Unthinkable, Unsettling, and Undeniable

a sermon preached by the Rev. Diane Miller
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle
on September 14, 2008

 

It’s odd how the mind can work when things happen that don’t make sense.  When we experience things that are outside the realm of what we expect to occur, the mind offers an explanation, a hypothesis of sorts.  We humans are extraordinarily good at seeing patterns, assigning meaning, and creating narrative – at making sense of things. Usually our immediate take on a situation is pretty accurate.  Occasionally it is not.

 

Because sometimes, events are so far outside the pattern that they do not make sense.  In the immediate news stories after the church shooting this past July 27th in Knoxville, one man described what he experienced. He was seated in the front row of the Tennessee Valley UU Church in Knoxville as a children’s production of “Annie, Jr.” began.  He heard a very loud noise.  After the second explosion he realized the sound was coming from behind and turned around. The woman seated immediately behind him was bleeding from the nose.  He recalled his instantaneous thought, that the sound must have caused her to have a nosebleed.  And then he quickly understood what had not initially made sense to his brain: the loud sound was from a gun, a shotgun, and a man was standing in the back of the church shooting his direction. At that point he pushed his family down to the floor and ran toward the shooter. He was one of the many courageous church members whose brave and quick responses stopped the carnage from being worse than it was.[1]

 

Another person there that morning was retired history professor and long-time church member and leader, John Bohstedt.  He was taking the role of Daddy Warbucks that morning as part of the cast of the production of Annie, and he was seated in the back, wearing a big top hat, waiting for his cue,  when he saw a man enter the back of the sanctuary, carrying a guitar case.

 

 [H]e described the sequence of events this way:

 In the second scene of “Annie,” Annie escapes from the orphanage and is out there with her flashlight in the darkness and is about to back into Miss Hannigan [a character in the play]. The background music is suspenseful and ominous. You have a suspended sense of reality because of the theater. I’m Daddy Warbucks, and I’ve got 15 minutes before I go on.

This guy comes in… whom I’ve never seen before and puts down a little bag and his guitar case. I thought, “There are no guitars in this musical.” The bag looked like it could be a photo bag of sorts, and I thought he could be a photographer. Then he opened the guitar case and took out a gun. At that point I didn’t know what was going on.

Then he stepped into the sanctuary and fired a shot into the sanctuary. At first many of us thought it was some new sound effect or element that had been added to the suspense. Then he fired the second shot and people started screaming.

You literally have to decide, “What am I seeing?” Then you know this is the real thing. When he fired the second shot I rushed at him.

My goal was to get the gun and get it pointed up toward the ceiling. Then at least that would stop the shooting. When I got to him, I was coming at him from the side. I didn’t perceive myself to be in physical danger. There were three or four other guys rushing at him, too. He was down on the floor on his face with his arms pinned in two or three seconds.

. . . Then, I spent 20 minutes trying to keep Greg McKendry with us. [McKendry, an usher, was fatally injured when he confronted the gunman.] I was rubbing his wrists and rubbing his head and speaking into his ear, “Stay with us, Greg. You’re a hero. We need you.” His wife was there saying the same thing, and we were trying our best to keep him with us.[2]

Even with the basic facts known after the fact, most of us still try to fit the pieces of information into some sort of order we can comprehend.  In Knoxville, Jim David Adkisson, an unemployed man who had once been married to a woman who had been a member of the Tennessee Valley UU Church, intentionally walked into that congregation and fired at parishioners with a 12-guage shotgun. He killed two people and wounded seven. He left a note in his car saying that he hated liberals, and that they should die. Is there any way for the mind and the heart to make sense of such hatred?  Where does it come from?

This past Friday evening, the PBS broadcast of Bill Moyers Journal looked at the aftermath of the shootings.  They quoted the Rev. Chris Buice, minister of the church, saying that:

The man who walked into this sanctuary on July 27th was armed with a gun but he was also armed with hatred, he was armed with bitterness, he was armed with resentments, he was armed with indiscriminate anger. He was armed in body and spirit.[3]

I was proud of my colleague, who was filmed preaching to his congregation in the weeks after this tragedy, addressing the pressing issues of evil, hatred, and healing.

The Moyers program looked at the question of how the hate speech and hate literature against liberals might have contributed to this murderous rampage.  Police have reported that Adkisson had publications in his apartment including

books by popular right-wing talk-radio personalities who berate and denigrate liberals. One of the books police found in Adkisson's apartment was Michael Savage's "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder". In it, Savage calls liberals "the enemy within our country;" "an enemy more dangerous than Hitler"; "traitors" who are "dangerous to your survival" and who "should be placed in a straightjacket". Like Adkisson, Savage accuses liberals of "[tying] the hands of our military". [4]

It is clear to me that I’ve been living a protected life, because the next part of the Moyers program was really startling to me.  It included several recorded samples of the radio shock jocks who say despicable things about groups of people they despise.  More than one of them spoke of killing people they didn’t agree with, people they dismissed as not deserving to live, one comparing Muslims to cockroaches. It isn’t that I wasn’t aware that there are people who say those hateful things. I’ve studied religious history – a compendium of the hatred and cruelty people have visited on each other, and as a minister I’ve seen it up close with individuals filled with vengeful rage that blames others for their pain.  But here is the shocking part, for me: that millions of people are listening to Michael Savage and others like him every week.  And that their books are best sellers. 

