One of the victims was Matt McQuinn who moved to Denver from Springfield Ohio last November. We will never really know why the gunman did it. Maybe he snapped. Maybe he had a mental breakdown. People are fragile. We know that.
Now we mourn as a nation, like we have mourned many times before. We reflect on the fact that there are no guarantees. We would do well to wake up and receive each day as a gift and a blessing, and not take anything for granted. We have been here before. We know that life is a blessing as is every day of it.
Our first response as followers of Jesus is compassion: compassion for the victims, their families, the survivors who will undoubtedly suffer from shock and recovery for a long time to come. We even dig deep down inside and try our best to have compassion for the alleged shooter. He is perhaps the most broken person of all in this situation. We know as Christians we are called to have compassion for him.
What is going on in our world, that any child can grow up and turn into such a cold and calculating killer? Honestly, I think we all have some responsibility to understand why our world has come to this sort of violence all too often. We need to ask God’s forgiveness on us all as a human race. But our first response is to mourn together and to express compassion for those who suffer most directly.
But of course, very quickly we start to get angry and fearful. When will this happen again? Will this happen to someone we love. The social media sites were burning up with debates about gun control and the usual arguments. I got into some of that myself. A friend of mine intervened on a thread on my FB and said there will be plenty of time for this, let’s just take a breath for today, and mourn together as a nation. I had to agree.
But here is the thing. In times of crisis, we need tools to guide our conversation in civil conversation. As followers of Jesus, we are engaged in our world. We want to do something, don’t we? When something like this happens, it pushes us to get to work, putting our faith into action to prevent these horrific events from happening again. We want to know how we can impact society for the good. It is what Jesus would do.
After all, our vision statement here at The Village says, “We are followers of Jesus and we can change the world.” So we are called to take a serious look at hard situations like this and consider how we, as a society, can order our life together differently so that we can get different results.
The Confirmation Students learned something about discernment this week. They learned that when John Wesley and his early followers were trying to discern God’s will for their lives, they would turn to four sources for guidance:
· Scripture
· Tradition
· Experience
· Reason
This tool for spiritual discernment has been named the Wesleyan Quadrilateral (it has four sides for those for whom geometry has faded a bit). Now, we always start with scripture. It is primary. But we read scripture through the lens of the tradition of the church, through our own experiences in the world, and through the use of our minds using reason.
One denomination has had a marketing campaign saying: “You don’t have to leave your mind at the door” to come to church here. That would be an argument for using the brains God gave us as we read and interpret scripture in each generation and context. We also know that sometimes the church has had a tradition for a long time but then our own experience bumps up against that tradition and causes conflict.
For example, for a long time the church had a tradition that women were not allowed to be pastors. The church tradition said that women were not gifted as pastors, but then women started saying: we are experiencing God calling us to be pastors. And congregations started saying: we are seeing in women the gifts and graces for pastoral ministry. Logic tells us that it would not make sense for God to give women these gifts if God did not want them to be pastors. There were scriptural passages that had been interpreted, in their cultural context, to say that women should not be leaders in the church. But when we re-read those in the context of the day, and allowed ourselves to consider another reading, through the lens of our experience and our reason, we came to another conclusion and discerned that yes, we believe that God does call women to be pastors. And one by one denominations started calling women pastors. And the world has not ended now, has it?
CAUTION: Now, this reading of scripture and engaging the tradition of the church, while bringing our own experience and reason to the table, needs to be done carefully and in community. Somebody could walk in here today and say my tradition says “X” and we could follow that. But we need to take time because as you can imagine, people can be all over the place in how we interpret scripture based on our own experience. That is why there are so many different kinds of churches.
The scripture for today comes from the Gospel of John (John 1:1-5 for those following along from afar). There are four Gospels in the New Testament. The Gospels are stories about Jesus. Each one is written with a different perspective. This one is the most symbolic and poetic and the most symbolic and theological in its writing. It starts with this image of Jesus being the WORD:
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.
5The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
To me, it’s a wonderful metaphor to say that God came into the world, in the form of a human being because God wanted to EXPERIENCE what life is like for us. It was like the WORD of the God, the scripture or the truth, came smack up against human experience. This wonderful introduction to John’s Gospel tells us that we cannot help but interpret the Word of God through our own experience. The way we find our way – find our light, is when we allow God’s Word, to come into our experience of life.
So, what does this mean for us? Every day, we keep listening to God, and looking for the connections between the Word of God and our life experience. This brings me to the other story I want to tell you today. It explains the “God is Still Speaking” image you have been seeing all day.
The story begins with a pastor named John Robinson, born in England in 1575. He was planning to be a priest in the Church of England but he became increasingly dissatisfied with the Church because it was looking more and more like the Roman Catholic Church. The Puritans had formed by this time and he found them more to his liking. He became one of their leaders and when they fled to Holland for religious freedom he went with them.
