Beyond Guns and Belief
Grocery shopping.
Back to school shopping.
Grabbing a drink with friends after a long week of hard work.
Common activities that have been added to the growing list of ways you can lose your life at the weapon of hate. Jesus Christ, this is excruciating.
On August 3 and then again within the first couple hours of August 4, at least 31 people were gunned down in two separate acts of terrorism. The first tragedy took place in El Paso, Texas, at a Walmart. The second shooting unfolded in Dayton, Ohio, just outside a bar. The terrorist in Texas released an online manifesto shortly before unleashing his hate via bullets, using an easily accessible AK-47 variant. The Ohio shooter simply ordered his rifle online, more efficiently than the victims who were simply trying to order drinks with their friends. The shooter was found with a 100-round drum magazine attached while also carrying 250 additional rounds with him.
I didn’t learn of these tragedies until Sunday afternoon. How? By someone speaking with deep annoyance at how people are probably going to try and take their guns.
Jesus Christ, help.
People traveled to the grocery store for the basics of life, but they didn’t come home because they had their life brutally taken from them. And the response is, “You can’t have my guns.”
Jesus Christ, help.
How can we move toward peace? Not a peace that simply removes evil, as helpful as they may sound, but a peace that goes well beyond the absence of evil to find the wholeness within relations and creation. Peace that simply attempts to remove evil far too often leads to thinking about how we can get weapons into the right hands, or bigger weapons for the good guys. The dualities of right and wrong or good and bad are not the solution. We need a third voice, one guiding us to a restorative and reconciling peace.
That kind of peace is possible and fully available, to all people. We have the clear and prophetic teaching inviting humanity to participate in the restoration of all things. We’ve had access to it for at least a couple thousand years. Some call it a sermon and others have referred to it as a manifesto for a new world order. It’s transcendent wisdom, and it is needed now more than ever. It wasn’t just a speech, but it was embodied and lived out for a whole world to see and experience. This is possible and livable, even now. A few lines and then I’ll leave you to read and meditate on the whole thing for yourself.
Unmerited favor is poured out on the spiritually bankrupt, for they will awaken to the life that has no ending.
Unmerited favor is poured out on those who are soul crushed and cry out, for they will awaken to an eternal embrace.
Unmerited favor is poured out on those whose strength is internal, for their inheritance will be a restored earth.
Unmerited favor is poured out on those whose appetite and thirst is for the wholistic life, for they will experience an eternal quenching.
Unmerited favor is poured out on those who embody mercy, for they will be carried by even greater mercy.
Unmerited favor is poured out on those whose heart has glimpsed every angle of the universe, for their view will now be transfixed on the Creator of the universe.
Unmerited favor is poured out on those who create peace out of chaos, for they will be known as kids of the architect of eternal peace.
Unmerited favor is poured out on those who suffer for living a wholistic life, for they will awaken to the life that has no ending.
And then Jesus embodied this way with how he lived each and every day.
After this, the religious and political institutions conspired against him, and utilizing the weapon of the day that would cause the most public humiliation, they murdered him. But hIs death revealed how that system, and the way of violence, will never be the answer. He revealed the failure of death, while simultaneously inviting all of humanity to choose a whole new way of life. The only life that is capable of fulfilling every need in every molecule of the body. For everybody.
I am not asking you to believe these words, I am inviting you to step into them, try them on, because this is an experience to be embodied. Saying you believe something is really easy, but embodying a way of life that is upside down to the dominant way that surrounds us; well, that has you participating in the restoration of all things.
(The referred to text that is my paraphrase comes from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 5 verses 1-10. The entire sermon/manifesto is chapters 5-7, read it all, slowly, again and again and again.)
