Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Luke chapter 19 verses 41 and 42:
41 As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, 42saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.”
Last night I received a text from a former member of my youth group from 20 years ago. He told me that yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of the death of another member of the the group named Tony, who died at age 19 by gunshot wound in a front yard fight. Yesterday some friends from the group all went out to the gravesite to pay their respects.
I still remember the moment I heard about Tony’s death. A deep lament came over me and I cried like a baby. It was the first young person in the group whose life was lost to senseless gun violence. Unfortunately, it would not be the last. I remember Tony’s grandmother being quoted in the newspaper, “He wasn’t afraid to die; he was afraid to live.”
So many in this world are so afraid to live. They’re so scared to live vulnerably, to show even the slightest sign of weakness, to walk away. I was told the other kid — also 19 — had a gun pointed at Tony’s chest and Tony dared him to pull the trigger. Neither of them could back down. One life was ended. Another ruined. Tony was buried by the county a few days later. His killer was locked up by the state for the next decade.
And somebody made money off the gun, the bullet, the burial, and the lock up.
In today’s Lesson there is great lament. Jesus weeps over his city. He weeps over a city which knows not the things of peace, the way of vulnerability. He weeps over a city which is not afraid to die but afraid to live. He weeps over a city whose leaders are bent on repeating the same mistakes, drawing the same wrong conclusions, refusing to think about an end to violence and a beginning to the way of peace-making. We can still hear his sobbing today.
Tony’s death was a sobering moment in my life. It was a moment of transformation. Until his death, I had mostly thought about trying to get kids souls saved for heaven. But my tears told me I wasn’t really ready for Tony to go heaven. They told me heaven wasn’t ready either. I began to think differently about ministry that summer. I began to think hard about race and about poverty and about guns. It set me on a whole different course, one that would inevitably lead me to seminary, and to Irie, and to a whole new understanding of what it means to “present the Gospel”.
I’m still so sorry about Tony. I’m so sorry his life was cut short — before he had a chance to grow up. I’m so sorry his assailant’s was also. Mostly I’m sorry for those who read about the murder in the paper and just wrote them both off as thugs without ever knowing anything more.
Why are kids afraid to live in these United States of America? Why are there so many guns on our streets and inmates in our prisons? Why don’t we care enough to get involved? Why do we still think the Gospel is just about the kingdom in heaven rather than the kingdom on earth?
These are hard questions. They have no easy answers. I live in a city in the midst of racial turmoil this week. There are no easy answers.
But maybe what we need is a deep lament, sobbing and a wailing and a profound kind of knowledge of and encounter with the pain and fear so many in our country live with and die with day by day. In a word, it is what we call compassion, the place of feeling and sensing and even suffering with, and also the place of transformation, and of seeing.
“If you,” Jesus said, “even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.”
No; the answers are not easy. But, “Even you,” Jesus said. Even us. If only we could see again through the eyes of compassion then maybe we could know the way to peace.
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