Staring at the Screen
Too many thoughts to determine where to begin.
Writer’s block is most often associated with either a lack of time or creativity. Staring at the screen in this moment represents selecting what to say amidst all the things available. Buffalo. The SBC. Uvalde.
One common theme between these three events?
“We can’t do anything about it.”
Four hundred pages provided by Guidepost reporting the findings of their investigation into possible sexual abuse cover-ups by the Executive Staff and Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention between 2000-2021 tells the story of the fear of liability. Lawyers recommended a pathway SBC leadership should follow to avoid liability lawsuits related to Southern Baptist pastors and leaders turned sexual predators/abusers. The worst part of the narrative is that at the highest levels, ministers in leadership opted for that advice rather than care for the abused.
What advice?
Southern Baptists relate via voluntary association. Once established, we differ from connectional systems by insisting on the autonomy of the local church. Convention lawyers, internal and external, seized on both the principle of voluntary association and local church autonomy to avoid creating a clergy abuse database. Complaints that came before the Executive Committee most often involved guilty clergy who were passed on to other unsuspecting churches. No, a database could not be created to help churches vet candidates said the lawyers. That would violate local church autonomy. Essentially, the SBC, through her lawyers, told abuse victims and Survivor Advocates,
“We can’t do anything about it.”
Twelve days ago, an 18-year-old drove to a Buffalo supermarket and killed ten people. Evidence uncovered after the shooting revealed the teen bought into fringe ideologies that are increasingly pitched as mainstream. Bewildered by mass shooting incidents, many express no hope,
We can’t do anything about it.
We are all quite numb from yesterday’s news out of Uvalde, TX. Another 18-year-old with an AR-15 kills 21 - 19 children and two teachers. Golden State Warriors coach, Steve Kerr used his pre-game Press Conference time to scold Senators for doing nothing with HR8. Jimmy Kimel stared into the camera, shocked that these events continue happening concluding what is a clear observation, we won’t do anything about it.
Elizabeth Breunig writes in The Atlantic, A Culture That Kills Its Children Has No Future,
Yesterday, before the families of Uvalde had buried their children, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a televised interview that he would “much rather have law-abiding citizens armed and trained so that they can respond when something like this happens, because it’s not going to be the last time.” That is to say: It’s going to go on indefinitely. It’s not an end, exactly, but life inside a permanent postscript to one’s own history. Here is America after there was no more hope.
Read that last line again.
Here is America after there was no more hope.
Ken Paxton, Texas Attorney General, tells those in an interview,
We can’t do anything about it.
My friend Jason Micheli wrote in the aftermath of yesterday’s shooting,
I’m not a lawyer though I almost went to law school. I’m not a politician though I’m a politics junkie. And as a Christian, I don’t feel at home in either party our politics offers us. So I’m not interested in talking about policies or laws here. Politics and law are not my area of expertise. I’m a preacher. The Bible is my area of expertise.
As a professional interpreter of the Bible, I can say without qualification that a society that tolerates the ongoing slaughter of children in the name of rights is not a free society but an idolatrous one.
Churches may not pass statutes enforced by civil authorities. But, churches can follow the Scriptures that establish their very existence as God’s better place in the world. As God’s better place in the world, churches extend into the present the words of Jesus, who offered sanctuary to all who are weary and heavy-laden. Who would dare question whether the abused, the survivor, is overburdened and exhausted?
When the Church, Christians, adopt the paralysis represented in,
We can’t do anything about it,
we are making a theological claim. We are not making a partisan claim. We are not making a legal claim. We are making a cultural claim. We are making a theological claim.
I could not find the Tweet, but a perceptive account owner made the point that the more Christians claim nothing can be done about mass shootings, particularly at public schools, the closer to ending any talk of an Almighty, omnipotent God. Sooner than later, the conclusion may be that God does not care or that God can’t stop these events.
My quibble here is not with those who have chosen a way to understand Divine Action that allows for unlimited human freedom concluding that God can’t. No, it is for the majority that fill our Evangelical, even Baptist, churches. Those who tell others and themselves that God has a plan. Adopting the cultural default, that we can’t stop mass shootings and abuse, is to stipulate that God in fact can’t.
Few would adopt the position that God can’t. So it is on the Church, churches, to resist the cultural conclusion that these things cannot be stopped. When the disciples received information that challenged their understanding of the way the world works, considering future action impossible, Jesus said,
with God all things are possilbe.
Rather than focus on what we think cannot be done, it is on those that bear witness to Jesus to assess what Jesus did and then do it. Churches and Christians must trust that the Spirit will give us both the will to work and the imagination so that in all ways the Church/churches are sanctuaries, safe havens, for those who have been harmed, to present a better place in the world where harm is proactively and energetically resists.
The Church cannot fall into the trap that says,
We can’t do anything about it.
Especially when lives are on the line.
If anything, we give ours.