When It Is Still Not Yet

“But you O LORD, reign forever;
                your throne endures to all generations.
Why have you forgotten us completely?
                Why have you forsaken us these many days?
Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may be restored;
                renew our days as of old–
unless you have utterly rejected us,
                and are angry with us beyond measure.” – Lamentations 5:19-22

by Ben Howard

Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison

More than likely in the next few days, we will have names and suspects. We will have arrests and we will have someone to blame. We will call them evil and they will be our new demons. They will serve as the face of menace and destruction and death.

We will hate them.

They will be the new James Holmes. The new Adam Lanza. The new terrorists.

And then we will fight. We will argue about mental illness or terrorism or who should have known what and when they should have known it. There will be hearings and there will be reports and there will be overpaid men in ties yelling at each other on cable news and using words like “obviously” to preface statements that are far from obvious.

Someone on Facebook will blame Obama. Someone else will blame God.

It is all so tragic, so horrible, yet so familiar, so normal.

Yesterday, after checking around to make sure that my friends were all okay, I thought to myself, “Only 3 died? That’s not bad.” Only?!? Really? That’s what crossed my mind? What kind of monster hears about the death of 3 innocent people, the pain and suffering of hundreds, and the emotional tragedy of thousands and says, “That’s not so bad”?

I am numb. The violence, the tragedies, the death, the brokenness and the desperation of the world just keeps coming. One after another. And they are so loud. They are so ever-present and unwieldy and unmanageable that I can barely do more than let them wash over me in a cacophony of tears and pain and blood.

And I am left cold, and I am ashamed that I do not feel more, that I do not hurt and ache along with those who hurt and ache. I am ashamed that my day was quite pleasant and relatively normal.

Since I am a Christian blogger and I have Christian blogger friends, I will read a bunch of articles about God today. They will talk about lament, and where God is in the tragedies, and how God is working with us to heal this broken world. They will talk about the heroes and the acts of love and truth and justice that happened in the wake of the explosions. They will talk about the Kingdom of God that is coming, the Kingdom that is already here.

And I will remember, bitterly, coldly, painfully, that though it is already, it is still not yet.

"In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express." - Romans 8:26

Peace,

Ben

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87.

You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.

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What Nolan's Batman Movies and Jesus Have Taught Me About How to Respond to the Shooting in Aurora

by Steven Lefebvre

First let me apologize if you find this opportunistic or inappropriate and forgive me for adding to the noise…

Friday morning I took a dozen of my youth to see the The Dark Knight Rises, but not before I was awoken by a phone call from a concerned parent. She asked if I was still planning on taking the youth to see the film in light of the attack that morning in Aurora. I think she ultimately called me to think out loud, so I quietly ‘uh-hu-ed’ along as she pontificated that it’s probably safe because we were going to a morning viewing. Safe.

I was thoroughly entertained and satisfied by the film except for the scene where the antagonist, Bane, holds up the Gotham Stock Exchange Hostage. In this scene, he and his henchmen murder about a thirty people in cold blood. With the events of last night swirling around in my brain, I found it disturbing and terrifying. I caught myself looking around the theater a few times both imagining what it must have been like for those souls in Colorado and feeling afraid and unsafe myself. Safe.

Who promised us this safety that, every time a tragedy shatters our feelings of security, prompts us to demand answers? Why do we think that watching 24-hour news cycles and finding out what kind of parents the killer had will put the pieces back together? Why is it so important that things go back to normal?

Wake up my friends.

Evil exists in this world. If we learned anything from Nolan’s last Batman movie it’s that some people “just like to watch the world burn.” Sometimes bad things happen and there is no rhyme or reason, no plot or motive, no way to prevent it from happening, no way to promise it won’t happen again. It just simply exists.

This is the way it is for most people in this world. Whether its people dying and being mutilated by war lords and militias or epidemic diseases without cures or hurricanes or tornadoes or psychopaths or alcoholism or pedophilia or drought or starvation. Evil exists in this world. As long as there are varying levels of hate, greed, jealousy, inequality, prejudice, pollution, exploitation, bitterness, lust, disease, and sloth, it is here to stay.

Some people get the benefit of going longer periods of time being ignorant to evil’s presence, but sooner or later a tragedy will strike and it will find you. But the damned thing is, somebody in this modern world promised us safety. They told us suffering is bad and the quicker we can alleviate the discomfort the better. So when tragedy strikes we look at the talking heads like they're the crew on a sinking ship directing us to the lifeboats. Perhaps we tweet about demanding better gun laws, or we tell everyone to carry their own guns so that when it comes we can be ready.

But deep down we all know what the truth is: no amount of government, wealth or artillery will protect us from tragedy, suffering, and our inevitable deaths. The one thing that we all have in common is our suffering and its aim is to teach us compassion and tolerance. You cannot fix suffering, you can only run from it or turn and face it, embrace it and begin the process of grieving, which is the way we heal.

Please stop watching television. Please stop demanding answers. Please stop trying to go back to the way things were.

We have become a society of numb and lonely people. We complain about being enslaved by Facebook, our smart phones, and our individualized busyness. We complain that our kids are too addicted to video games and have become increasingly desensitized to violence. So why do we want things to go back to “normal?” Why is this uneasiness we feel so bad and our feeling of apathetic numbness so good (or maybe it’s the blinding stress and busyness)?

Sure, to be aware of the world’s suffering is to be full of tension and it causes us to reevaluate our values and our priorities. But I believe, as I watched people be murdered on screen today, Friday’s events put me back in touch with reality: Violence is evil. I should be uncomfortable with it. This doesn’t mean that there is some silver lining to the attack, that it was good that it happened because now we can all appreciate what we have, blah blah blah, etc etc etc. No, that morning’s event was senseless and unexplainable.

However, what we are today is conscious. So the question I wish to pose is: How are you going to respond? Are you hoping that something else will come along and trick you into believing you are safe again? Are you going to choose despair or apathy and hopefully time will lull you back into your ignorant and idle bliss?

Or are you going to use this as a time to be present to the suffering in this world? Will you choose to suffer with everyone you know and those you can imagine, learn more deeply the story of the human condition, discover the ways you are perpetuating the cycles of evil in this world, repent, forgive, forgive everyone because they are just like you and be more charitable to your fellow human?

WE CANNOT CONTROL EVIL. The only thing we CAN control is whether or not we choose to participate in perpetuating it.

Grieve well my friends.

Pray. God is near.

Shalom.

Steven is the Director of Youth and Young Adults at St. Paul's Episcopal Church.  He writes/posts about his music at http://www.stevenlefebvre.com/