Frank Talk about Newtown, Connecticut

The recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut involving the death of 20 children and six adults at an elementary school brought shock and grief to most of us. It has left us asking for answers as to why this would happen. It has also left us seeking to find ways to prevent this from happening in future.

There are many who have sought to offer answers about this tragedy. However many of these attempts are misguided. Some simply blame this on the shooter’s mental state. Today we acknowledge that mental health is just as important as physical health though often mental health treatment is sorely lacking.

Yet, this I also know; there have been mentally ill and mentally unstable people in our nation since its inception. There have been twisted minds in our world for centuries. Mental illness is nothing new. Yet, and I heard a mental health professional say this just yesterday, mental illness doesn’t prevent one from knowing right from wrong.

Mental illness has been around a lot longer than school shootings. This isn’t about mental illness.

Others will point to guns as the real problem. I’m not a gun person. In my home as a child there was a shotgun on a gun rack in our den. It was kept there because we were southerners and southerners keep a shot gun in their house. We weren’t hunters. My Dad and I would fish sometime but we didn’t hunt.

Today Nannette and I have a pistol for protection in our home but we are not obsessed with it and have never pulled it out to use in order to protect ourselves. I’m not a member of the NRA and I don’t hunt deer, ducks, wild turkeys or anything else. I have no vested interest in guns.

That said, guns landed in this country with the first settlers at Jamestown. Guns came to this country on the Mayflower. We have always had guns. Yet, we haven’t always had people shooting people in schools.

We haven’t always had people being gunned down watching a movie. We haven’t always had people being shot in shopping malls. It’s not about guns, it’s about people. The issue here is much deeper than guns.

Others will say we need to do more to make our children safer in school. Absolutely, this is not debatable. We must do all we can to see to it that our children are educated in a safe environment.

That said, we do not want our schools to become armed camps. It is my observation that the five campuses in our county are fairly safe. I’ve walked the halls of all of them and I’ve seen no fear nor felt any fear. In the end, I feel that many of our children are probably safer at school than they are at home.

What happened in Connecticut is not a school problem. I dare say if this individual had not massacred school children he would have massacred persons elsewhere.

In the end, mental health, guns and school security are only symptoms of a larger issue.

The roots of what happened in Connecticut last week are far greater than any of those issues.

There is a cancer that is eating at the collective soul of our nation and it is that which we must address.

Quite frankly we should not be surprised at what happened in Newtown this past Friday.

We should not be surprised that one made the conscious decision to massacre children. After all we are a society that has decided that it is perfectly acceptable to allow unborn children to be sacrificed because they are inconvenient.

We should not be surprised that one made the conscious decision to massacre children because we have become a society that values what is politically correct over what is morally right.

We should not be surprised that someone made the conscious decision to massacre children because we have become a society that no longer holds persons accountable for their actions.

We are a society that has made right and wrong a matter of personal preference.

We should not be surprised that someone made the conscious decision to massacre children because we have become a society that has decided to push God and the Christian faith to the margins of society.

We should not be surprised that someone made the conscious decision to massacre children because we have become a society in which fewer and fewer people seek to have a relationship with God.

Now do not hear me say that what happened in Connecticut on Friday is God’s punishment for these things. That is not the case. Rather I offer that the tragedy in Connecticut is the logical conclusion to the path that we have chosen as a society.

The one way to prevent what happened in Connecticut is to bring Jesus Christ into the hearts, minds, and lives of the people of this nation.

Of course the logical question to ask today is “Where was God last Friday?” God was there. God was there with open arms to welcome those precious children into their new home not made with human hands but eternal in the heavens. God was there in the person of those dedicated teachers who saved the lives of many. God was there present with those grieving parents. God remains in a community that is grieving.

The truth is that the evil of humanity will not triumph over the goodness of God. Even in our grief we are called today to affirm that goodness. We are called to grieve with those grieving parents for there is no greater grief than the grief of a parent that has lost a child. We are called to grieve with the families of the murdered teachers. We are called to grieve with the family of the perpetrator for they too are in pain.

As this tragedy has unfolded my mind went back to crash of ValueJet airliner that left Miami bound for Atlanta in 1996. On that plane was the son of Warren Lathem who at the time was pastor of the Mt. Pisgah United Methodist Church in Alpharetta. Warren’s son was returning to Alpharetta after a mission trip to Venezuela.

A few weeks after the crash, Warren stood before a session of our Annual Conference and affirmed before the assembled clergy and lay representatives of the United Methodist Churches of North Georgia as he boldly proclaimed that “God is good all the time and all the time God is good.”

God is good all the time and all the time God is good. As we stand on the cusp of the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ and in the shadow of a great tragedy it is on this rock we stand and it is on this great truth that we find our hope.