The Colors of Advent

Yesterday was the third Sunday of Advent.  There were red candles on the windowsills  surrounded by greenery, and wreaths with red and gold ribbons streaming down hung high above them in the tall windows on either side of the sanctuary.  A Christmas tree at the front of the sanctuary was topped with an illuminated angel.  In spite of the rain the pews were nearly full, with families with their children home from college, the winter family vacations not yet started.

Advent is the season of preparing for Christmas.  I grew up in a church that saw Christmas as a secular holiday that had no place in church (we should celebrate Christ's birth every Sunday, not just in late December).  I love the rituals of the liturgical calendar.  It's not that they bring back childhood memories but they connect us to ebb and flow of seasons and harvests and lives ordered by movements of the sun and moon, rather than Outlook calendars.

But yesterday wasn't about joyous preparation.  It was about the unspeakable tragedy that occurred  on Friday.  I was at clinic when it happened, with charts appearing in my box faster than I could complete a patient visit.  That morning I'd left my Blackberry on the dining room table and I had a doctor's appointment of my own in the early afternoon.  So it wasn't until later when I got to the office that I heard the full horror of what had unfolded that morning in Newtown, Connecticut.

Yesterday their names were listed in a black rectangle on the front page of the New York Times.  Twenty first graders, killed in their classrooms, and 6 adults from the school -- the principal, the school psychologist, and 4 teachers -- and the mother of the shooter, who had been his first victim, before he took her guns and her car and headed off to the elementary school.  There was selfless heroism at the school -- the principal and psychologist were killed when they tried to intervene, teachers tried to shield their young students from the gunman -- but they couldn't protect the children from a young man armed with a Bushmaster AR-15.

It's not that all mass murders are committed with guns -- they aren't -- or that they only occur in the United States -- they don't -- but they occur here more often than anywhere else and they almost always involve guns.  The ease with which guns designed to kill lots of people quickly -- like the gun the shooter used at the Newtown elementary school -- are obtained in the United States is  part of the problem, but gun regulation alone won't prevent these tragedies. We also need to do better with providing care for our mentally ill, and providing a safe place to grow up for all our children, including the odd ones who have few friends who get bullied or just ignored. By Friday night, the story the New York Times posted on line included the obligatory quotes from acquaintances of the killer. A high school classmate said “I never saw him with anyone. I can’t even think of one person that was associated with him.”

A sermon on the third Sunday of Advent about taking a stand, about being a part of a community that demands safety for our children.  Surrounded by the symbols of the season, thinking about guns, and mental illness, and wondering if this is the episode that is bad enough that we will demand action, that we will realize that we can't just demand, that we have to take action ourselves.  Otherwise, nothing changes.

There are no other people who are going to step up to the plate on this one.  There's only us.