“Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples.” That’s what today’s epistle reading tells us. There was a man – a man who had so many gifts, so many abilities, so much going for him – and yet he chose to use his considerable capabilities to do harm rather than good.

What could get into a man to cause him to focus the use of his talents on destruction instead of promoting well-being? It’s hard to grasp. Here was a man – Saul of Tarsus – a man raised in such a prosperous and respected 1st century Jewish family that he had the honor of being granted Roman citizenship. Here was a man – a man so intelligent and devout – that he had the honor of having been admitted to the most prestigious rabbinical school of his time. Here was a man – a man so accomplished – that he was being groomed to take a place on the Jewish ruling council. All that, and yet he chose to use his talents and position to try to destroy lives – simply because the people he targeted believed a differently from the one he did – because they believed in Jesus. How could Saul wind up with such malice and destruction in his heart? He wound up that way simply because, any other evidence to the contrary, he was deluded to believe that the followers of Jesus were a danger and that his point of view was absolutely right. He believed that the only way to uproot their evil was to stamp it out -- even the lives of the enemies that he believed he saw in each and every Christian. How could anyone possibly think that way?

Tragically, throughout this past week, we’ve witnessed the fruit of even more deluded thinking than Saul’s. We’ve seen paraded before us the scenes of horribly destructive behavior by someone who was just as certain that he was right and that those around him were evil. We’ve seen paraded before us the names, faces and biographies of the 32 innocent people he murdered in his rage-filled mayhem. We’ve been exposed to the depths of Cho Seung-Hui’s tormented soul’s inner beliefs. And we’ve been deeply wounded by it. Our hearts have been pierced by the shock, pain and sadness of it all. Since I served that very community as a chaplain for 2 years, I know that mine has.

Whenever this sort of tragedy happens we witness our media trying to make sense of it all. And we ask ourselves, “How can something like that happen? Where God is in the midst of such acts? How could someone possibly do some-thing like that? What was going on inside him? What went wrong with the systems that are supposed to protect us from that? What can we do to stop it?”

It happens because evil is real. God, never a puppeteer yet always loving, weeps in the midst of it – for those who were killed and for the one who did the killing. It happens because people can become deeply disturbed emotionally. It happens because people can hold on to hurts and real or perceived abuses until the anger festers into malice, the malice into rage, and the rage into utter hatred, such that others become objects to be destroyed. In the process, as he loses sight of the humanity of others, a person loses his or her personhood. The systems fail because it’s impossible to monitor the downward spiral each and every person’s murky inner darkness and even more impossible to control it. It happens over and over again in this country because something is wrong with our society, but our insecurity causes us to refuse to look at it. Over 1 thousand more people each year are killed in this country with guns than in all thirty other developed countries combined.

What’s wrong with us?
1. Community is lacking in our time, and people are not as connected as they used to be. Isolation is rampant and people who don’t fit in are ostracized.
2. We’re about the most socially Darwinian culture in the world. We’re convinced, since everyone who originally came here scratched out their family’s survival, that hard work always rewards, that the free market is always wise, and that no one deserves anything that he can’t make for himself. And so we prize strength, individualism, aggressiveness, power, wealth, and, yes, violence.
3. We prize violence – in virtually all of our entertainment -- in sporting, so-called reality T.V., and films. And then we wonder why this sort of thing happens, as if we don’t parade it as virtue before the well adjusted and maladjusted alike. Every species has maladjusted individuals. Others of the species sense it and keep their distance. It is impossible to filter maladjustment out of the mix, but other species do not have and cannot use weapons of mass killing.
4. And yet, somehow, we refuse to curtail access to weapons of mass killing. And so handguns, automatic and semiautomatic weapons are available to private citizens regardless of their mental status. The rather paranoid argument posed is that somehow such weapons are necessary to protect us. If that were the case then all of us could arm ourselves to fight off real or imagined aggressors. Then what would happen? We would be shooting at each other like the old West, and arms manufacturers would prosper beyond their wildest dreams. What’s crazier to think that we can screen out all disturbed people or keep weapons of mass killing out of their hands? Jesus said that those who live by weapons die in the same way. And so we might not be surprised. It’s simple cause and effect – people become enraged, disturbed people lash out, disturbed people with weapons of mass killing when they get enraged kill masses of people. The question isn’t how that could happen, but why we refuse to make weapons of mass killing unavailable to private citizens.

I can’t imagine Jesus using a handgun or a semiautomatic rifle, can you? Of course you can’t. It’s absurd. How could those who call them selves His followers? Ah, you say, but it’s in the Constitution – the right to bear arms, I mean. Yes, well, we can bear shotguns and 22 cal. rifles, but we’ve lost the right to bear weapons of mass killing due to the behavior of those who have so tragically misused them.

Jesus was all about forging community with others. Today’s Gospel shows the risen Lord Jesus building community, as He so often did, this time on a beach calling out to invite His friends to join Him for breakfast -- building community.

So what’s a Christian to do? First, a follower of Jesus should pray for those who have died and their loved ones. And that includes Cho Seung-Hui and his family. Why? Because Jesus told us to pray for those who hurt us. And that leads to the second – followers of Jesus should forgive Cho Seung-Hui. We should forgive because Jesus told us to forgive trespasses and because when we don’t the hurt and anger can fester into just the kind of rage that drove him. Third, we should work to outlaw the ownership of weapons of mass killing simply because there is no sane reason to use one except for entertainment and entertainment isn’t worth the potential cost to the community in human life. Fourth, we should always be strengthening and extending accepting and loving community to others in Christ’s name. Followers of Christ know the importance of community and are outgoing in sharing it with others. We know that everyone is actually interconnected and interdependent, and that’s true of all creatures and not just us humans.

On this International Earth Day it’s also about time to recognize that when the earth is clearly overpopulated with us humans, simply for the sake of God’s other species and for our the survival of our descendants, we also ought to work to outlaw behaviors that needlessly devastate the environment for short-term gain. It’s God’s will and in less than 40 years all of us and our descendants will pay a terrible price if we don’t. I’m sure that God’s made the world such that it will replenish itself, but not without billions of humans dying and other species becoming extinct first. It isn’t possible in our time and under the current circumstances for thinking and serious followers of Jesus Christ to not also to be serious environmentalists. It’s part and parcel of our first covenant with God – the creation covenant – to tend creation. And it’s part and parcel of loving our neighbors as our selves – both our neighbors that are other species, here and now, and our human neighbors, who will come after us. We must adapt the way we live because the way we live is destroying our habitat. Living as a follower of Jesus means loving. Loving means praying, forgiving, and ending the use of weapons of mass killing – whether the killing of our own species or of our environment. That’s a major part of what it means to follow Jesus in 21st century America. And I believe that the Risen Christ can help us to change – to change as much as He did Saul – from the pull of darkness to light because He is the light of the world.