COME TO THE MANGER: SEE GOD by Cheri Holdridge (with an assist by Kurt Young)

Where is God?  Have you asked yourself this question lately?  That is the question I get asked when 20 children and 6 adults get gunned down in an elementary school in Newtown CT on a Friday in December. I am, after all, a pastor. 

People come to me for answers in the midst of grief and chaos. Why did this happen? Why does it keep happening?  Just a few days before we had 2 more victims in a shopping mall in Oregon. In August there was the Sikh Temple in Wisconsin. In July the movie theater in Aurora Colorado. 

What is going on here?  There is a pattern. Pretty much every time, a hurting, broken person, often with some sort of mental illness, buys guns, again, often legally, and they kill people. 

And when this happens, we want to know where God is.  Where is God? I am here to tell you, that God is weeping right alongside of us. God is holding the grieving mothers and fathers, the sisters and the brothers of those children & adults. God is sitting with them in their homes, in that empty space once filled by the one who has died. Most of us have been there in that shock and grief of losing someone we loved.  God is there in the shock and horror as they grief. 

God was surely with that brave father of Emilie Parker who went on the news last night and expressed compassion for the shooter. God is with us in our shock and horror, trying to comfort us and give us the strength to get out of bed and face our fears. For those children and teachers, who will eventually have to go back to school at Sandy Hook Elementary School, God will walk with them. It will be scary, but counselors and teachers, parents, pastors & rabbis,  and grandparents will help them. And God will be with them. As we have already seen, we pull together as communities when these unthinkable tragedies strike. 

We are already hearing the stories of amazing courage: the teacher who hid her children and told the shooter her students were at gym class, and saved their lives. Another teacher, who locked herself in a tiny room with her kids and kept telling them that she loved them because if they died she wanted the last thing they heard to be her voice reassuring them that they were loved. Those children were saved. As far as I am concerned, that teacher was the presence of God for those children.  She was the voice of God. 

You see, God does not abandon us. God walks right here with us through these tragedies. I cannot explain why some people die young and some people live to be 100 years old. It appears that these 20 children and 6 adults died because of one of man’s horrible choices. The systems to protect him from himself, and to protect those 26 other people from his choices, broke down. We live in an imperfect world. 

We are in the season of Advent. We are preparing our hearts to receive Jesus, God’s love made real in the world. When Jesus came into the world, some people where threatened by the power of his love. Isn’t that weird? They saw the power of God’s love as a bad thing. You see love causes people to do crazy things. King Herod was really threatened.  He knew that there were prophecies that this baby would be a new King. He did not want a King because he was the King. Herod was crazy with power.

 By our standards, looking back, we would probably call Herod mentally ill. This is what he did. After Jesus was born, Herod wanted to destroy Jesus. So in order to try to get rid of Jesus, Herod ordered that all the boy babies in Bethlehem under the age of 2 be murdered. So his soldiers went through town. They went house to house and killed every little baby boy.  Sounds too much like Newtown, CT.  

Now Mary and Joseph had been warned in a dream about this, and they fled to Egypt just in the nick of time. Jesus was saved. But all those other mother’s babies were killed. Why? Why would Herod do this? Why did the soldiers follow those orders? Why would God let this happen? We are not puppets. God gives us free will to make our own choices. And Herod made a terrible choice. 

In Matthew (Matthew 1:18-24 for those following along on the web) we read these haunting words:

A sound was heard in Ramah,
    weeping and much lament.
Rachel weeping for her children,
    Rachel refusing all solace,
Her children gone,
    dead and buried.

Rachel is weeping for her children in Connecticut today. Our President said it well when he said, “Our hearts our broken.” The collective hearts of our country are broken today. “There is not a parent in this country who did not hug their children a little tighter on Friday night when we put them to bed.” 

          So the people closest to this tragedy need to grieve. They need to care for one another. Parents need to bury the dead. Another town in America will never be the same. A school full of children will have to go back to school at some point. The post traumatic stress will go with them. They will be wrapped in the arms of God. Pastors and rabbis, counselors and others will care for them and they will care for one another. Over time, life will move on.  They will see joy again some day.

We are shocked. Those of us, who are parents, will be a bit shaken for a few days, but soon, we will forget. Life will return to normalcy. We will get busy with our Christmas plans. The news cycle will return to the fiscal cliff, or who will be the next Secretary of State, and the next thing, and for the most part, a school shooting in Newtown, CT will fade into the background.

Unless, we decide to change the world.  Because, you see, Christmas is coming, and we are followers of Jesus.

          You see, as followers of Jesus, we are called to respond to tragedies in the world with a two-fold response: acts of mercy and acts of justice. We are called to short terms solutions (caring for hurting, hungry, damaged people) and long terms solutions (what can we do to prevent this from happening again). We are called to offer care in the midst of a crisis, but we are also to look at the underlying systems that led to this crisis and ask ourselves: what can we do to prevent this crisis from happening again? 

With any problem in the world, a movement of change can be born when people are so passionate about something that they finally decide to DO SOMETHING. 

Have you heard of Amnesty International? They began with one man’s outrage and his courage to do something about it. After learning of two Portuguese students being imprisoned for raising a toast to freedom in 1961, British lawyer Peter Benenson published a newspaper article. That article launched the “Appeal for Amnesty 1961”, a worldwide campaign that provoked a huge response. This was the genesis of Amnesty International. They now have 1,800 staff members and hundreds of volunteers fighting for human rights  around the world. (http://www.amnesty.org/en/who-we-are/about-amnesty-international).

You just never know how a movement will be born.  As a result of the shooting in CT, someone, or a team, from The Village could decide to say enough, we’ve got to stop this.  We could really research the ins and outs of gun violence and give strength to a movement to do something about it. 

Gail Collins wrote in the New York Times “America needs to tackle gun violence because we need to redefine who we are. . . . We have to make ourselves better. Otherwise, the story from Connecticut is too unspeakable to bear.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/opinion/collins-looking-for-america.html?_r=0)

I agree with her. Someone has got to do something about the violence in our country. A movement could start right here today. You just don’t know. Actually there are already movements across the country. There is one right here in Toledo called the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence. We could join one of them and give our energy to them. We might help form the tipping point that would make the difference this time in this critical issue of our day.

You see, the power of God is just that amazing. When God works in us, God can take the most horrific tragedy and turn it into a power to change the world. That is the miracle we are waiting for this Christmas.

Remember, those of us that were here last week, wrote down something impossible in our lives that we want God to make possible, and we put it in the manger. Those notes are still there. I think we could certainly add the impossible problem of gun violence in our country. 

We need to take all those concerns to the manger as we wait for Christmas. We need to pray. We need to pray like we have never prayed. Our country is a mess.   Change this God, fix this, do something that lets us do something.

We have some really broken people around us as evidenced by the events of this week. And today we need some time to grieve with our brothers and sisters in CT and in other parts of the world where there is suffering.

But you know, we have some brokenness right in our own homes and families. And it is into our world, that God sends Jesus.   Jesus is coming into our brokenness to bring us new life.

God loves us and God’s love has the power to lift up the brokenhearted and soften the hearts of those who are filled with evil intentions. God has the power to change us. And God has the power to change the world through us. That’s why we come to this manger to see God.

So I invite you to the manager. Come to the manager.  Bring your grief, bring your brokenness and your hopes for the future. Come to the manager, ready to see God.