"Some of life's events do not lend themselves to the easy interpretation of cause and effect..."
Rev. Dr. Brent A. Smith
All Souls Community Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan
August 3, 2008
Some of life’s events do not lend themselves to the easy interpretation of cause and effect. The joy of scientific discovery is to give a reasoned explanation to what appeared previously as randomly unconnected phenomenon. Religious faith, though, dwells in another realm of human existence than cause and effect because it is not science. And that is not a certain weakness but a different kind of strength. Religious faith takes as its raw materials the grand confusions and great unanswerable events from which we are driven to create and discover meaning. Where science is about explanation, answering the “Why?” and the “How?” of a larger scheme of understanding, religion is about the kind of meaning which can attach itself after an event. Sometimes experiences occasion unspeakable pain and sorrow, and the initial response to these kinds of events is to declare them senseless. This is understandable about us. But it is precisely at that point that a spiritual reading begins because it is necessary and needed. Humanity cannot exist devoid of meaning.
Last Sunday my wife and I landed in Springfield, Illinois, a mini-vacation to the hometown of Abraham Lincoln. Abraham and Mary Lincoln married in Springfield and began their life together there. It was a life of multiple sorrows, as history often tells it. They buried one young son in Springfield. They left their longtime friends there to go to Washington, the White House, and the Civil War’s agonizing reckoning of our racist peddling in human flesh. They buried another young son while in the White House, and last Monday Pat and I stood at the train depot in Springfield where the Lincolns departed under the echo of Abraham’s apocryphal words that we repeat every Lincoln Sunday in this church:
To this place (Springfield), and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Trusting in that Divine Being, who can go with me, and remain with you and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return...
Of course, he returned. He came back in a casket. History does not record the everyday joys of the Lincoln’s family life, but the obvious sorrow is overwhelming. There is always more than what is obvious and initially overwhelming.
I heard the news about our Knoxville Church on television Monday morning. A man entered the sanctuary of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and opened fire on the 200+ worshippers gathered. The shooter was subdued by an usher, but not before he had murdered the usher, Greg McKendry, as well as Linda Kraeger, a member of nearby Westside Unitarian Universalist Church who was visiting that morning. As of the writing of this sermon Joe Barnhart, Jack Barnhart, Betty Barnhart, Linda Chavez, John Worth, Jr., Tammy Sommers, and Allison Lee were identified as injured victims of the shooting. No children were hurt though they were preparing for a Children’s Pageant as the morning worship.
In a Candlelight Vigil held the next evening at the adjacent Presbyterian Church members of the area’s Unitarian Churches were joined by the interfaith community to grieve and begin the process of putting order and meaning back into their existence. It is there that our Unitarian Universalist Association President, Rev. Bill Sinkford, spoke the words that ended our readings this morning after voicing what all initially felt. The event was senseless.
But a spiritual reading of things demands it not remain thus.
In a rambling four page letter the shooter had identified “the liberal movement” as the source and object of his murderous rage. He went to that church to unleash that rage with 75 rounds of ammunition. He chose a specific church not at random, because he knew that congregation and our faith tradition. His ex-wife had been a member several years before, and when they were married, he and she had hosted a few church gatherings and traveled to various Unitarian Universalist summer camps run throughout the country. He was particularly enraged about our view of gay men and lesbian women. The minister of that church regularly wrote essays in the local paper, and the congregation regularly sponsored support groups and community educational events concerning issues of tolerance, reason, and freedom. And he chose this church as the symbol of what he called, “the liberal movement,” rather than, say, a liberal political rally or liberal political party offices. He chose this church although in my 25 years of ministry, and in serving and consulting with over 100 of our 1000 churches, I have yet to find one which didn’t possess political conservatives as well as liberals. And votes for McCain and Obama and other candidates, will come from this congregation, too.
In events that cause such deep pain and dislocation that we at first call them senseless we often first look for an Ultimate reason to be hidden inside the senseless. In senseless personal traumas we often first look to what might be God’s Will inside of what happened, even though that can make the Divine into something bloodthirsty. Lincoln resisted this in refusing to claim God’s Will was on his side in killing Confederate soldiers, and he humbly admitted he did not know why God was allowing the bloodshed to continue. We just do not know the Divine reasons inside of human events. Because it is initially senseless by our first reckoning does not mean ascribing Divine reasons to its insides makes it any more meaningful.
One could look at the stated reasons of the shooter for “Why?”, to vanquish “the liberal movement” by starting with that church. But why would we look for sense come from someone who senselessly brought 75 rounds of ammunition and began unloading it in a worship service where children would perform from the musical Annie, “I love you tomorrow”? Sense and meaning do not come from derangement.
Yet, sense and meaning must be made of it. We are driven toward that. Time and tomorrow drive us toward that. At this very moment the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church is having a rededication service in that sanctuary. They are trying to create meaning from an event so horrific that members require counseling from a nationally composed Trauma Response Team, and a number of the members cannot even step into the sanctuary this morning for worship at their own church! If meaning is not created from this the living will have been forsaken and those who died will have done so in vain. The event now cries out for meaning larger than what God wills or wants—which, of course, we can never know—and something other than letting the shooter declare the sense of it all.
A spiritual reading of things is demanded of us who remain.
