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The Shooting in Our Knoxville, Tennessee Church
Sermon Delivered at All Souls Community Church
Grand Rapids, Michigan August 3, 2008
Copyright © 2008
The Reverend Doctor Brent A. Smith
READINGS
There are four readings this morning from the history of the
relationship of religion and violence in general, all from the particular
history of our faith tradition. Lest one presume we have been just the
recipients of violence, one is included where we participated in the killing.
The first is from the condemnation and execution of Michael Servetus, a Spaniard
of the 16th century hailed by some as the first modern Unitarian and author of
the text, On the Errors of the Trinity. It was Servetus’ dissent against the
orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity – Jesus as deity – that earned him
his death at the hands of John Calvin. The second reading describes the trial of
Sarah Good, the first of the 17th century Salem “witches” to be tried,
convicted, and killed. It was our Puritan spiritual forbears who brought about
this violence upon both women and men. The third reading concerns the murder of
Unitarian minister, Rev. James Reeb during the activity in Selma, Alabama in
1965. It is told by Unitarian Rev. Orloff Miller, who joined with Reeb and Rev.
Clark Olson on that momentous night. The final reading is of the words of Rev.
Bill Sinkford, President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, at a
candlelight vigil the day after the shootings in one of our Knoxville, Tennessee
congregations.
The condemnation and execution of Michael Servetus
The replies from the churches at length arrived. The Councils had
with one accord referred the matter to their pastors, and the latter, though
expressing themselves in differing terms and in guarded language, urged that
Servetus was plainly guilty, and that all due means ought to be used to rid the
churches of him, especially lest they get a bad reputation for harboring
heretics. In the face of such unanimous advice there was but one action to be
taken, and after a few days’ delay it was voted that Servetus be condemned to be
taken to the suburb of Champel and there be burned alive the following day,
together with his books. Burning had for centuries been the penalty for heresy
under the law of the Empire, and when Calvin revised the laws at Geneva he had
let this law stand unchanged. In the present case he tried to get beheading
substituted for burning, but the matter had passed beyond his control. When the
sentence was announced to Servetus he broke down completely, for he had expected
acquittal, or at the worst only banishment; but he soon regained composure, sent
for Calvin, and begged his forgiveness. Farel, minister at Neuchatel, had that
morning arrived at Calvin’s behest. He tried to get Servetus to renounce his
errors and thus save his life. But Servetus remained true to his convictions,
only begging for another form of death, lest the suffering at the stake cause
him at last weakly to recant. Farel accompanied him to the place of execution,
where a large crowd had gathered, and there he died with a prayer upon his lips
(October 27, 1553).
Proceedings Against Sarah Good
Sarah married a former indentured servant, Daniel Poole. Poole died
sometime after 1682, leaving Sarah only debts, which some sources credit her
with creating for Poole. Regardless of the cause of the debt, Sarah and her
second husband, William Good, were held responsible for paying it. A portion of
their land was seized and sold to satisfy their creditors, and shortly
thereafter they sold the rest of their land, apparently out of dire necessity.
By the time of the trials, Sarah and her husband were homeless, destitute and
she was reduced to begging for work, food, and shelter from her neighbors.
Good was one of the first three women to be brought in at Salem on
the charge of witchcraft... She fit the prevailing stereotype of the malefic
witch quite well. Good's habit of scolding and cursing neighbors who were
unresponsive to her requests for charity generated a wealth of testimony at her
trials. At least seven people testified as to her angry muttering and general
turbulence after the refusal of charity. Particularly damaging to her case, was
her accusation by her daughter. Four- year-old Dorcas Good (Sarah's only child)
was arrested on March 23, gave a confession, and in so doing implicated her
mother as a witch. At the time of her trial, Good was described as "a forlorn,
friendless, and forsaken creature, broken down by wretchedness of condition and
ill-repute."
Good was executed on July 19. She failed to yield to judicial
pressure to confess, and showed no remorse at her execution. In fact, in
response to an attempt by Minister Nicholas Noyes to elicit a confession, Good
called out from the scaffolding, "You are a liar. I am no more a witch than you
are a wizard, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink."
Her curse seems to have come true. Noyes died of internal hemorrhage, bleeding
profusely at the mouth. Despite the seemingly effectiveness of her curse, it
likely just further convinced the crowds of her guilt.
The Murder of James Reeb
When the telegram came from Dr. Martin Luther King asking ministers
of all faiths to come to Selma… [those] of us went without even a toothbrush
because we thought it was a one-day event. Nevertheless, when Dr. King asked if
we could remain a few days, a number of us decided to stay.
