Aurora, Louie Gohmert, and the Question of Theodicy: Take Two

(Author’s note: While I tackle the recent Aurora, Colorado mass murder in my most recent Sunday sermon, it was obviously a very quick effort on my part, amplified by the reality that I was busy performing a wedding this weekend.  Please consider this an epilogue to that sermon. –E.A.)

Aurora, Colorado, is, in every sense of the term, close to home for me.  It is a day’s drive from my hometown of Kansas City, I have visited there on a number of occasions, and my uncle, aunt, and two cousins have lived there for many, many years.

I cannot tell you how relieved I felt when, after waking up on Friday morning and seeing the headlines, I went to Facebook and saw that my cousin Jo Beth had posted, and so I knew that my family was safe.

And now, four days later, I have to admit that my relief is giving way once more to skepticism, because I fear that we have begun to treat mass murders like the Aurora shootings, or Virginia Tech, or Columbine High School, the same way that we treat, say, genocide or war crimes—we proffer words of indignation, say that justice will be served, and swear, “Never again,” except we end up doing nothing substantive to prevent future attacks, and then something so very similar happens just a few years later, killing still more people.

Indeed, more than even staving off doing anything to protect the innocent, we become quick to point fingers instead.  Assigning blame becomes more important than learning from the massacre.

Perhaps the most (in)famous instance of this was the late Rev. Jerry Falwell going on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club right after 9/11 to blame the terrorist attacks on feminists, pagans, and the ACLU.  But it is already happening with the Aurora shootings as well.

ABC erroneously reported that the killer, James Holmes, was a tea partier.  The American Association Family’s news director was quoted as blaming the “liberal” media and Hollywood.

But the most painful finger-pointing to see was Representative Louie Gohmert’s semi-coherent proclamation that we have lost God’s protection by “(telling) him we don’t want him around.”

Louie Gohmert is a wingnut, I realize.  He signed Rep. Michele Bachmann’s letter demanding a McCarthy-esque investigation of Muslim infiltration of the federal government.  He has ranted on the House floor about “terror babies,” sans evidence.  I know I’m rising to take a lunatic’s bait.  But this is a lunatic who a lot of people listen to.

I touched on this in my Sunflower entry last week (before I knew I would be spending so much time in the next ten days about why bad things happen to good people) that yes, rejection between us and God must come from us, not from God.

But what Louie Gohmert is suggesting—that God just takes His ball and goes home—is not, I think, an interpretation of God that we should be the business of pushing, not only because of how it assigns blame, but because of what it implies about God.

The prophetic literature of the Old Testament is chock full of poetry about a God who, though spurned by us, remains faithful to protecting us nonetheless (Isaiah 59, Jeremiah 30-31, Zepheniah 3, among others).  Jesus says he has come not for the righteous, but for the sinners (Mark 2), and that He does not judge those who reject Him (John 12).  Paul’s entire conversion is one of redemption after his rejection of the church (Acts 9).

If we choose to not have a relationship with God, that is our choice.  But that doesn’t keep God from still wanting that relationship with us.  That doesn’t keep God from leaving us.  I adamantly believe that God is a deity who loves us so much that He refuses to let us be alone.

To say that God abandons us because we do wrong, or are not always capable of loving Him with our whole selves, says an awful lot about God as a petty, vindictive, emotionally immature Creator who made us and loved us one second, and cast us aside like old playthings the next.

That simply is not the God I see in the Bible, in the church, in the faces of the people who I am called to serve.

And I am forever grateful for that reality.

God always loves YOU.  Never let anyone convince you otherwise.

Yours in Christ,

Eric