Some thoughts on a School Shooting

In the year of our Lord, April the sixteen, 2007, a gunmen killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University, marking the worst school massacre in American history.

Now all we have to do is sit and wait for the usually flurry of news ads asking: whose fault is it? Was is video games? Music? Books? Movies? Bad diet? Bad philosophies? Bad education? Bad social life? Bad economic life?

Maybe a girl dumped the gunman? Just last month, some girl at the University of Memphis drove off the top of the five story parking garage after her boyfriend dumped her (amazingly, she was not killed). Or maybe the gunman had the "Columbine Syndrome," i.e., too many bullies. Maybe we should start an anti-bully campaign.

Whatever the magazines and newsreels will blather on about over this tragedy, they are basically asking one fundamental question: what breaks inside someone so that they are capable of doing such things? Unfortunately, such a question will lead us only to subterfuge. It is not the right question, because it assumes that someone is whole and then something breaks them. The truth is far more shocking: a man does not break; a man is already broken, broken since birth. The answer to how can a human being maliciously kill 32 other human beings is simple: Sin.

No, not sins (i.e., lie, cheating, stealing, etc.), but Sin, capital "S," the fundamental disposition that plagues all humanity. "Mankind's problem," says Oswald Chambers, "is not wrong doing but wrong being." There is something in us humans that is broken already; we are born broken. We spend or lives running from the brokenness (and hence comes obsessive hobbies and vices), are else we give in to the brokenness, and 32 people and their families lie broken in our wake (for brokenness creates after its own kind).

Switchfoot sings, "Maybe we've been living with our eyes half open, maybe we're bent and broken," "We've been blowin' up, we're the issue, it's our condition. We've been blowin' up, we're the issue, a detonation. We've been blowin' up, we're the issue, we're ammunition, we're ammunition. We are the fuse and the ammunition," "I am broken, I am bitter, I'm the problem..."

How many tragedies must happen, how many lives must be lost, how many hearts must be sacrificed on the altar of ignorance and apathy before the church wakes up and realizes no amount of education, diet, exercises, social status, money, opportunities, philosophies, or religions can fix the brokenness within. How long will the church continue to be fixated on sins and not realize the reality of Sin.

Here is the message the church must say on the reality of Sin: Christ changed that reality, changed it on the Cross, changed it with the reality of Redemption. Now Sin is not how it has to be. Its power is lost, replaced by the power of Redemption. The cliche is true: the answer to all of life's problems is still the Cross of Christ. On the Cross, Christ bore all the brokenness of the world and did away with it. We no longer have to live incomplete and shattered. We can be made whole. It is too late for the 32 plus 1; the brokenness swallowed the 1 and took the 32 with it. Sin can still kill if you let it, and Jesus does still save, if you let Him.