If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair. ~C.S. Lewis
Words of comfort appeared so quickly. I was surprised, for none occurred to me.
Little children gunned down like tin cans at target practice, and before even one heartbeat of silence, we searched for something to say, for words to ease the pain and grief. But comfort eluded us.
Maybe, for those of us not directly affected, it will not be comfort we receive, but conviction.
The conviction we all share the blame. That God holds us all accountable when collectively we lose our way. Do we have the courage to speak the obvious out loud? This was not a mysterious, random act of evil. The killing of those innocents was the inevitable outcome of what we in America have chosen to love.
We love violence, and view those who get in our way as disposable. If movies, television shows, video games and political rhetoric reflect the state of our nation, we practice a dark religion where the satisfying answer to any problem is a blast of selfish, unchecked power. The answer to violence is more violence. The answer to fear is preventative attack. The answer to every slight offense is to go for the jugular.
In every arena, we have become a nation where our “rights” are given pride of place. The attitude is deeply imbedded, even among Christians. The “right” to hold on to what we’ve gotten, the “right” to have what we want cheaply and without inconvenience, the “right” to say and do anything that occurs to us, without interference. Freedom has been badly re-defined as being answerable to no one, and the ongoing debt we owe to one another is dismissed.
Jesus came, abandoning all comfort.
The irony of Advent: God, who could have chosen a blast of unchecked power, came to us emptied of his rights. The first song he heard was a lullaby, not a militant soundtrack. His only weapon, undefeatable love. His only strategy–to rescue us from our deadly dance with evil, and empower us to overcome evil with good.
God has not forsaken us, his heartbreak for Newtown and his anger at what they endure is far greater than our own. He is a God of both comfort in sorrow and discomfort in our failure. And he asks each one of us, every day. When will you lay down your rights for my sake? How will you overcome evil with good?
1 John 3:16-17 Philippians 2:1-11 Romans 12:21
