Headline News 2/23/20: Ahmaud Arbery jogged down the wrong road. Headline News 4/18/23: Kaylin Gillis drove up the wrong driveway. Headline News 4/13/23: Ralph Yarl rang the wrong doorbell. Headline News 11/19/22: Daniel Davis Aston, Kelly Loving, Ashley Paugh, Derrick Rump and Raymond Green Vance went to the wrong nightclub. Actually, there is nothing wrong about doing any of these — except the shootings that left them dead.
Leaving church, a parishioner said to me, “It can happen anywhere, anytime, to anyone.” But being shot is most likely to occur here in the United States, where the incidence of gun violence far exceeds any that in other country. It is hard to believe that tens-of-thousands of our people die every year from gunshots (per the CDC). If any nation or terrorist group did that, we’d be sending the troops after them. Yet, little is done to curb this violence and the suffering it causes. Why?
The reasons have a lot to do with our fears, our faith, our loves, and our lack of inner freedom, to broadly name some of them. One more I would mention here – the now-undervalued divine imperatives that for millennia have been the civilizing safeguards in societies, like the Sixth Commandment of Moses: “Do not kill/murder.” In stark contrast, our culture unremittingly reinforces the efficacy of violent force and the legitimacy of weapons to carry it out. We are feeding our minds death and reaping it in real life.
Religious faith can bring us back to our moral senses if it doesn’t also justify and bless recourse to violence. Remember the Golden Rule: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” It certainly rules out shooting anyone. It is still a good foundation to right what’s wrong.
Pastor John Hardman-Zimmerman
Brandon United Methodist Church
