Unitarian Universalist Church of Minnetonka

READING: Matthew 2:12-18

Having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, [the Magi] returned to their country by another route.

When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.  “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”  So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.  Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

“A voice is heard in Ramah,
    weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
    and refusing to be comforted,
    because they are no more.”

In the Bleak Midwinter

Reverend Kent Hemmen Saleska

    I am tired.  I am sick and tired.  I am sick and tired and angry of violence in America, of violence in the world.  I am angry at a shooter, I am angry at gun manufacturers, I am angry at the gun lobby, I am angry at politicians who defend and collude with the gun lobby.  In this hour, in the aftermath of this tragedy, I am angry and in anguish like Habukkuk in ancient Hebrew Scriptures who laments:

How long, Lord, must I call for help,
    but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!”
    but you do not save?
Why do you make me look at injustice?
    Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?
Destruction and violence are before me;
    there is strife, and conflict abounds.
Therefore the law is paralyzed,
    and justice never prevails.
The wicked hem in the righteous,
    so that justice is perverted.

The perversion of justice shows up so many places in our culture.  I am angry that some of our best computer minds are being used to create ever newer and more complicated and more realistic video games where the players, many of whom are children, rack up more points the more people they kill.  I am angry that violence is both glorified and deemed to be more appropriate to show on television and in the movies than naked bodies making love.  I am angry that access to guns is easier and more available in this country than is access to health care.  I am angry that the National Rifle Association continues to defend their gun manufacturers and their bloodlust with the childishly irresponsible mantra, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”  And I am angry that so many people and so many politicians defend that mantra as well.

I am angry that people like former governor Mike Huckabee get to go on national television and say that we have so much violence in our schools because we have systematically removed God from our schools, and that as a result, we shouldn’t be surprised that our schools would become places of carnage.  These outrageously insensitive words are not just cruel and false, they also victimize the families of the dead with a second round of verbal and emotional violence.

            In Friday’s shooting, it was reported that two of the guns found were a Sig Sauer pistol and a Glock pistol.  The slogan for the Sig Sauer gun is: “When it counts.”  The slogan for the Glock gun is, “the confidence to live your life.”  So I am left to wonder what counted at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and what unfathomable form of confidence did the shooter need to have when he went there?

And of course, ultimately, I am so angry and so saddened by the deaths of 28 people, most of whom were children.  I can’t imagine what it must be like to wait in a holding area not knowing the fate of your child.  I can’t imagine what it must be like to wake up this second morning since Friday to once more be reminded that your nightmare continues whether you are sleeping or waking.  13 years ago I worked with teenagers and opened the paper to read about Columbine.  I just sat at the breakfast table sobbing.  More than a decade later I have a son in kindergarten, and on Friday, as I kept turning to my computer in my church office to read and hear updates about the kindergarteners in Sandy Hook Elementary School, I had a similar reaction.  I feel like Rachel, weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because her children were no more. So that we do not just remember the shooter, we need to remember the children and adults.  For each person – child and adult – I have a candle here.  If you feel comfortable, I invite anyone to come forward and (as Greg plays the music for “O come, O come, Emmanuel” ) light a candle in memory as I read off the names of the people who were lost on Friday: 

Charlotte Bacon, 6

Daniel Barden, 7

Rachel Davino, 29

Olivia Engel, 6

Josephine Gay, 7

Ana Marquez-Greene, 6

Dylan Hockley, 6

Dawn Hochsprung, 47

Madeleine Hsu, 6

Catherine Hubbard, 6

Chase Kowalski, 7

Nancy Lanza, 52

Adam Lanza, 20

Jesse Lewis, 6

James Mattioli, 6

Grace McDonnell, 7

Anne Marie Murphy, 52

Emilie Parker, 6

Jack Pinto, 6

Noah Pozner, 6

Caroline Previdi, 6

Jessica Rekos, 6

Avielle Richman, 6

Lauren Rousseau, 30

Mary Sherlach, 56

Victoria Soto, 27

Benjamin Wheeler, 6

Allison Wyatt, 6

    I am so, so angry, and I am so, so full of anguish.  I am almost at a loss, and I struggle mightily to figure out what to say or do next.  Sitting in my office on Friday listening to the news reports, I suddenly felt I could no longer preach what I had planned to preach.

