Carl Creasman

Tragedy

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Carl Creasman

There’s no better word for what happened in Newtown Connecticut.   Tragedy.   Yet, it should not be a surprise…sadly.  In the days to come, there will the usual comments from both the pro- and anti-gun owners.  Some will talk about increasing security or asking if someone missed something that could have halted the tragedy.  Meanwhile, the deeper sadness will be missed by a society that refuses to confront the reality that we’ve lost our way, lost the core values and morals that guided us through the years.

 

CNN has posted a deeply revealing timeline about school violence.  I have not checked their research, but usually find CNN to have a solid grasp and don’t believe them to have any reason to not present accurate facts here.  What you can see if you look at the timeline is that according to CNN, there was one school shooting murder in 1927, then nothing till 1959.  Through the 1960s, there were two more attacks.   But, starting in the mid-1970s, the timeline picks up speed into an almost-every-year crescendo of violence.

 

Though no one wants to admit it, that is generally the same time period when TV exposure reached its near peak with over 95% of US homes having at least one set.  Cable TV was now available in almost every metro-area and was gaining traction in the more rural areas.  The mid-1970s is also when drug usage among young adults exploded.  Abortion was legalized in 1973.  Teen sexuality grew at an alarming rate along with an explosion of STDs.  None of these things, of course, explains the actions of one man, but they do set the stage for clear evidence that the country was beginning to move away from the historic mores and values that had long sustained the nation.

 

America was on its journey to no longer be a Christian nation.  Perhaps the most damning evidence would be found in churches all across the country as those supposed bastions of holiness saw their own explosion of divorce, teen pregnancy, and general corruption both within the laity and the clergy.  In other words, the same creep of declining values was slowly taking over the very thing that should have been protecting the country.  I have long proclaimed that those most guilty of the depraved state of our country actually are the churches and “Christians.”

 

Without that “leaven in the bread,” things that should have been never allowed to be done or seen, especially in the exploding media of TV, Hollywood and soon the gaming industry, became accepted and even celebrated.  Of course, as a historian, I am very well aware that death, murder and massacre have been present in our world in all continents, among all cultures.  Yet, the point I am making isn’t that were we to return to our Christian roots, we’d be safe and at peace….rather, the explosion of death and destruction would not be happening at the rate.  Again, go look at the CNN timeline and be stunned at what you see in the 1990s and 2000s.  It is horrific and tragic.

 

Yet, it should not be surprising.  Just look at the TV today.  Or, check out the types of games available.  Hollywood movies never cease to come up with sick ideas for movies to foist on society.  Of course, as a gamer, I am not making the suggestion that we should ban media—that would not work any better than suggesting banning guns.  I am suggesting that we have lost our foundation for our culture.  What should be happening is how such death, such macabre things we handled in the 1920s, the 1890s or the 1740s…as extreme, part of a fringe, sick sliver of society, something that most of society turns their head at.  Any attempt to put such things into the broad culture through TV or magazines or books or movies would lose massively where it really counts….in dollar amounts.  Instead, today, these things proliferate.

 

Is there any hope?

 

Yes!  We start now by remembering that Christmas is about the birth of a savior.

 

It is not a moment for merchants to make a dollar.  It is not time for getting gifts.  It is not time for us to buy more useless junk that none of us really need.

 

Jesus came so that He can offer us peace….not peace like the world thinks, such as merely an absence of war, but a true peace between God and an individual.   When the angel proclaimed Peace on Earth, he was declaring that as each individual came into a personal relationship with God through the open door created by Jesus, the war between that individual and God would end.  As such, the individual would then become a new creation, would become willing for God to modify the code (so to speak) so that old things would fall away, and our desire would be the ways of God, the ways of holiness.  As Linus said to Charlie Brown, that’s what Christmas is all about.   Through living among us, He became able to meet us right where our tragedy lies, right in the pain of disappointment, issues and failures.

 

Jesus came, as the writer of Hebrews 4:15 says, so that He can truly understand the pain of such loss, of such tragedy that the parents in Newtown are feeling.   We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize . . . but one who in every respect has been tested as we are. (Hebrews 4:15)

 

The wonderful John Piper said it well in his latest blog post:

 

The world needed a suffering Sovereign. Mere suffering would not do. Mere sovereignty would not do. The one is not strong enough to save; the other is not weak enough to sympathize.

So he came as who he was: the compassionate King. The crushed Conqueror. The lamb-like Lion. The suffering Sovereign.

Now he comes to Newtown, Connecticut.

The God who draws near to Newtown is the suffering, sympathetic God-man, Jesus Christ. No one else can feel what he has felt. No one else can love like he can love. No one else can heal like he can heal. No one else can save like he can save.

I hope that your Christmas becomes an awakening, perhaps for the first time, of what we have lost, and then a personal determination to seek the baby in the manger.