December 16, 2012 "NOT CAMELOT"

Monday December 17, 2012
The text of this article is excerpted from the sermon preached on Sunday
December 16, 2012 in the aftermath of the Newtown Tragedy.
“Not Camelot”

In the musical “Camelot” King Arthur sings about his fantasy Kingdom where by law July and August cannot be too hot, where there is a legal limit to the snow, winter is forbidden till December and March the second on the dot. The summer lingers through September; the rain may never fall till after sundown and by eight the morning fog must disappear; the snow may never slush upon the hillside and by nine PM the moonlight must appear. In short there’s simply not a more congenial spot for happily-ever-aftering than Camelot. (1)
When holiday hearts are broken, shattered in sympathy for the families of the murdered women and children of Newtown, we are stingingly aware that we don’t live in Camelot. In Camelot there are wars and death and destruction, but the line between good and evil is clearly visible. As observers on the outside looking in we see who is working for good in Camelot and who is planning evil.
But we live in this world where good is not always visible and evil is not always predictable.
When bad things happen like the December 14th massacre of 20 children and 7 women-- we are left speechless, yet screaming on the inside wanting answers, wanting to know WHY!???!! We want an explanation. We demand an explanation from anyone who can tell us just what we could have done to prevent such evil from finding its way into our midst. We want to know the mechanism that kick starts the indifferent machine. We want to locate and find the kill switch, or the launch key to turn it back, to abort the launch. “O God, Where is the button that will stop the action? O God, where is the rewind button that will take us back to the time before the evil happened?” Superman used his power to reverse the earth’s direction, to spin the world backwards in time so he could rescue his beloved Lois Lane in the nick of time.
Experts will scramble to explain positing a failure of impulse control, or a messiah complex, psychopathy, or sociopathy. In truth all of the reasons for evil are pathological---the Greek word from which the word pathology is derived is the word pathos, which means suffering. Pathology, then, is about suffering. Pathophysiology is about the suffering of the body. It is the study of all that causes the body to suffer. We have tests and machines that seek out what causes the body to suffer. When a body is broken or attacked by viruses or bacteria, we may be appalled by their appearance, but we can see the devastation and we can intellectually prepare ourselves for how we will respond to the attack.
When my little sister died at the age of 8 from the chicken pox virus invading her brain she was only the 3rd such case they had seen at Boston Children’s hospital. That was in 1959. In 1981 I had been a registered nurse for 11 years. I was working to pay my way through Seminary doing a shift in the pediatric unit of San Dimas Community Hospital. I read an article posted on the bulletin board about a disease called Reye’s syndrome – named for the physician who identified it. It was believed to be caused by the use of aspirin in treating viral infections in children particularly the Chicken Pox virus. What the researchers discovered was that aspirin (probably for its anticoagulant properties) actually aided the virus in crossing the blood brain barrier resulting in the inflammation of the lining of the brain, causing a marked headache, fever, seizures, coma and death. Twenty-two years after my sister died I learned what had caused her death. But we all took aspirin for a fever when I was a little girl. And not everyone got Reye’s syndrome when their fever was treated with aspirin. (2)
Psychopathology is the suffering of the psyche the suffering of the mind. We cannot see what causes it, and we can only guess at what might relieve the suffering. We are so frightened by it, that we are unable to prepare ourselves intellectually or emotionally for the toll which the suffering mind exacts from all of its victims as it wreaks havoc on itself and others.
Just as we want to wield magical powers over the pathos that devastates the human body, so too, we want to wield power over the pathos that devastates the human mind. But we do not have magical powers. We are in fact powerless to eradicate pathos. We want to be able to repair the world, to repair all of the brokenness that accompanies human existence, but that is not part of our job description.
Today we are called to hug each other and our children even tighter. Today Jesus calls us to embrace blessing in the midst of mourning, for we are promised comfort. He reminds us to let the little children come to him, and never stop them, for it is to them that the kingdom of heaven belongs.
Keep the words of Paul close at hand and always in your heart:

“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:35; 37-39)
AMEN.

(1) Musical by Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Lowe 1960 based on the novel by T.H. White “The Once and Future King” 1958

(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reye's_syndrome and http://www.reyessyndrome.org/