Chris Buice pointed out that:

If you look at the history of like situations like in Rwanda in 1994, the talk radio was a big part of leading to the conditions that created a genocide. The Hutu radio disc jockeys would call the Tutsi cockroaches. There's the sense that these aren't human beings. You know, they're not human beings with children or grandchildren. These are cockroaches. And when you hear in talk radio that liberals are evil, that they are traitors, that they are godless, that they are on the side of the terrorist. That's hate language. You don't negotiate with evil people. You don't live in community with people you consider to be traitors. [5]

When the news stories and the UU World magazine began to tell us more about the people who were struck by bullets that day, it became evident that a close-knit community of families and friends were in the sanctuary.  Linda Kraeger, a member of the Westside UU congregation was killed that day.  She had moved to Knoxville with her husband into a two family home so that they could help their close friends, the Barnharts, raise their grandchildren. Joe Barnhart, who had retired as Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas, was deeply grieving by the murder of his close friend and co-author, Linda.  Joe Barnhart was shot, along with his brother and his sister-in-law, and his 41 year old daughter, as they sat together in church, there to watch his grandchildren in the program based on “Annie.” 

How do we make sense of the idea of sanctuary, a sacred space, a safe space, in which a shockingly profane act of deliberate, intentional killing took place?  Joe, after a lifetime teaching philosophy, struggled to make sense of it.  Among other things, the experience changed his views of capital punishment.  You’ve probably heard that dismissive joke from way back that a conservative is just a liberal who has been mugged.  In this case, Joe Barnhart, who was not a member of the church, had lived in Texas for decades, and was a supporter of the death penalty. But his good friend and colleague, Linda Kraeger, who was killed that morning, was a Unitarian Universalist who lived and professed values that came from her faith.  Linda had made a strong moral argument against capital punishment, based on the element of human error, which could and indeed has led to the execution of innocent people.  After witnessing her murder, Joe was reconsidering his stand, and moving away from his existing opinion in favor of capital punishment.  Even though this would not be a case of mistaken conviction, Joe was accepting the idea that having Adkisson behind bars so that he could not kill again was the way for justice to be done, and that execution was not going to improve anything or change the horrible things that had happened to his family and friends that day.

How do we make sense of such events?  Some people have talked about increasing safety in their churches.  I think this is always a good idea, but in fact the chances of anything like the Knoxville experience taking place again are very, very small.  Not impossible, however. In my first ministry, in San Francisco in 1976, I was leading the service when a man entered the sanctuary at 11 PM on Christmas Eve when it was lit with hundreds and hundreds of candles, and he was carrying a large can of gasoline.  He was intent on horror, on setting the church on fire, and the people and himself as well.  It was an exceedingly frightening and bizarre experience, but I did get him to give up the gasoline and we all got out of there alive.  The full story isn’t relevant here, but I am under no illusion that people bent on destruction, whose minds are filled with hate, or psychosis, or destruction, tend to pick targets with low defenses, like colleges, Amish schools, or churches. 

Following the Knoxville shootings, the UUA placed an ad in the New York Times, saying “Our Hearts and Our Doors Remain Open.”  It is posted downstairs for you to read the full text.  What was never in question was that our tradition of religious liberalism, creedless and covenanted congregations, with a commitment to justice, would not be cowed by the hate that was expressed that day in Knoxville.  We were not cowed when the Rev. James Reeb was murdered in Selma where he was advocating for civil rights.  We were not cowed when Charlie Howard was murdered in 1978, a young gay man in Portland, Maine, who was thrown off a bridge to his death on his way home from church.  Our tradition is filled with martyrs, such as Michael Servetus, Francis David, Jesus, and others who have been considered heretics and threats in their time.

How can we make sense of evil?  Unless you believe that the world is unfolding according to script, how do we make sense of such acts?  We do not have in our tradition a clear-cut theological explanation of evil, nor of suffering, disaster – when bad things happen.  If I had come across a satisfying explanation that wraps up the meaning of terrible events, I would let you know.  We would do well to continue to face evil and cruelty in its many expressions and forms.  What we do know is that our moral sense tells us that evil acts cannot be explained to our satisfaction.

So far as I can tell, the best response we can make it to continue to covenant around love as the doctrine of this church, as have the two congregations in Knoxville.  Love doesn’t solve everything or insure us against evil.  Yet it is the way to create good, and thus it is the path to continue walking together.  AMEN.

 

The READINGS were taken from an essay by the Rev. Meg Barnhouse, “Love Can’t Fix Everything” http://www.uuworld.org/spirit/articles/118660.shtml

And from a sermon by the Rev. Wendy von Zirpolo,
Unitarian Universalist Church of Marblehead, Massachusetts
August 3, 2008  “What Now My Faith?”  posted on the UUA website

 

[1] I couldn’t locate the original report; this is the way I remember it

[2] from UU World article by Jane Greer, one of several available at www.uua.org/uuworld

[3] Transcript of Bill Moyers Journal , September 12, 2008

[4] Reporter Rick Karr, from transcript of Bill Moyers Journal

[5] Transcript of Bill Moyers Journal program