Friends,
Ten years ago today was a Sunday, so I was preaching in Iowa as part of an Advent series called “Great Expectations.” I focused on the part of the Christmas story that originated with the prophet Isaiah – A young woman shall conceive and shall bear a child and you shall call his name ‘Emmanuel’ – and was ruminating about the power of children as symbols of innocence, a fresh start, exuberant possibilities. Then I wrote this:
Friday’s awful tragedy at Sandy Hook elementary school has laid a pall on even our best feelings and sentiments. It reminds us that the prophets, whose voices we hear during the season of Advent, are ever speaking out of a time of dismay – where disasters leave even the mightiest leader speechless and numb. And just when we thought that we had this seasonal celebration figured out, suddenly we find ourselves groping for some way of comprehending the incomprehensible.
It is still, ten years later, hard to wrap one’s head around the reality of Sandy Hook. It’s hard to imagine how someone can dehumanize children and teachers to make them targets of murder without hesitation. It’s hard to understand how a nation that pretends to value life seems to love its guns more. It’s hard to comprehend how an unspeakable tragedy like Sandy Hook has been repeated again and again and again. It’s simply wrong that guns are the number one cause of death among children and teens in the US. In an essay on Wednesday, German Lopez offered this chart and the observations that I will cite below it.
As this chart shows, “The U.S. accounts for 97 percent of gun-related child deaths among similarly large and wealthy countries, despite making up just 46 percent of this group’s overall population.” What makes the US stand out so much, German states, is this: “The U.S. has more guns than people.” (German Lopez, “The Lives They Lived,” The Morning, The New York Times, December 14, 2022.)
Ah, but we’ve heard all this before. We’ve heard the arguments and the counterarguments. We’ve seen the cycle: Hideous act of violence; outrage; gun control activists demanding change; thoughts and prayers from weapons manufacturers and their supporters; very little change, if any. Repeat. I don’t mean to be cynical. There have been some small incremental changes along the way that do matter. But, by and large, it is a frustrating cycle of the same thing over and over.
The endless cycle of violence may be one of the best arguments for repeating the Advent season year after year. Year after year we hear Isaiah longing for a day when weapons are transformed into tools. Year after year we hear John the Baptist calling for radical and systemic transformation. Year after year we proclaim how Jesus came to us as God’s gift to free us from the power of sin and rescue us from our own worst tendencies. Year after year we lean into hope – hope for a new day, a day of peace, and time of justice. And year after year we learn that a baby in the manger doesn’t magically change everything, but invites us into a new way of being where everything can change. So, year after year we embrace hope anew. It is a chastened hope, a hope that remembers last year and the year before that and ten years ago with sober reality. But year after year we proclaim hope because to lose hope is to allow the powers of death and destruction to have the last word.
The season of Advent is much more than just holding our horses a few weeks before celebrating Christmas. It is the performance of hope itself, a hope that resists violence and lives toward peace. Over and over.
May this season fill you with a resilient and persistent hope,
Mark of St. Mark
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