When I read that there had been 45 mass shootings this past month, I thought it was a typo. Maybe 45 this year, I tried to tell myself, just to keep the sorrow at bay.
So I looked it up. The number was correct. The number of mass shootings in the United States for the year, as of April 16, is 147. In Indianapolis alone, there have been three; one on January 24, one on March 13, and the most recent one, on April 15.[1]
The victims were identified by the police as Matthew R. Alexander, 32; Samaria Blackwell, 19; Amarjeet Johal, 66; Jaswinder Kaur, 64; Jaswinder Singh, 68; Amarjit Sekhon, 48; Karli Smith, 19; and John Weisert, 74. Five more were hospitalized with injuries.[2] The shooting at the FedEx facility was yet another one involving a large capacity, military style weapon, and the President called it a national embarrassment.
I don’t know, he may not be able to call it what it is, hoping to move at least some Republican Senators to support legislation banning the use of military style weapons and large capacity magazines outside of the military and law enforcement—legislation supported by a large majority of voters, including a majority of registered Republicans. Crumbling bridges and underfunded schools, that's what I’d call a national embarrassment. But America’s paralysis in the face of repeated attacks in which four or more people are killed, often randomly, reveals an obsession on the part of too many, that I can only call idolatry—a death cult where my right to carry any kind of firearm I wish ranks supremely above any concern for public safety and public health. I can only call it idolatry because it holds my right to practically unrestricted access to weapons more sacred than my neighbors’ lives.
“The whole law is summed up in a single commandment,” Paul wrote in Galatians 5:14, echoing the teaching of Jesus, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The only love I can detect in the refusal to let the public draw certain boundaries around my right to arm myself, is an isolationist variant of self-love, the very opposite of the love of God in Jesus Christ. So I’m not trying to make a legal argument or a political argument; I’m speaking from a place of deep theological concern about self-absorption masquerading as passion for the constitution.
I’m concerned, I’m troubled, I’m sad and angry, but mostly I’m heartbroken; mostly I feel like my soul is being pummeled and bruised by the reports and the statistics— and they just keep coming, relentlessly. And, of course, it’s not just the mass shootings. Charles Blow wrote on Wednesday,
One of the first times I wrote about the police killing of an unarmed Black man was when Michael Brown was gunned down in the summer of 2014 in Ferguson, Mo. Brown was a Black teenager accused of an infraction in a convenience store just before his life was taken. Last summer, six years on, I wrote about George Floyd, a large Black man accused of an infraction in a convenience store, this time in Minneapolis. Both men were killed in the street in broad daylight.
He points out that every year since 2015, “the police shot and killed roughly 1,000 people,” but “Black Americans are killed at a much higher rate than white Americans, and … unarmed Black people account for about 40 percent of the unarmed Americans killed by the police, despite making up only about 13 percent of the American population.” And he continues,
Something is horrifyingly wrong. And yet, the killings keep happening. … Now there is another: Daunte Wright, shot and killed during the day in Brooklyn Center, Minn., not far from where Floyd was killed. There is video. … The aftermath of these killings has become a pattern, a ritual, that produces its own normalizing and desensitizing effects.
Now there is another — four bare words that convey the normalization of the horrifyingly wrong. “It becomes hard to write about this in a newspaper,” says Blow,
because it is no longer new. The news of these killings is not that they are interruptions of the norm, but a manifestation of the norm. There is no new angle. There is no new hot take. There is very little new to be revealed. These killings are not continuing to happen due to a lack of exposure, but in spite of it. Our systems of law enforcement, criminal justice and communal consciousness have adjusted themselves to a banal barbarism.[3]
Idolatry, the normalizing of he horrifyingly wrong, and systems adjusted to a banal barbarism – these are realities pushing hard against our hope.
In today’s Gospel reading, Luke uses words like startled, terrified, disbelieving and wondering to draw us into a moment when the newness of resurrection life breaks in. Jesus, we’re told, appeared among the disciples and ate with them, and he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. It was the interplay of Christ’s living presence and their immersion in the scriptures that allowed his followers to absorb the meaning of Jesus in its true magnitude.
Harvey Cox used to teach a course called “Jesus and the Moral Life” to undergraduates at Harvard. Some of his students identified as Christian, and many did not, but the content of the course was so compelling that their numbers kept going up until Cox finally had to move the class to a theater usually reserved for rock concerts. Initially, he ended his class with the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and death. He did so out of respect for his students who came from a variety of religious backgrounds, but, as he wrote later,
there was another reason why I had been trying to steer around the Easter story: Classrooms, at least the ones I teach in, are not viewed as the proper venue for testimonies. What is supposed to go on in classrooms is ‘explanation.’ But not only did I not know how to explain the Resurrection to the class, I was not even sure what ‘explaining’ it might mean.[4]
Eventually he realized, though, that by leaving out this part of the story he was not just being unfair to his students, he was “also being intellectually dishonest, a little lazy, and cowardly.” He decided that he would “sketch out some of the current interpretations of the Resurrection and suggest that they would have to decide among them on their own. … [And so he] set out to move from silence into at least some kind of conversation.” And when he did, he had his mind opened by the witness of the prophets.
It … became evident that stories of raising the dead in the Old Testament did not have to do with immortality. They are about God’s justice. … They did not spring up from a yearning for life after death, but from the conviction that ultimately a truly just God simply had to vindicate the victims of the callous and the powerful.
Resurrection hope was a thirst for justice, and the resurrection of Jesus was God’s affirmation and fulfillment of that hope. “To restore a dead person to life is to strike a blow at mortality,” wrote Cox, “but to restore a crucified man to life is to strike a blow at the violent system that executed him.”[5]
Idolatry pushes hard against our hope; the normalizing of the horrifyingly wrong pushes hard against our hope; systems adjusted to a banal barbarism push hard against our hope— but God raised Jesus from the dead; and immersed in the community of believers and the witness of the scriptures, we too are having our eyes opened to his living presence and our minds to the true magnitude of his life, the true magnitude of his teachings, and the true magnitude of his execution and resurrection.
Dr. King loved to talk about proper adjustment.
Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities, we all want the well‐adjusted life. … But there are certain things in our nation and in the world [to] which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all [people] of good‐will will be maladjusted until the good society is realized. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism [and the] self‐defeating effects of physical violence… In other words, I’m about convinced now that there is need for a new organization in our world. The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment — men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”[6]
When our institutions have adjusted themselves to a banal barbarism and the idolatry of isolationist self-love, the advancement of creative maladjustment is the faithful, the hopeful, and, yes, the loving, response. It is our insurrection against the reign of death, in the name of Jesus.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/article/mass-shootings-2021.html
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/04/16/us/indianapolis-fedex-shooting
[3] Charles Blow https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/14/opinion/us-police-killings.html
[4] When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 273-274.
[5] Ibid., 274.
[6] Excerpt from a speech at Western Michigan University on Dec 18, 1963. Dr. King frequently repeated the theme of “creative maladjustment” in speeches and sermons.