In human history, in American history, murders in holy places like temples or churches are not uncommon. We imagine that places where the holy is lifted up and sacred pronouncements made, should be immune. It doubly offends, which can lead the pious idealist to despair and the cynical nihilist to blame religion itself as the cause.
But neither the pious idealist nor the cynical nihilist gives a spiritual reading of things. And that’s what is needed: A spiritual reading.
The psychologist or psychiatrist would search for the interpersonal conflict that yielded this particular form of derangement in the shooter. The sociologist would seek out the economic and class and societal trends. The political analyst would probe the divisive, partisan landscape. But here we are called to give a theological interpretation towards gaining a religious meaning to the spiritual qualities derived in the event. We are called to give a spiritual reading of matters.
We cannot know the Ultimate reason, “Why?” because no human being knows the mind and will of the Almighty, but we can ask what Ultimate meanings are revealed from the perspective of time and history; the weeks and months and years that follow. Burning Michael Servetus for having challenged the Christian Church’s doctrinal declarations of truth is an event that means more than what his executioner, John Calvin, saw it to mean at that moment. That is the theological interpretation we can and must make. We cannot know what will come to be called sacred about this event because no human being knows what tomorrow will bring, let alone how this event will be remembered, or whether it will be remembered at all. Executing Sarah Good for unconventionalities and non-conformities has come to mean something very different than what the Puritan establishment declared they were doing at the time. That is its religious meaning. And the Spirit is an elusive thing, and what human beings often deem as spiritual are transient qualities that pass away. Two of our clergy saw a brother’s spirit snuffed out by a baseball bat 43 years ago, and what abides, what is larger than any single, mortal, finite human life, is different than what the swinger of that bat declared justified his act. What is eternal is what a spiritual reading of things is aimed at.
And this is what we seek to create, articulate, and proclaim and live by, as a way to remember and honor people whom we did not know personally, but with whom we share something deeper than words and wider than physical distance. It is more than just the random chaos of existence at work when we realize it could have been this church and me. What is it about what we do, what is it that we represent, what we are as individuals and a congregation and a faith tradition spanning the centuries, which is larger than any one single life amongst us?
Greg McKendry was not killed after publicly declaring himself a heretic as Servetus did. Linda Kraeger was not murdered after having been accused by others of non-conforming beliefs as was Sarah Good. And last Sunday there probably was no one who was injured or in attendance who thought themselves thrusting their lives into a risky protest on behalf of the unfair treatment of others as James Reeb, Clark Olson, and Orloff Miller. Ms. Kraeger traveled across town to one of the other Unitarian Universalist churches in Knoxville to see the Children’s Pageant. Mr. McKendry went to his Unitarian Universalist Church to pass out programs and collect the offertory as he promised he would. It is conceivable that no one thought the day would contain more religious meaning than rising, reading the paper, attending worship, and brunch and household chores and preparing for the grind of the work week.
But Mr. McKendry, as an usher, was a Guardian of the Divine meanings of our faith tradition. He was a hero for having leaped upon the shooter and prevented him from discharging more rounds into the congregation. He heroically guarded the congregation and in so doing, guarded what our faith tradition represents. I imagine he arose thinking he would only do the usual duties of an usher that day. But he came to give his life guarding the spiritual fact that all souls are holy because each is made in an image of the Divine. Gay, straight, black, white, yellow, red, old, young, poor, rich, every individual is a child of the same Divine Parent and this is the Ultimate meaning of last Sunday. Individuals are more holy than the creeds and sacraments of religion, more holy than what the doctrines others demand conformity to, and more holy than the demarcations of society and the divisive ways of human social arrangements.
And Ms. Kraeger, in traveling from one of our churches to another, was an Emissary of the Sacred. She went to another of our congregations to support the children of that sister church in performing songs as part of worship. Maybe unbeknownst to her, for how could she know, but her simple act of affection ended up heralding the presence of the Sacred. Love is an inheritance not just for the children of her home church, but of a neighbor church, and not for just some souls, but for all souls. She died heralding something larger than her own singular life, her own individual congregation, her own hometown, nation, and finite and mortal existence. She revealed an Affection larger than the personal affection that drove her to a neighboring congregation’s worship. What is Sacred is not bounded by space, nor by time, as we mere mortals are. This Love, which is present for all souls, is of substance Divine. And even when human beings cannot or will not, God loves all souls.
The Spiritual Freedom that is expressing itself through the liturgy of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church this morning as they seek to rededicate their sanctuary by liberating it of the false doctrine that death is its own final victory, is the same Spiritual Freedom being expressed through the Westside Unitarian Universalist Church, and here at All Souls Community Church. For Spiritual Freedom is an inheritance not just for the children of one church, but as the legacy and meaning that makes sense of all human life in all times and places. Through Love, the human form divine can be liberated from the senseless burdens that deem death the final victor. It is not the only truth that makes sense of human existence, but it is the truth that we represent through our expressions of worship and community. It is the Good News we offer to the world.
Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger, one a Guardian of the Divine and the other an Emissary of the Spirit, died to make men and women holy. Let us rededicate ourselves to live to make all souls free. Amen
Copyright Rev. Brent A. Smith
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Last updated on Thursday, June 3, 2010.
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