something that’s undeniably true: every one of us is dying. Whether by the slow decay of years or in a sudden and unexpected tragedy, each of us will someday come to experience the awful reality of our mortality. And when that moment comes, will we have taken hold of the Incarnation of Christ and held on tight, or will we have brushed it off as a nice story without any real meaning or power in our lives? So let’s consider for a moment what the Incarnation means, not just in terms of a story, but in terms of real theology. And in the Orthodox Church, all theology is practical theology, or else it is useless.
The Son of God, Who existed eternally before all creation, saw that His beloved creation had turned away from Him, had cut itself off from the Source of life. He saw that we were dying—physically, psychologically, spiritually. He saw that we were suffering, that we were alienated from our Maker and from each other. He saw that we were broken. He saw that we were sick and infected with the disease of sin and death. He saw that we were enslaved to the Devil. And looking upon our desperate condition, He chose to enter into it.
He chose to become one of us. He’s not merely like us. He doesn’t simply look like us or act like us. His humanity is not a fancy illusion. It’s real. He was really conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary and by the power of the Holy Spirit took flesh from her just as we all did from our own mothers. Into the womb of that pure and holy young woman entered the very God of the universe, not just taking up His dwelling in her, but making her humanity His own. He stepped into time and into history. He stepped into the genealogy of mankind. He not only has a mother, but grandparents. And great-grandparents. And cousins. And so on. He’s really human, and not just a human, but He has become the human, the new Adam, the new prototype and template for every human person. Adam himself was made according to Christ, and now in Christ is human destiny fully revealed.
It is for this reason that St. Stephen whom we heard about today in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles can go gladly to his death, because He is going to the Christ by Whom and for Whom he was created. It is for this reason that when we read about the horrifying crime of Herod in today’s Gospel, we too weep with Rachel, the voice lamenting in Ramah, whose children are no more. It is because the face of Christ is imprinted on every human person from the moment of their conception.
The world is confused about this question today, so much so that in this country, it is legal to kill a child even within his mother’s womb. And more than 1/5 of all babies conceived in America are killed by abortion. The place that should be the ultimate in safety, warmth and intimacy becomes a battlefield, where there is a war being waged against the most innocent, the most helpless, the most vulnerable. In Belgium, a proposed law would make it legal for a doctor to take the life of a child who is less than a year out of his mother’s womb if he is regarded as “deficient,” even if his parents do not consent. Why? How can we do this? It is because we no longer look at human beings, even in the womb, and see the Christ according to Whom they were made.
No matter what the law says, it is still a great and horrific evil to murder a child, whether in the womb or out of the womb. Yes, the world is confused about what it means to be human, at what moment a human being suddenly changes from a blob of cells at the whim of inconvenience into a “someone” who should be protected by the law. But we Christians cannot take what is legal to define what is moral. We cannot let the government interpret for us the Scriptures and the revelation of God. As Orthodox Christians, no matter what political or economic theories or parties we prefer, it is incumbent upon us to work hard to stop the ocean of blood that is flowing from the wombs of women, by voting, by loving, by speaking the truth, by giving up our own convenience to save lives, heal the wounded, soften the jaded, and reach out to the desperate.
Because we as Orthodox Christians believe that a person is a person, whether in the womb or out, it is deeply inconsistent and hypocritical for us to say that murder of a 2 year old should be illegal but that the murder of someone in the womb should be legal. It is no more a “private” decision than is the decision of a doctor in Belgium to kill your infant baby, whether you want him to or not. Murder is murder, and it affects everyone in the community. That we have made it “safe,” “clean,” and “convenient” should horrify us even more. We have sanitized infanticide.
There are those who say that illegalizing abortion again will drive it into dark alleys. That is an interesting image to me, because it is precisely in such dark alleys that murders are so often perpetrated. How does bringing murder out into broad daylight, making it into a “respectable” and profitable profession, make it any better? If what is in the womb is a human person, and our faith says clearly that it is, then abortion is murder. Period.
Now, you may say that science doesn’t really tell us when the sacredness of humanity becomes present in the womb. You may say that many people in our society all believe that it’s just fine to kill an unborn child. You may say that philosophy has no clear answers for the definition of human identity. You might be correct in saying all those things.
