The Part of the Christmas Story We Don't Talk About

        Christmas is over but the season continues, at least for me.  As I write these words, I am at my parents’ house in Michigan near where I grew up and attended Adams Elementary School – new at the time but showing its age these days!   Thoughts of Newtown, CT continue to trouble me although not to the extent that they surely trouble those who live in that community.  As I consider the Christmas story as recorded in the book of Matthew in the Bible, I am reminded that there is a part of the story that is not included in any of our manger scenes and often not considered in our celebrations at home, in church or in the community.  From Matthew 2:16-18:

When Herod learned that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious and gave orders to kill all the boys two years old and younger in accordance with the time learned from the Magi.  Then what was spoken of by the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

“A voice is heard in Ramah

      weeping and great mourning;

Rachel weeping for her children

     and refusing to be comforted

   because they are no more.”

            If only Sandy Hook were something new.  If only this were an isolated, one of a kind of problem.  Unfortunately, the “slaughter of innocents” is a time honored tradition.  How are those who follow Jesus to react to an elementary school shooting?  Our hearts cry for justice.  Our faith demands forgiveness.  Our sense of fairness is compromised by a senseless act of insanity.  We are angry.  We are sad.  We want to act.  But no action we can undertake seems remotely sufficient to right the wrong or make up for the pain.

            As is often the case in such dramatic tragedies as experienced in Newtown, CT, predictable emotional reactions surface first.  And often they seem to take an agenda driven perspective.  Quickly, many people of faith posted comments indicating their strong conviction that the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary is evidence that our nation is becoming increasingly godless and tragedies of this nature are the natural consequence of our drifting away from our Christian heritage.

            Just as quickly, another group contributes their voices saying that this is what happens when a country allows people to own certain types of weapons and this is the natural consequence of bad gun control policy.

            These comments bother me.  Both groups of people are basically saying the same thing: “See, I told you so!”  They use an event of national magnitude but of personal tragedy to advance their predetermined explanations of reality.  There is no apparent attempt to learn from the experience.  Only to “teach” from it; and to teach that they were right all along and that this only proves it.  It seems very exploitative and not at all respectful of the individuals and families who lost so much.  It is vaguely reminiscent of the folks from that Baptist church that protest at funerals for military personnel killed in action, saying that their deaths are due to America’s tolerance of homosexuality.

            If you are in one of the above categories, you might be offended by this comparison.  “This isn’t the same thing!” you might say.   I agree that it isn’t the same thing in content.  But is there really any difference in process?

1.      I have an opinion about why things are the way they are.

2.      Some tragic event of public significance occurs.

3.      I can only see that event through my lens.

4.      I will use (exploit?) this opportunity to tell others that my view is correct and that others to need to adopt my point of view or more tragic events will occur.

Is there much difference whether Step 1 is a strongly held view about gun control or a godless nation or the intolerance of homosexuality?  All three groups use Step 2 in whatever form it comes to move through Steps 3 and 4 with passion. 

In the present context, it is not that I do not believe that tragic events like what took place in Newtown should not provoke us to consider important issues that deserve our attention from gun law to morality to mental health and so on.  But for those who are often so vocal in taking us with them through Steps 1 through 4, I don’t sense any desire to have real conversation about the issues.  I listen to the loud voices and don’t believe they have any interest in personal or cultural change unless that change occurs in someone else and the culture moves to their already established vision.  If for no other reason than to respect those who lost children, family members, and friends we have to do better than to simply use Sandy Hook as an excuse to have the same old arguments.

To my gun control friends, I want to say that I agree that there is a need to reopen the conversation in our culture regarding guns and who can own what and how guns could be regulated.  The second amendment to our constitution was important enough to those who wrote and passed it that they made it the second amendment.  But it was never about hunting!  Arguments that start and finish with “Why would someone need a semi-automatic assault weapon to hunt deer?” miss the original concerns that led to the second amendment; primarily safety and personal protection not just from other citizens but also from the government itself!  The second amendment was a kind of check on government power. Productive conversations leading to changes in gun policy will need to be aware of this issue – an issue which was clearly not a part of the Sandy Hook situation.  Similarly, the “slippery slope” argument advanced by second amendment advocates (If one kind of gun is regulated, what will be next?) is too simple to be useful in this conversation.

Beyond that, was Sandy Hook really about guns?  Would it have mattered if the weapon had been a knife or a sword or a baseball bat or even a musket?  Would we not have been just as outraged?  Would we not have been just as grieved?  If the gunman didn’t have access to an automatic weapon, would we have been less impacted if only six children died instead of 20?  The only difference in the conversation would be that gun control advocates would not have a forum to advance their Step 1 opinions.

      Yes, guns are important and there needs to be a sane conversation about gun law.  If there are some who are provoked to get engaged in that conversation by the events at Sandy Hook Elementary then that involvement can be a part of looking at solutions that can contribute to safety for people everywhere, not just in schools but also in theaters (Colorado) and malls (Oregon).  But for those who simply want to say, “See, I told you so!” I encourage you to let the newcomers take the lead!

