On Pentecost two years ago, I opened the sermon in a way that maybe no one else remembers, but that haunts me: with a brief overview of the mass-shooting events in the US to that point in the year. By the most widely-accepted definition, there had been 223 as of the previous Sunday, May 21. Pentecost falls eleven days later this year; as of last Sunday, by the same definition, the count stands at 173. Which is . . . better, sure; but saying “There have been fifty fewer mass shootings in eleven more days” doesn’t exactly seem like cause for wild celebration. What’s more, given human ingenuity, killing a lot of people doesn’t require a gun. You might remember that six weeks ago, I asked for prayer for the Filipino community in Vancouver, British Columbia, as someone had driven an SUV at high speed into a street festival in celebration of Lapu Lapu Day. Dozens of people were injured, and eleven people died; the driver turned out to be a thirty-year-old man, also of Asian descent, who was dealing with mental-health issues—though according to reports, his care team had seen no signs of possible violent behavior before that point.
I could go on ad nauseam, but nausea would serve us nothing. It all boils down to this, that we live in a world which generates such horrors. It makes me think of the opening stanza of William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats wrote that in 1919, but as true a description as it may have been of Europe in the aftermath of World War I, I think it may ring even truer now. But then, like John Green in the clip Emily played last week, I feel the power and pull of the statement “Everything is the way it is because everything and everyone sucks.” Green is a favorite in our house, too, in part because of his response to the steady temptation to despair. He chooses neither avoidance nor positive thinking but active resistance: he steers into it, facing the maelstrom head-on, and seeks to find and enact hope there—which is, I believe, uncommonly wise.
We as followers of Jesus are soldiers of the Prince of Peace, an army called to wage peace against a world of war. To do that, we have to face the violent life-sucking whirlpool of human sin squarely, or else we will end up speaking peace everywhere except where that word is desperately needed. Ours is not a peace that denies war, for we have been given a hope which does not deny despair. The things which tempt us to despair are real and must be answered, and ultimately made right; our hope in the face of despair is the proclamation that they will be made right, for they already have been made right—we just haven’t reached the end of the story yet.