… Jim Reeb, Clark Olson, and I (Orloff Miller) decided to have dinner together…
After dinner, as we [three white men] started walking across the street, there
appeared four or five white men yelling at us… we did not look across at them,
but we quickened our pace… One of them was carrying a club, and Clark said he
turned around and saw the club just as it was swung. Jim Reeb, who was closest
to the curb, caught the full impact of that blow on the side of his head…
[James Reeb died enroute to the hospital.]
It’s a terrible thing to have to say, but for some reason it took
the death of a white clergyman to turn things around.
-Rev. Orloff Miller
“What you want is the nation to be upset when anybody is killed,
“said Black Activist Stokely Carmichal, “but it almost seems that for this to be
recognized, a white person must be killed.” At Reeb’s funeral Dr. King gave the
eulogy, saying, “God still has a way of bringing good out of evil,” and “by
placing himself alongside the disinherited black brethren of this [nation]… he
demonstrated the conscience of the nation… [and] was an attorney for the defense
of the innocent.”
The Murder of Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger
We live in a society where there are differences of opinion, and
Unitarian Universalism and our congregations here have a long history of
standing on the side of love, of standing up for justice and saying everyone
should be welcome, and saying that we are churches that welcome all souls, not
just some souls. And that’s a deep religious calling for us, and the Tennessee
Valley church and the Westside church and Unitarian Universalism are not going
to change living our religion that way. We simply are not.
And you know what? More of the people in this sanctuary here
tonight, would say the same things: that we need to be willing to stand up and
stand on the side of that larger love which can help us move through these
difficult times, resulting from this tragedy, but [also] these difficult times
for our world, right now.
-Reverend Bill Sinkford, President of the UUA
PRAYER
O God, in whose eternal love do rest the spirits of all thy
children, we praise and bless thy name for the great company of those who,
having walked with us in this life, have gone before us into thy world of light.
For Thou hast encompassed us about with a mighty cloud of
witnesses: thy saints and prophets, courageous men and heroic women, and little
children, all those most dear, who speak within our hearts of hope and trust and
love.
And especially do we give thanks for Greg McKendry and Linda
Kraeger who witnessed in their lives for their trust in the breadth of Love and
the wideness of Mercy, and gave their lives for that trust. Bless their names to
thy continual keeping, and save their earthly lives within the eternity of thine
own.
And watch over Joe Barnhart, Jack Barnhart, Betty Barnhart, Linda
Chavez, John Worth, Jr., Tammy Sommers, and Allison Lee. Aid in the healing of
their physical wounds inflicted when they stood up for Love and Mercy. And walk
with those in our Knoxville Churches who have been traumatized by a heinous act.
And especially, O God, walk with and bless the children. And walk with all those
everywhere who find themselves the unwitting target for religious intolerance
and hatred. And heal the spirit of the shooter, Jim Adkisson, from the malice
and hatred of his soul’s sickness, which has taken from him the capacity to see
your Divine Likeness in human beings and blinded him to the Love you have for
all souls. It is the capacity to see these things and shape the world by them
that makes us fully human.
O God, we do not presume to know thy children as thou knowest them.
But, we do give thee thanks for all those secret, mysterious completions of life
beyond our understanding but known by thee: the hidden service human beings
render to one another in private; the petitions for thy support and comfort that
are concealed in the recesses of the human heart; the cry of our souls in pain
and in joy; and the benediction of thy peace which always comes at last.
Now may thy children, Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger, rest in
peace. May the people of the Knoxville Unitarian Universalist churches know that
peace which passes all human understanding. For in the midst of walking in the
valley of the shadow of death, their eyes have seen also a glory, and their
hearts have known and given love, and the lives of all souls living and dead
remain a blessing.
Amen.
SERMON
Some of life’s events do not lend themselves to the easy
interpretation of cause and effect. The joy of scientific discovery is to give a
reasoned explanation to what appeared previously as randomly unconnected
phenomenon. Religious faith, though, dwells in another realm of human existence
than cause and effect because it is not science. And that is not a certain
weakness but a different kind of strength. Religious faith takes as its raw
materials the grand confusions and great unanswerable events from which we are
driven to create and discover meaning. Where science is about explanation,
answering the “Why?” and the “How?” of a larger scheme of understanding,
religion is about the kind of meaning which can attach itself after an event.
Sometimes experiences occasion unspeakable pain and sorrow, and the initial
response to these kinds of events is to declare them senseless. This is
understandable about us. But it is precisely at that point that a spiritual
reading begins because it is necessary and needed. Humanity cannot exist devoid
of meaning.