But what is absolutely clear is what the Orthodox Christian faith has to say about this. From the Scriptures to the Fathers to all the saints throughout the whole 2000 year history of the Church, Orthodox Christians have always believed that the moment of conception is the moment of the spark of humanity, the moment when the face of Christ is present in a new, wonderful and unrepeatable way. There is absolutely no ambiguity in our tradition in this matter. You either stand with the Church or you stand apart from it. This is deadly serious. If you are Orthodox, then you believe this. If you refuse to believe it, then you are deliberately and of your own free will departing from Orthodoxy.
Since we know from the unanimous Holy Tradition of the Orthodox Church that abortion is a deadly sin against a helpless human person, what do we say to the young woman who is in desperation? What do we do for the woman who conceived a child without thinking, or because of violence? The answer is that we do everything we can. It is not enough merely to say that abortion is a sin. Though they may not know it or admit it, those who abort their children are harmed forever by what they do, and while many do it merely out of convenience, the desire to have sex without family, many also do it because they believe they have nowhere else to turn. It is a curious thing that abortion clinics are often built in the poorest and most desperate of neighborhoods. These people know their target market.
For those who are thinking about abortion out of desperation, there are many things we can do. First, we can offer to help raise the child, to help provide for what she needs to be a mother or perhaps help to provide a mother and father who cannot have their own children. We can offer to provide for counseling to such women, so they know their true options. If you don’t want to do any of those things, ask yourself how much human life is really worth. We can do so much for them. Only think for a moment. The only thing holding us back is lack of love.
For a woman contemplating abortion or even one who has had an abortion, or perhaps for the man or other people in her life who encouraged or threatened her into it, shall we turn the awful face of condemnation? Shall we yell at them, blow them up, ostracize them, disown them, gossip about them? Absolutely not. Those who have committed and suffered from abortion need to be healed. They need to be loved. They need to be made whole again through the grace and love of Jesus Christ that we are equipped to give them. But no one can be healed if we refuse to admit that they have been wounded.
This is the truth of the holy Orthodox faith, that it really does reach right into the intimate and concrete depths of our souls, and yes, even into the very womb. If we believe it, if we claim the name “Orthodox” for ourselves, then we have to live it. It is not enough merely to mind our own business and not egregiously hurt anyone else. We have to take positive, active steps to reach out to others, to touch their lives, to become that miraculous presence of Christ for them. There’s always somewhere we can start. Make a donation to a crisis pregnancy center. Tell that young woman you know who’s pregnant and doesn’t know where to turn that you’re really there for her, and then love her and help her no matter what anyone says or thinks.
Why should we do this? It is because of the awesome reality of Christmas, because the God before all the ages became a human person. I wonder what the Virgin Mary would say to us if we told her that what was in her womb didn’t get full human rights until after she gave birth! Or in Belgium, it would be another 12 months! If it is true that Jesus Christ is fully human from the moment of the Annunciation, then we who were created according to Him as our template, according to the image of the invisible God, we are also fully human from that same moment, that holy miracle of conception, when God reaches into the intimacy of a man and woman and undertakes creation all over again. It’s the same for us as it is for Jesus.
The Incarnation of Jesus Christ is all around us, most especially and clearly in those who are baptized and chrismated as Orthodox Christians, those who partake of His Body and Blood and are adopted members of His family. The Lord told us that whatever we do to the least of His children, we are doing it to Him. If we help the poor man, we are helping Christ. If we comfort the desperate, we are ministering to Christ. If we save the life of an innocent child, we are giving to Christ. The same is also true if we hate, ignore, oppress, gossip about, sneer at, or kill. We are doing it to Christ.
In this holy and blessed season where we are drawn by the Church to contemplate the birth of our Saviour, the God-man Jesus Christ, let us also be drawn to see and to contemplate the intimate connection between Him and His creation. He created us, like a poet dreaming beautiful lines of holy poetry to make into persons, all reflecting something of Himself. But even more deeply than that, He became one of us. He bridged the gulf between the Creator and the creation, becoming part of His creation. And in doing so, He imparted to every human being, from the split second of their conception, the awesome dignity and majesty of being the children of God.
Let us therefore honor and worship Him, let us draw ever closer to Him, by becoming conduits of real, self-sacrificial love and grace for every person with whom we share this Earth, most especially the truly vulnerable and helpless.
To the Incarnate God-man, therefore, with His Father and Holy Spirit, be all glory, honor, and worship, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.