Among his main teachings were these ideas:
(1) The necessity for an enlightened, scholarly ministry who lived with their people and served as their teacher.
(2) The central importance of an educated laity who could read, study the Bible, and think for themselves.
(3) Independence of the local church from king and bishops. The people were the church. The people had the right to run their churches, choose their ministers and lay leaders. Their aim was a free church where men could speak their minds and seek new truth.
(4) Reform of the church from control by crown and bishops, and reform from corruption and superstition.
From http://www.sail1620.org/history/articles/109-our-pilgrim-heritage.html from “Our Pilgrim Heritage” written by Rev. Dr. Robert Merrill Bartlett
When the time came for many of his people to leave Holland, travel to America on a ship called the Mayflower, he preached a sermon to them. There is a famous quote from that sermon where he tells them: “I am verily persuaded the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth from His holy word.”
The Puritans helped created the Congregational churches which became the United Church of Christ. This quote is now being used by the UCC as our brand: “God is still speaking.” We also use a quote from Gracie Allen, comedian from the 1930’s and 40’s: “Never put a period where God puts a comma.” This is why the comma has become the trademark of the UCC.
What we are trying to say by the brand is that God continues to create; and to reveal truth to us. The relationship between God and God’s people is not static, is it moving and growing. We don’t have to be afraid that God changes like the wind and bounces from one extreme to another. But we can trust that we can grow in our understanding of God. As the world changes, God can respond to us in new ways and reveal truth and light to us in ways we could never have imagined in another time. God can speak to us in new situations. God can help us with situations and circumstances that may not have been going on at the time the Bible was written.
Now, let’s go back to the beginning of today’s sermon. God is still speaking. And this week we had a tragedy in Colorado. What does this mean for us?
It means that we need to trust that as followers of Jesus, God can give us the tools to discern how to respond: first with compassion, but second with action to We can’t be sure today what that action might be.
I can tell you that our United Methodist Board of Church and Society put out a statement on Friday, reminding us The United Methodist Church considers it a priority public health issue to prevent firearm-related death and injury, and that we have already passed a Resolution on Gun Violence. The Statement offers suggestions for work congregations can do, such as encouraging Congress to reinstate the ban on sale of military assault weapons to civilians. (Source:
http://main.umc-gbcs.org/blog/social-justice-agency-urges-prayer-for-victims-of-aurora-colo.-shootings). These are recommendations that have already been made by our brothers and sisters in the United Methodist Church, who have prayerfully considered scripture, tradition, experience and reason. They offer their work to us for our consideration. I will put their full statement on our website this week. We are not bound by this work, it is there for us to consider.
This is what it means to be part of a connectional church, with the United Methodists and the United Church of Christ. When we need help discerning some of these complicated issues, there are other people connected to us in our church who have already spent lots of time carefully considering many of these important issues. They are people with similar values to ours.
The Confirmation Students had a chance to meet some of those folks this week when they went on a field trip to Cleveland and Akron to visit the UCC National Office and to visit the Jurisdictional Conference of the United Methodist Church. And they had a chance to share their stories with us in worship.
Our Confirmation class shared their experiences about their confirmation trip. Tanner shared about going to the Freedom School in Cleveland, where inner city kids learned and got conflict resolution skills and fun dancing. Jolee shared about going to the Reading Group at the Freedom School, writing poetry and sharing their poetry. Becca shared about going to UCC National Office in Cleveland and going to the Amistad Chapel, a beautiful room which honors what the UCC did to help the people who were slaves rescued from the slave ship Amistad, she also talked about what the staff does. Quinn spoke about how you can sponsor a child for $25 per month, but here, unlike the TV commercial ones, all of the money goes to the child, not a penny to administrative costs. Max then shared about the Methodist Jurisdictional Conference in Akron. They attended a worship service with handbells and a person doing sign language, they actually illustrated Scripture with big puppets, including the story of Jesus walking to Emmaus, and the Bishop who preached said his prayers in all of the languages present. The kids had a great experience and learned a great deal.
Let me close with this. When tragedy hits, it is hard on all of us. It may shake our faith. But it is out of adversity that people of God come together to change the world. I don’t believe God causes these things to happen so we can learn from them. Human brokenness caused this tragedy. But as human beings, who love God and who follow Jesus, we are called, then, not to bury our heads in the sand, it is better for us to come together. We have a rich tradition, we have scripture to guide us, and we have our experience and our minds to make good decisions together. God gives us these tools so that we can engage the world and make a difference. WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. So let’s live out our vision. Let’s follow Jesus and change the world.
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