The eCrozier

Earlier this week, just a few blocks from the high school where my wife teaches in Washington, DC, there was gang-related murder. During a funeral procession for a young woman from the neighborhood who was murdered the week before, a rival gang opened fire on one of the cars causing it to crash killing one young man and others being critically injured. While police reports are still uncertain, they are pursuing leads related to rival “crews” (as they are called in DC) engaging in retaliation.

And less we mistakenly think that such violence is only an urban, minority problem, on the same day a 19-year-old sophomore math major at the University of Texas, Colton Tooley, opened fire with an automatic weapon sending students diving for cover. As he walked through the library firing his gun, thankfully no one was killed. Tooley killed himself before the police could get to him.

Yes, both of these incidents indicate that we have a public policy challenge as a nation when it comes balancing the right to own guns for self-protection and the right we also have to live free of fear from such incidents described above. But if we see this as only a public policy issue, then we will be horribly short-sighted. What we have is a spiritual crisis and my hunch is that it won’t be solved only by traditional conservative or liberal solutions (e.g., school prayer and stay-at-home moms from the former and more social workers and self-esteem training from the latter).

This spiritual crisis might be best summed up as the absence of what the Bible calls the “fear of God,” a profound sense of humility for our place in God’s created order.  If we place our faith in such a God; a God whose very nature is love, who commands us to love those who are nigh to us (that is, our neighbors, which literally means those near, or nigh to us); a God who incarnated that neighbor-love in Jesus who became nigh to us so that we might know God’s very nature, then such a faith would begin to change the world, at least our neighbor’s world.

What would it look like if our congregations began to fully practice such neighbor love? Well, one of my recent conclusions is that an “unemployed Mormon” is an oxymoron. That’s because, as I understand it, if a Mormon is unemployed, then on Sunday the Bishop stands and says: “We have an unemployed person in our midst. We’re not leaving today until he has a job.” You see, the Mormons believe it’s the whole church’s responsibility to ensure that person has a job so he can provide for his family.

Practicing such neighbor love would begin to address this spiritual crisis by infusing in us our responsibility for one another. We’re all part of God’s loving created order. The more connected we are to that, the less we’ll experience the disassociation that can result in someone shooting a gun to exact revenge or to randomly kill. Such neighbor love can’t be enacted into public policy nor can it be commanded by a theocratic state. It can only be practiced by communities like ours; communities who know we must practice what we preach.

+Scott