This afternoon many of us here in our church are involved in the radio play production of the “Miracle on 34^th Street.”  Each December I give a sermon that is a letter to a Christmas character.  This year, partly because it’s a character in our show, and partly because I have not yet written a letter sermon to a female character, I wanted to write this year’s letter sermon to Doris Walker, the divorced single mother of the story who is trying to raise her child in the best way she knows how: with as much realism and as few illusions as possible.

I was looking forward to writing that sermon.  A divorced single mother in the 1940s was highly unusual.  Not only is Doris Walker not a sad character deserving our pity or a caricatured character easily dismissed, she is strong and loving.  She wants to raise her daughter in a way that will prevent her daughter from suffering the pain of shattered illusions, and the resulting anger and resentment that inevitably follow.

Sitting in my office on Friday, I felt I couldn’t write that letter sermon.  Instead, I felt the need to somehow address the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  Yet as I wrote this sermon and participated in the rehearsal for the show yesterday, I couldn’t help but identify the similarities in Doris Walker’s conflicted feelings about raising a vulnerable child in a world full of pain and disillusionment.

In the midst of my own anger, I am reminded that I can get just as angry as the next person – and that if I let it, I can let my anger turn into rage.  And if I allow my self-righteousness and rage to run amuck, then I create defensive walls, attempting to protect my own pain by directing anger at others.  As a result, I develop the capacity to inflict the kind of violence I normally condemn.  This is where I need my religion, my faith, a faith bound together and emerging from both Christianity and Judaism, to prevent the emergence of rampant anger.

Two thousand years ago, much of the Mediterranean world was occupied and oppressed by Rome.  The people of that time in particular sought a savior, someone who would throw off their oppressors and allow them to be free once more.  I believe we are living under similar oppression today – only this time, it is an oppression of the spirit.  The heavy hand of empire is upon us, an empire of spiritual emptiness that lures us into fear, reactivity, consumerism and addiction.

“Your body is so ugly,” says the emptiness, “that the only way you can be beautiful, or even acceptable, is to lose weight if you are fat, gain weight if you are skinny, straighten your hair if it is wavy, curl your hair if it is straight, dye your hair if it is grey.  And since these efforts will never be enough,” says the emptiness, “spend even more time and money and emotion on these unattainable efforts.”

“Your life is so empty,” says the emptiness, “that the only way you can fill it is with more toys, bigger houses, smaller phones, more pills, more alcohol, more sex, more adrenaline rushes.  If you are not happy,” says the emptiness, “then watch more TV, play more video games, drink more beer, get more and more angry and point your finger at someone else as the cause of your unhappiness.”

“The world is such a scary place,” says the emptiness, “that the only way you can be safe is to buy a gun.  And if you don’t feel safe buying one gun,” says the emptiness, “then go buy another gun.”

In the great empire of emptiness, the forces of fear become so powerful and dissonant that they scream for no restrictions whatsoever because for them the protection of gun ownership, the so-called “freedom” of gun ownership, is more important than healthcare, or the education or the protection of our children.  In this Orwellian cacophony, I can almost hear the doublespeak emerging that stops calling them “killing sprees” and instead, begins to call them “freedom sprees.”

I don’t want to live in a world like that.  Do you?  I don’t want to live in a world where doublespeak trumps common sense, where a lie repeated often enough becomes a truth.  Do you?  From my faith, I need to hear the call of deep peace and profound love cut through this nonsense.  It will not help to turn over the responsibility of raising my children by blaming the video game industry, or blaming Hollywood, or even by blaming heartless politicians or inadequate gun laws.  In the bleak midwinter, when everything is gray and rainy and foggy, the future is not clear.  Definition is difficult to determine between near and far, between up and down, between danger and safety.  So in the bleak midwinter, in the fog of our anger and pain, in the mists of our desire for retaliation and blame, when it seems we’ve lost our moral compass and our sense of direction is out of whack, we call for the birth of a savior.  We sing, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”

“Emmanuel” means “God with us.”  When I talk about a “savior,” though, I’m not necessarily talking about God, or a god, or any external supernatural being coming to perform magic on us.  I’m talking about how we discover our brilliance and share it with the world.   I’m talking about how we dig deep to find our light that will give us the strength to overthrow the oppression of emptiness, and then walk together, with one another, as images of The Holy for one another, to bring forth that light to live our lives in balance and wholeness.  As the song says: