Living Word of God, you speak and chaos is transformed into order and light shines in the dark. Speak to us through the words of the stories of Israel and of Christ so that we may believe and be healed. Comfort, O Comfort your people and speak tenderly to us in your grace. Amen.
The last two months have been devastating for so many lives in the northeast. At the end of October people from New Jersey to Connecticut had their lives completely upended by the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy. The loss, pain and struggle involved in such a broad area is hard to put in perspective for its scale. The events of the last few days, however, in contrast to scale of Sandy have been just as devastating and more in the focus of their impact on one small community, one small school, individual families. The events of Sandy Hook come all the way down to an intimacy every family can comprehend and fear.
I have no words words right now that can adequately express the events of the last three days in Connecticut. The tragedy of the events at Sandy Hook Elementary School are too raw, too visceral, to be adequately expressed by the normal words of discourse. My throat literally aches and is bruised from the tension of the past 48 hours.
Although I have made my life in Central Pennsylvania for the last 30 plus years I still have deep roots in my home state of Connecticut. Most times when I drive to and from my folks home in Branford, CT I drive down Route 25 through the center of Newtown. It is the prototypical small town New England hamlet with houses dating all the way back to the 1700s; a time by which some of my ancestors had already been in Connecticut for 100 years. My Connecticut Yankee roots grow deep. I cannot begin to anticipate the feelings I will experience the next time I drive down Route 25.
Twice before I have received phone calls from home in Connecticut telling me of friends and family whose lives have been touched by shootings there. The first was the Connecticut Lottery shootings in 1998 when a close friend of my brothers and myself was shot and killed by a disgruntled employee while he tried to help save others . That was the first time I felt this bruising in my throat. It remained for days.
The second was when I received a call from my parents because my cousin had shot and killed her daughter. My cousin had a marginal 70 IQ and her whole life had been marked by the developmental challenges surrounding that. At the time her daughter who was similarly challenged was struggling with school because of the kind of pain that can be inflicted on those who are different by young children. My cousin had sought out assistance from others but the desperation she was experiencing was never heard by various professionals. Finding no help and no way to deliver her daughter from her suffering my cousin chose the unimaginable and tragic path of buying a gun intending to take her daughters life and her own. The first shot that took her daughter's life created such a shocking scene nothing like the scenes on TV that it jolted my cousin to her senses and she ran to a neighbor's for help. This is the briefest of details but it once again resulted in that same aching and bruised throat I had felt before.
Today and for a considerable time there will be hundreds of throats in Newtown that will be so bruised. Pain will surge with every difficult swallow. And for many voices will simply dry up and only the weakest of words will be forced out expressing the pain and the fear of what has happened.
It is in such moments that the strength and power of words of faith speak for those who cannot speak. Words that assert the boldest of confessions in the face of a world where a descent into chaos can appear to wash all life away in an instant. Comfort, O Comfort your people writes Isaiah. Words that we will read from pulpits and sing in the words of Handel's Messiah in our Christmas celebrations.
Some say that words are cheap, but for the believer these words of God's comforting grace are among the most expensive ever spoken. These words were the Isaiah's words of hope given to a people is exile who had lost everything they knew. Torn out of their homes in Judah they were taken to Babylon. The exiles thought that they had been cut off from their God. "How can we sing the Lord God's song in a strange land," was their lament. To these people God spoke a word of comfort. But it did not come quickly but still the people held onto the words for decades and even centuries as new generations found themselves in similar periods of oppression across centuries and millenia.
The words of Isaiah and the Old Testament have been used to define the story of Jesus of Nazareth. In Jesus birth and in his death it was Isaiah's words that were used again and again to define his life. Emmanuel, God with us, Jesus was born into a world of political conflict. Immediately, Herod attempts to wipe out the nascent king and the threat to Herod's throne. Every male up to two years old in the kingdom is ordered killed. Echoes of Moses define the child through the deaths of innocent children. The scale dwarfs even the loss of Newtown but the pain of parents and the living is always the same. It is a pain that King David knew. It is a pain that Martin Luther knew. In the end we are told that Jesus of Nazareth, the only Son of God died, too. Not as a child but as a young man. He, too, died an unjust death, tortured and crucified in the presence of his friends and mother. God has shared our pain to the very depths of the human experience. When the scriptures speak to us of suffering, comfort and hope they are not empty words and they costly indeed. We are broken saints.
(To be continued...)
The last two months have been devastating for so many lives in the northeast. At the end of October people from New Jersey to Connecticut had their lives completely upended by the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy. The loss, pain and struggle involved in such a broad area is hard to put in perspective for its scale. The events of the last few days, however, in contrast to scale of Sandy have been just as devastating and more in the focus of their impact on one small community, one small school, individual families. The events of Sandy Hook come all the way down to an intimacy every family can comprehend and fear.
I have no words words right now that can adequately express the events of the last three days in Connecticut. The tragedy of the events at Sandy Hook Elementary School are too raw, too visceral, to be adequately expressed by the normal words of discourse. My throat literally aches and is bruised from the tension of the past 48 hours.
Although I have made my life in Central Pennsylvania for the last 30 plus years I still have deep roots in my home state of Connecticut. Most times when I drive to and from my folks home in Branford, CT I drive down Route 25 through the center of Newtown. It is the prototypical small town New England hamlet with houses dating all the way back to the 1700s; a time by which some of my ancestors had already been in Connecticut for 100 years. My Connecticut Yankee roots grow deep. I cannot begin to anticipate the feelings I will experience the next time I drive down Route 25.
Twice before I have received phone calls from home in Connecticut telling me of friends and family whose lives have been touched by shootings there. The first was the Connecticut Lottery shootings in 1998 when a close friend of my brothers and myself was shot and killed by a disgruntled employee while he tried to help save others . That was the first time I felt this bruising in my throat. It remained for days.
The second was when I received a call from my parents because my cousin had shot and killed her daughter. My cousin had a marginal 70 IQ and her whole life had been marked by the developmental challenges surrounding that. At the time her daughter who was similarly challenged was struggling with school because of the kind of pain that can be inflicted on those who are different by young children. My cousin had sought out assistance from others but the desperation she was experiencing was never heard by various professionals. Finding no help and no way to deliver her daughter from her suffering my cousin chose the unimaginable and tragic path of buying a gun intending to take her daughters life and her own. The first shot that took her daughter's life created such a shocking scene nothing like the scenes on TV that it jolted my cousin to her senses and she ran to a neighbor's for help. This is the briefest of details but it once again resulted in that same aching and bruised throat I had felt before.
Today and for a considerable time there will be hundreds of throats in Newtown that will be so bruised. Pain will surge with every difficult swallow. And for many voices will simply dry up and only the weakest of words will be forced out expressing the pain and the fear of what has happened.
It is in such moments that the strength and power of words of faith speak for those who cannot speak. Words that assert the boldest of confessions in the face of a world where a descent into chaos can appear to wash all life away in an instant. Comfort, O Comfort your people writes Isaiah. Words that we will read from pulpits and sing in the words of Handel's Messiah in our Christmas celebrations.
Some say that words are cheap, but for the believer these words of God's comforting grace are among the most expensive ever spoken. These words were the Isaiah's words of hope given to a people is exile who had lost everything they knew. Torn out of their homes in Judah they were taken to Babylon. The exiles thought that they had been cut off from their God. "How can we sing the Lord God's song in a strange land," was their lament. To these people God spoke a word of comfort. But it did not come quickly but still the people held onto the words for decades and even centuries as new generations found themselves in similar periods of oppression across centuries and millenia.
The words of Isaiah and the Old Testament have been used to define the story of Jesus of Nazareth. In Jesus birth and in his death it was Isaiah's words that were used again and again to define his life. Emmanuel, God with us, Jesus was born into a world of political conflict. Immediately, Herod attempts to wipe out the nascent king and the threat to Herod's throne. Every male up to two years old in the kingdom is ordered killed. Echoes of Moses define the child through the deaths of innocent children. The scale dwarfs even the loss of Newtown but the pain of parents and the living is always the same. It is a pain that King David knew. It is a pain that Martin Luther knew. In the end we are told that Jesus of Nazareth, the only Son of God died, too. Not as a child but as a young man. He, too, died an unjust death, tortured and crucified in the presence of his friends and mother. God has shared our pain to the very depths of the human experience. When the scriptures speak to us of suffering, comfort and hope they are not empty words and they costly indeed. We are broken saints.
(To be continued...)
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