Last Sunday my wife and I landed in Springfield, Illinois, a
mini-vacation to the hometown of Abraham Lincoln. Abraham and Mary Lincoln
married in Springfield and began their life together there. It was a life of
multiple sorrows, as history often tells it. They buried one young son in
Springfield. They left their longtime friends there to go to Washington, the
White House, and the Civil War’s agonizing reckoning of our racist peddling in
human flesh. They buried another young son while in the White House, and last
Monday Pat and I stood at the train depot in Springfield where the Lincolns
departed under the echo of Abraham’s apocryphal words that we repeat every
Lincoln Sunday in this church:
To this place (Springfield), and the kindness of these people, I
owe everything. Trusting in that Divine Being, who can go with me, and remain
with you and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet
be well. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return...
Of course, he returned. He came back in a casket. History does not
record the everyday joys of the Lincoln’s family life, but the obvious sorrow is
overwhelming. There is always more than what is obvious and initially
overwhelming.
I heard the news about our Knoxville Church on television Monday
morning. A man entered the sanctuary of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian
Universalist Church and opened fire on the 200+ worshippers gathered. The
shooter was subdued by an usher, but not before he had murdered the usher, Greg
McKendry, as well as Linda Kraeger, a member of nearby Westside Unitarian
Universalist Church who was visiting that morning. As of the writing of this
sermon Joe Barnhart, Jack Barnhart, Betty Barnhart, Linda Chavez, John Worth,
Jr., Tammy Sommers, and Allison Lee were identified as injured victims of the
shooting. No children were hurt though they were preparing for a Children’s
Pageant as the morning worship.
In a Candlelight Vigil held the next evening at the adjacent
Presbyterian Church members of the area’s Unitarian Churches were joined by the
interfaith community to grieve and begin the process of putting order and
meaning back into their existence. It is there that our Unitarian Universalist
Association President, Rev. Bill Sinkford, spoke the words that ended our
readings this morning after voicing what all initially felt. The event was
senseless.
But a spiritual reading of things demands it not remain thus.
In a rambling four page letter the shooter had identified “the
liberal movement” as the source and object of his murderous rage. He went to
that church to unleash that rage with 75 rounds of ammunition. He chose a
specific church not at random, because he knew that congregation and our faith
tradition. His ex-wife had been a member several years before, and when they
were married, he and she had hosted a few church gatherings and traveled to
various Unitarian Universalist summer camps run throughout the country. He was
particularly enraged about our view of gay men and lesbian women. The minister
of that church regularly wrote essays in the local paper, and the congregation
regularly sponsored support groups and community educational events concerning
issues of tolerance, reason, and freedom. And he chose this church as the symbol
of what he called, “the liberal movement,” rather than, say, a liberal political
rally or liberal political party offices. He chose this church although in my 25
years of ministry, and in serving and consulting with over 100 of our 1000
churches, I have yet to find one which didn’t possess political conservatives as
well as liberals. And votes for McCain and Obama and other candidates, will come
from this congregation, too.
In events that cause such deep pain and dislocation that we at
first call them senseless we often first look for an Ultimate reason to be
hidden inside the senseless. In senseless personal traumas we often first look
to what might be God’s Will inside of what happened, even though that can make
the Divine into something bloodthirsty. Lincoln resisted this in refusing to
claim God’s Will was on his side in killing Confederate soldiers, and he humbly
admitted he did not know why God was allowing the bloodshed to continue. We just
do not know the Divine reasons inside of human events. Because it is initially
senseless by our first reckoning does not mean ascribing Divine reasons to its
insides makes it any more meaningful.
One could look at the stated reasons of the shooter for “Why?”, to
vanquish “the liberal movement” by starting with that church. But why would we
look for sense come from someone who senselessly brought 75 rounds of ammunition
and began unloading it in a worship service where children would perform from
the musical Annie, “I love you tomorrow”? Sense and meaning do not come from
derangement.
Yet, sense and meaning must be made of it. We are driven toward
that. Time and tomorrow drive us toward that. At this very moment the Tennessee
Valley Unitarian Universalist Church is having a rededication service in that
sanctuary. They are trying to create meaning from an event so horrific that
members require counseling from a nationally composed Trauma Response Team, and
a number of the members cannot even step into the sanctuary this morning for
worship at their own church! If meaning is not created from this the living will
have been forsaken and those who died will have done so in vain. The event now
cries out for meaning larger than what God wills or wants – which, of course, we
can never know – and something other than letting the shooter declare the sense
of it all.
A spiritual reading of things is demanded of us who remain.
In human history, in American history, murders in holy places like
temples or churches are not uncommon. We imagine that places where the holy is
lifted up and sacred pronouncements made, should be immune. It doubly offends,
which can lead the pious idealist to despair and the cynical nihilist to blame
religion itself as the cause.
But neither the pious idealist nor the cynical nihilist gives a
spiritual reading of things. And that’s what is needed: A spiritual reading.
The psychologist or psychiatrist would search for the interpersonal
conflict that yielded this particular form of derangement in the shooter. The
sociologist would seek out the economic and class and societal trends. The
political analyst would probe the divisive, partisan landscape. But here we are
called to give a theological interpretation towards gaining a religious meaning
to the spiritual qualities derived in the event. We are called to give a
spiritual reading of matters.
