Newtown: Advent Death Into Christmas Life

The longtime Managing Editor of The New York Times, the late James “Scotty” Reston, once observed, “I’m a Scotch Calvinist and nothing makes me happier than misery.”

Given the profound misery experienced on Friday just three states and 300 miles north, I don’t think any of us who hail or not from such Presbyterian roots could be happy in the least. 

For just two days and two hours ago, the statistically dull average of 20 minors slain by gunfire every 2½ days in America suddenly took flesh and dwelt among us in the faces of 20 six- and seven-year-olds in one school time and in one school place.

One school place: a tony suburban shelter. Newtown – by way of Littleton – by way of the Amish children slain at Nickel Mines. That “it-can’t-happen-here” shocker: the media feeds on it. Pulling upon us and tugging upon us in a way that the gun slayings of 21 children in Detroit already this year could never do.

The fact that eight children are being gunned down daily in America should already pull upon us. If not that impersonal fact, then the faces of 21 dead Detroit children this year should tug upon us. And yet: This faceless fact and these scattered minority faces have not proven compelling to us. As for 20 comfortably-kept first graders in a few minutes in a single school … that got our attention.

For a weekend of reflection, at least. And then we can -- and sadly, we probably will -- put this heartbreak on the gun rack next to Littleton and Tucson, Nickel Mines and Aurora, and Virginia Tech. Because, to liberally paraphrase Scotty Reston, nothing seems to make us individually happier in our country than ignoring the social warning signs all around and living aloof of the general misery.

Living individually happy – aloof of the general misery. For after shock, then aftershocks, comes our lived antidote: our daily, languid, suburban indifference.

But not so for an Advent-into-Christmas people! Living happily aloof of general misery is not an option illuminated for us by these three candles this morning!

For with the Advent Christian, living patiently midst this giddy contemporary lie known as the “Christmas season,” these sudden crucifixions cannot be rubbernecked and then driven merrily past. For with the Advent Christian, longing for and living into a joy-filled, resurrected life – as opposed to clinging to a cloistered and removed “happy” life – death and dying of this profundity can never be neatly avoided.

Instead, what this and every Season of Advent testifies to us, the Advent Christians, is something quite the opposite. For Advent testifies not that in the midst of life, there is death to be avoided at all cost. Advent testifies that in the midst of death and out of the specifics of death, we experience life and living and Christmas … as never before!

Christmas – new life – comes again this year to us out of the midst of death  … yet not in the act of death itself. For our God is never a death-dealing God. Our God could not be found in the pulling of those three triggers on those 20 children and eight adults on Friday – and I’m including the gunman. That was not God’s will; that was not part of God’s plan; God certainly didn’t need a few more little angels. Any more than God found it necessary to put God’s son to death on a cross. 

But God can and has been and is still being found in the midst of those deaths, and out of those deaths. For in the midst of those deaths and out of those deaths comes the life-hope of these three Advent candles before us -- lighting the way toward the starlit night of God’s new birth. God’s new birth, as the Prince of Peace: where shepherds lead the way with staffs beckoning forth, as opposed to Caesar’s legions coercing with swords ever drawn.

For in the story of Christmas that awaits us still, there is no right for us around life’s manger to bear any arms. Instead, we are borne forth into God’s incarnation. Into the arms of God’s cradled love.