The news over this past week has been absolutely terrible, tragic, and unfathomable. Although war is awful, at least we can kind of understand how it happens and we expect the violence that comes with it. But it is impossible for us to grasp what would possess a human being to walk into a movie theater wearing a gas mask, set off tear gas, and open fire wounding thirty-nine people and murdering twelve. These folks just wanted to go see the premiere of a big summer blockbuster and they wound up experiencing a living (or dying) hell. What was he angry about? Is he mentally ill? Has he been possessed by pure evil? I cannot really venture a guess at the answer to any of those questions. That is for a judge to determine. I simply want to comment on this horrible situation as a pastor.
I, like most pastors in the Presbyterian Church (USA), don’t spend a whole lot of time talking about Satan. Many of my friends in different churches spend a great deal of time talking about “the enemy” as though every problem they have is the result of the devil trying to bring them down. Got a cold? It’s the devil. Your teenaged son got caught spray painting profanity on the side of an abandoned building? Satan’s got that boy. I don’t buy that and I always cringe to hear Christians talk like that. That doesn’t mean, however, that I do not believe that there is an “evil one” as Jesus calls him. A colleague of mine in ministry once asked me, “How can you believe in a personification of evil?” My answer was simply, “The harder question to answer is why did Jesus talk about him so often if he does not exist?” Jesus also said, however, “For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander (Matthew 15:19). Perhaps our “hearts” can be influenced for evil just as the Holy Spirit can work in our “hearts” for God’s good purposes.
When asked if he believed in Satan, C.S. Lewis responded, “There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite. . . . The proper question is whether I believe in devils. I do. That is to say, I believe in angels, and I believe that some of these, by the abuse of their free will, have become enemies to God. . . . Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.” Another time Lewis wrote that “the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” This begs the question, “Was the movie theater murderer evil or possessed by the spiritual forces of evil?” Again, I can’t answer that but he sure seems like as good a candidate as any. There is also the possibility that he is seriously mentally ill, but this sure seems way too planned out to be a manifestation of mental illness to me. But what do I know? I think it also needs to be noted that all of these mass killers are young men. A few years ago Rabbi Schmuly Boteach wrote a book called The Broken American Male. Maybe we all need to read that.
A related news story that is worrisome to me is that gun sales in Colorado have gone up by 40% since the mass shooting early Friday morning. So what are these folks going to do? It is illegal to take a firearm in a movie theater anyway. So are we going to be going into a movie now with several people who legally own their firearm but are illegally carrying them into a public place where they are prohibited? Will more and more businesses allow legally registered firearms? Would it have made a difference or could it have made it even worse if in the screaming chaos of a tear gas filled pitch black theater a bunch of disoriented and blinded people tried to fire back at the murderer? Why any private citizen needs an AK-47 is beyond me, but this is not the venue for me to discuss my views on gun laws, so I will just say that as Christians we should at least ask whether or not a 40% hike in gun sales in the days after a mass shooting is a good thing or a bad thing.
Another news story over the past week or two is that a pizza delivery guy in Atlanta, who supposedly was worried about a rash of robberies of delivery drivers and started carrying a gun, shot a young man who allegedly jumped out of some bushes and tried to rob the driver. The alleged robber survived after being shot in the abdomen and the leg. If the alleged robber did actually attack the pizza guy, I think someone could make a good case that he had it coming, but I want us to consider something that was said in an interview with another Atlanta pizza delivery driver. When asked if he was going to start carrying a gun the man said, “The money isn’t worth shooting somebody over. I’d rather hand over my money than have to kill somebody.” I don’t know anything about the faith background of any of these people, but I think it is a valid question to ask who is really the strongest of these two pizza delivery guys—the one who carried a gun and shot his robber or the one who even values the life of a robber more than his own money? That’s a hard call to make, but I think the second delivery driver is a welcome divergence from a mass murderer, a rush on firearms, and a gun toting Papa John’s driver. At least he stops to make you think.
In Romans 12:17, the Apostle Paul writes, “Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord. On the contrary: ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” In 1 Peter 3:9 we read, “Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing.” I am in no way implying that anything good should be done for the murderer of all those innocent people in that movie theater. Please do not misunderstand me on that very important point. The civil government exists to protect its citizens and to punish those who commit crimes such as these, although a crime of this scale is practically unprecedented. What I mean is that we cannot let the evil that is done by others cause us to react to them with our own evil acts. When that happens “the enemy” that my friends talk about all the time has won.
I am a big fan of the Christian Bale Batman movies and had planned to go see the new film in the theater sometime in the coming weeks. I in no way fault anyone associated with the film, but I’ve decided to wait until it comes out on Blu Ray disc several months from now. I’m not usually like that but there’s been some weird stuff going on in connection with that movie so I think I’d be nervous the whole time and unable to enjoy the movie. All I can really do at this point is pray for the families who are mourning, for those who are healing, for a community (which isn’t very far away from Columbine) that is in shock, for those involved in the film who feel awful about the connection between the crime and their film, for a just punishment for the killer, and that God would even turn this man’s heart so that as he hopefully lives the rest of his life in prison or on death row he might come to know the peace offered by our Lord Jesus Christ and do something good for other prisoners.
What terrible news. If it wasn’t for the good news I don’t know how any of us could keep going in this messed up world.