We cannot know the Ultimate reason, “Why?” because no human being
knows the mind and will of the Almighty, but we can ask what Ultimate meanings
are revealed from the perspective of time and history; the weeks and months and
years that follow. Burning Michael Servetus for having challenged the Christian
Church’s doctrinal declarations of truth is an event that means more than what
his executioner, John Calvin, saw it to mean at that moment. That is the
theological interpretation we can and must make. We cannot know what will come
to be called sacred about this event because no human being knows what tomorrow
will bring, let alone how this event will be remembered, or whether it will be
remembered at all. Executing Sarah Good for unconventionalities and
non-conformities has come to mean something very different than what the Puritan
establishment declared they were doing at the time. That is its religious
meaning. And the Spirit is an elusive thing, and what human beings often deem as
spiritual are transient qualities that pass away. Two of our clergy saw a
brother’s spirit snuffed out by a baseball bat 43 years ago, and what abides,
what is larger than any single, mortal, finite human life, is different than
what the swinger of that bat declared justified his act. What is eternal is what
a spiritual reading of things is aimed at.
And this is what we seek to create, articulate, and proclaim and
live by, as a way to remember and honor people whom we did not know personally,
but with whom we share something deeper than words and wider than physical
distance. It is more than just the random chaos of existence at work when we
realize it could have been this church and me. What is it about what we do, what
is it that we represent, what we are as individuals and a congregation and a
faith tradition spanning the centuries, which is larger than any one single life
amongst us?
Greg McKendry was not killed after publicly declaring himself a
heretic as Servetus did. Linda Kraeger was not murdered after having been
accused by others of non-conforming beliefs as was Sarah Good. And last Sunday
there probably was no one who was injured or in attendance who thought
themselves thrusting their lives into a risky protest on behalf of the unfair
treatment of others as James Reeb, Clark Olson, and Orloff Miller. Ms. Kraeger
traveled across town to one of the other Unitarian Universalist churches in
Knoxville to see the Children’s Pageant. Mr. McKendry went to his Unitarian
Universalist Church to pass out programs and collect the offertory as he
promised he would. It is conceivable that no one thought the day would contain
more religious meaning than rising, reading the paper, attending worship, and
brunch and household chores and preparing for the grind of the work week.
But Mr. McKendry, as an usher, was a Guardian of the Divine
meanings of our faith tradition. He was a hero for having leaped upon the
shooter and prevented him from discharging more rounds into the congregation. He
heroically guarded the congregation and in so doing, guarded what our faith
tradition represents. I imagine he arose thinking he would only do the usual
duties of an usher that day. But he came to give his life guarding the spiritual
fact that all souls are holy because each is made in an image of the Divine.
Gay, straight, black, white, yellow, red, old, young, poor, rich, every
individual is a child of the same Divine Parent and this is the Ultimate meaning
of last Sunday. Individuals are more holy than the creeds and sacraments of
religion, more holy than what the doctrines others demand conformity to, and
more holy than the demarcations of society and the divisive ways of human social
arrangements.
And Ms. Kraeger, in traveling from one of our churches to another,
was an Emissary of the Sacred. She went to another of our congregations to
support the children of that sister church in performing songs as part of
worship. Maybe unbeknownst to her, for how could she know, but her simple act of
affection ended up heralding the presence of the Sacred. Love is an inheritance
not just for the children of her home church, but of a neighbor church, and not
for just some souls, but for all souls. She died heralding something larger than
her own singular life, her own individual congregation, her own hometown,
nation, and finite and mortal existence. She revealed an Affection larger than
the personal affection that drove her to a neighboring congregation’s worship.
What is Sacred is not bounded by space, nor by time, as we mere mortals are.
This Love, which is present for all souls, is of substance Divine. And even when
human beings cannot or will not, God loves all souls.
The Spiritual Freedom that is expressing itself through the liturgy
of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church this morning as they seek
to rededicate their sanctuary by liberating it of the false doctrine that death
is its own final victory, is the same Spiritual Freedom being expressed through
the Westside Unitarian Universalist Church, and here at All Souls Community
Church. For Spiritual Freedom is an inheritance not just for the children of one
church, but as the legacy and meaning that makes sense of all human life in all
times and places. Through Love, the human form divine can be liberated from the
senseless burdens that deem death the final victor. It is not the only truth
that makes sense of human existence, but it is the truth that we represent
through our expressions of worship and community. It is the Good News we offer
to the world.
Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger, one a Guardian of the Divine and
the other an Emissary of the Spirit, died to make men and women holy. Let us
rededicate ourselves to live to make all souls free.
Amen.
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