     

      To my fellow believers who are decrying the fallen, godless state of our culture.  The position that what happened at Sandy Hook is evidence that our American culture has abandoned faith in God operates from an assumption that our culture was ever good at following God in the first place!  We live in a fallen world in which the brokenness of people is played out every day in every arena.  Our country was founded and established in part with a compromise that allowed the continued practice of slavery.  The destruction of native cultures and people was a part of making our country one that stretched from “sea to shining sea”.  We have been killing each other from the beginning and barring the return of Jesus there doesn’t seem to be much reason to think it will change any time soon.  To attribute Sandy Hook to “godlessness” is simplistic and disrespectful.

 Again, we have to do better than “I told you so.” and “This proves what I have been saying all along.  You should have listened a long time ago.”  People of serious conscience need to be thinking deeper thoughts rather than simply interpreting current events through the lens of their already established world views on gun control or godlessness or mental health or whatever else. 

There are many arenas in which to do this thinking, but the one that has been troubling me the most is how did Adam Lanza get to this point and what could have been done?  As a school psychologist, I am familiar with the Adam Lanzas in my own schools.  There really is no room for them in the normal social-emotional functioning of other students and sadly, often among the staff as well.  It appears that academic skills were not a problem.  When kids do not have significant academic concerns, it can result in the socially awkward kids drifting off the radar in a school system increasingly dedicated to academic standards normal curve based assessment.  Mental health concerns definitely take a back seat when No Child Left Behind status for school districts is based on academic scores alone.  A student can get help if they have mental health concerns AND are not very good in math or reading.  But God help the kid who is “crazy” but proficient in all academics.  There aren’t enough resources to address his or her needs.  A supervisor at my own agency made this statement within the past two years: “We will no longer be providing on- going mental health services in the schools we serve.”  It wasn’t that we weren’t supposed to care about those kids.  We were being told that the total priority for our services would be the raising of achievement scores among underperforming students. (More on this in another essay!)

Back to “God help the kid who is crazy.”  As a follower of Jesus, I am obligated to consider events like Sandy Hook from that perspective.  As I think about Adam Lanza and others like him,  a few of them known and many more unknown, I have to think about the astonishing example of Jesus in terms of whom he spent time with and talked to and touched.  He hung out with prostitutes (street people today?) and tax collectors (think systemic, white collar crime in today’s terms).  He talked to women – something almost impossible for us to appreciate in our day.  He touched lepers – the outcasts of the outcasts! 

One of the hallmarks of the early Christian movement was how the followers of Jesus dealt with the outcasts and rejected.  An example was the reputation that quickly developed of Christians literally picking up and adopting abandoned children in Rome.  The commitment to helping the helpless continued from the earliest days to the present.  There is a reason that so many hospitals have words like “Mercy” and “Samaritan” and “St.” in their names!

Putting all this together, for Christians today the easiest thing to do is to look for evidence of others not living godly lives and blame them individually and culturally for cataclysmic disasters like Connecticut and Oregon and Colorado as well as California and Arizona and others before that.  But it seems more useful to ask ourselves if we are following Jesus in embracing, including and supporting the marginalized.  What more could I do to identify and minister to the Adam Lanzas in my own life?  How could the Christian community in which I live out my faith be more supportive of parents who are dealing with challenges faced by their children?  What could we do to bring into community those who are pushed to the edges by the culture as a whole? 

We don’t have physical lepers in our American culture any longer.  But we certainly have figurative ones.  Adam Lanza is an example of one of those lepers. Sometimes they are referred to as mentally ill but I wonder if sometimes being marginalized doesn’t lead to so called mental illness rather than the other way around!   Physical lepers were isolated from the culture at large and shunned because if you caught what they had, you would die.  Leper colonies were the result.  Thanks in part to a Christian commitment to touch and heal lepers, we don’t fear lepers any longer especially in America.  But the figurative lepers?

Kids like Adam Lanza often get isolated from the culture as a whole.  On rare occasions, their “leprosy” infects others and people die.  We are afraid not only of what they have done, but of what they might do if they get too close to us.  We want to do anything to stop them from “infecting” others.  But we are most comfortable when we don’t see them at all.  They and often their families as well stay hidden in their own private little “colonies”.   When one of the “lepers” gets out of the colony and someone gets hurt, we often rush to explain it according to what we already believe.  But these situations are so much more complicated than the simple four steps which are listed above and which routinely get played out in the media.  It doesn’t matter what the perspective is from gun control to morality to mental health – too often the steps look the same and produce little discernible change.

I am challenged to consider the marginalized lepers in my own sphere of influence and how I can better imitate this Jesus that I claim to follow.  I am committed to thinking less about what is wrong with others who do not live or think the way I do and to begin thinking more about what I can do to make a difference in the understanding of those who are different.  I believe that more will be accomplished by accepting responsibility for what I have not done than by blaming others for holding opinions or beliefs different from mine.  I am hopeful that by adopting these approaches maybe, just maybe I can touch and bring healing to an Adam Lanza in my life and so save not only him but others that might have been infected by his leprosy.  I look forward to working with others who are doing what they can in their lives as well.

Jim