The slaughter of worshipers in their houses of worship is nothing unique to New Zealand. The United States sets the pace on that peculiar atrocity. In the Middle East it is a favorite tactic among Muslims to inflict pain by bombing or shooting up their rival’s mosque. For sociopaths, there must be some perverse sport in shooting down people as they pray. Especially if you have branded their religion as false, a menace, or a blight on the planet.
This morning our pastor provided a brilliant analogy. When the shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, crashed into the Mosque and slaughtered its worshipers it was like a hurricane hitting shore. Its peculiar evil hit with particular and immediate effect. But it didn’t start that way. No, long before the hurricane breached land it had been forming out over the ocean as a storm system. The system is what made the hurricane what it was.
The system that formed over the chaos of the deep was a deadly combination of just the right elements – heat, moisture, wind, ocean currents, colliding fronts. And for New Zealand as well as for anywhere else, the system that first formed over the ocean included white supremacy, fear, hatred of the other, an ideology that includes the idea that others have less value, and powerful influences that travel like viruses. That storm system brewed and developed long before striking land. But when it did it came with terrible force.
What we face today are the powers and principalities of this world, forces that consolidate and show themselves with a very particular hatred and violence. When they do, we must be willing to bind up the wounds of all those afflicted. But beyond repairing the damage we all must speak to, address, and drain the storm systems of their accumulating power. That is the prophetic task. Which means that there is much, much more to do than simply gazing passively toward the horizon and saying, “I think we’re in for another big one.”
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