Don’t Pray for An End to the Violence – Live For It.

On a man helping a birth in a grave, 59 massacred and 500+ wounded and a Messiah.

In the Nuremburg war-crime trials, writes Paul Tillich, a witness told of living in a Jewish cemetery grave as he and others hid from the horrors. This 80 year old man told of assisting a woman giving birth to a child in another grave. He said this is what he prayed as this child was born 6 feet under: “Great God, has Thou finally sent the Messiah to us? For who else than the Messiah himself can be born in a grave?” Tillich wrote this about that: “For him [the witness] the immeasurable tension implicit in the expectation of the Messiah was a reality, appearing in the infinite contrast between the things he saw and the hope he maintained.”

The expectation of the Messiah and Las Vegas killings. Our confession as Christians is that the Messiah has been here already.

The things we see.

The things for which we hope.

I see 59 killed and 500+ more mowed down.

I hope for an end to that violence but too I know the violence goes deeper still and must be addressed. The violence of scarcity and poverty, the violence of inequality, the violence of bigotry, the violence of religious fanaticism, the violence of land and water degraded and diminished.

The things we see.

The things for which we hope.

In between comes and stands the Messiah who died at the hand of all this violence and left us with but a promise and a promised presence with which to engage all this same violence.

But what then are we waiting for?

A Savior?

A Lord?

Has he not already arrived?

Is this not our utter declaration?

How is it then that we think we are not the ones, the only ones, who can stop the violence? How is it that we think the Messiah should arrive and do something more than we are fully capable of doing? Why do we pray that the Messiah change things when he already has done so?

So we see, what we hope for has already occurred. We see the hope is already realized.

So what now but for us to live into Life. Live into the violence with non-violence, and be killed by it if that is what will be.

What we need to see is that there is not other “hope” out there that is to come or will come on our behalf. The solution to our violence has already been revealed in the poverty of the manger and the depravity of the cross.

Letting death have its way without dealing death back is resurrection.

Dealing death back at death is only destruction.

Instead of building shooting ranges we need to be building non-violence training centers.

The things we see.

The hope we maintain.

In between the two lives the Messiah who died.

How then shall we live?