Hilton Head Island, SC – April 11, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 4:1-9; Amos 7:10-17
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” – Genesis 4:9 (RSV)
Before starting this sermon, I want to say something about the next three sermons I shall be preaching. All deal with social and political issues, upon which I know not everyone will agree with what I am going to say. I feel led to preach them nonetheless. Furthermore, I want to do it before we return to The Cypress. I have been instructed not to address controversial political matters there, and I shall abide by that. I understand why that stipulation has been made. I believe it is important for us to have a permanent home (to the degree The Chapel Without Walls has ever had a permanent home), and we are indebted to The Cypress for allowing us to hold our services there. When we came to Jarvis Creek Park, we lost about 90% of our regular Cypress attendants. Only three Cypress residents have come to the park with regularity over the past ten months. So in order to get missing Cypressians back with us, we need to get back to our regular venue. I will vent my spleen now, and then become the meek and mild preacher I always was until we came here. Now let us turn to the issue of guns, and their unique and deadly place in America.
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The Constitution of the United States of America is one of the most important and influential political documents ever adopted by any people anywhere. However, the circumstances under which it was finally adopted required many unfortunate compromises. The framers knew they were unwise, but they felt that for the nation’s future, some sort of written principles had to be agreed on. The Second Amendment is one of the worst of those compromises, and it contains the worst wording of what it intended to say of all the various sections of the Constitution.
Here is the full text of the Second Amendment. “A well regulated Militia (comma), being necessary to the security of a free State (comma), the right of the people to keep and bear arms (comma), shall not be infringed.”
Does that clearly say that everyone is free to buy, own, and use guns? With the word “Militia” included in it, it most certainly does not. But that is what state and federal laws regarding gun ownership came clearly to declare, especially in the last half-century. In fact, probably most gun owners have never even thought about the relationship between a state or federal militia and their trusty AR-15 or their 32 caliber Smith and Wesson pistol.
The Constitution was adopted in 1787. At that time Americans feared the British might decide they made a big mistake losing the American Revolution, and they might come back to finish the job as they should have, had they done it right in the first place. They also feared that somebody might try to become an autocratic ruler of our country, and the best way to prevent that would be to have voluntary citizen militias who could wage war against such tyrants. But the Second Amendment definitely did not imply that every American had a right to own a gun, even though that is what the National Rifle Association, the corrupt and bankrupt gun lobby, and countless conservative politicians over the past fifty years have passed legislation to guarantee. Unless you are a convicted felon, or under age, or both, you probably legally can buy a firearm from somebody.
Because the Second Amendment has been so brazenly and deliberately misinterpreted by libertarians and conservatives, Americans have more guns per capita by far than any other citizens of any other nations anywhere on Earth. Since the election of 2016, and especially since January 6, 2021, there has been a frenzy of gun purchases in this country. It has been spurred by lawmakers in many states passing laws they think can subvert federal gun control laws. Our benighted state is one such. A state senator has proposed a law which says that any South Carolina adult citizen can own a pistol without a permit. That is incipient insanity. It is an attempt to re-codify the glaring mistake of the 18th century Second Amendment in the 21st century.
In the USA, over a hundred people a day are killed by firearms. That’s close to a thousand per week. It is over 40,000 per year. Three-fourths of all murders involve guns. Six out of every ten firearms deaths are because of suicide. Killing oneself by a gun is considered a surefire way of self-annihilation (pun sadly but deliberately intended.) And because there are so many guns available to almost everyone in this country, is it any wonder that we have one of the highest (but not the highest) rates of suicide?
There are far more mass murders in this nation than in any other. There are several likely factors behind that terrible phenomenon, but I will cite only two. First is the ready availability of large-clip semi-automatic or automatic weapons, and also handguns. There is no reason for any American citizen to own either type weapon, and there are many reasons for no ordinary citizen being allowed to own either kind of weapon. But because of laws passed almost exclusively by state or national legislatures controlled by one of our two major political parties, there are millions of pistols and AR-15s or the equivalent on our streets or in our homes. They were proudly displayed by Proud Boys and others in front of state capitol buildings across the country, or outside the US Capitol on January 6.
For almost a century, most non-evangelical biblical scholars have postulated that the first eleven chapters of Genesis were not meant by the author or authors of that book to be taken literally. Instead they were to be perceived mythologically. A myth might be defined as an obviously fictional story set in a previous time or in unworldly circumstances to help us understand what is going on in current time and in our own circumstances.
I chose as our first reading the mythological story of Cain and Abel, who were the mythological sons of the mythological Adam and Eve. If you want to believe these four people actually existed at some time and in some place, that’s okay too. That isn’t the real issue here. Anyway, you heard how both brothers brought an offering to God, and God liked the one offering and not the other. Probably the writer thought shepherds were better than farmers, and that God also thought that, but I’m not going into that either.
Cain’s nose was out of joint because God favored an animal offering more than a grain offering. So what did he do? He did what every red-blooded American would do; he killed Abel. He didn’t use a 12-gauge shotgun or a .44 magnum though. Genesis doesn’t even bother to tell us how Cain killed Abel; those are the kinds of details the Bible normally doesn’t care about. But the truth being conveyed here is that murder is one of the most serious crimes in secular law and one of the most serious sins in religious law. That notion became enshrined in the Sixth Commandment: You shall not murder.
How many murderers who use a gun are remorseful after they have used it? How many murders might not have happened were there not so many guns immediately available? Is the very lethality of a gun the reason it is used so often? If there weren’t so many kinds of guns available, especially pistols or semi- or automatic rifles, would so many Americans die from gunfire? Would so many people be shot by accident? Would so many children kill themselves playing with Dad’s pistol? Not everybody who points a gun at someone intends to kill that person, but often accidents happen, because safety is not a legal requirement for gun owners.
The NRA’s noxious mantra is that guns don’t kill people; people kill people. That is cynical nonsense. Nobody really needs a gun, except for officers of the law and members of the military. When the thirteen colonies began, there were only two reasons for firearms. The first was protection from Indians (and our diseases killed far, far more of them than did our guns). The second reason was food; hunting with guns no doubt kept many people from starving in places where farming was marginal. Otherwise guns were an expensive item which most people couldn’t even afford to buy.
Today only a few million Americans have ever gone hunting with a gun, and almost none of them really needed to do so for food. For most hunters, it is the challenge of the hunt and not the killing of the game that counts. To anyone who thinks all guns should be abolished, I will only note that there are some otherwise sensible hunters who would threaten to shoot anyone who threatens to take away their guns. Total gun abolition will never happen. However, gun control must happen if America does not want to lose its soul to a highly flawed constitutional amendment. Surely God abhors our fixation with firearms. How could He not, and still be God?
Here is the point. America and Americans have far too many guns. They are openly carried with a cavalier disregard for others. In moments of perceived emotional crisis they are used to shoot at or to kill somebody. We constantly live with Wild West anarchy.
Here is the unvarnished truth: If murders are good, then guns are good, because they are the most effective means for ordinary people to murder other ordinary people. If wars are good, then there have been hundreds of good wars from the end of the fifteenth century to the present, because guns have killed many millions of people, mainly men, who otherwise might have lived to the end of their natural lives. As it was, those lives were snuffed out unnaturally by firearms. As Genesis warns us in one of its earliest chapters, people kill people. For the past five hundred years, they do it most often with guns.
As a nationality, Americans are one of the most violent peoples on our planet. It isn’t because by nature we are more violent. Rather there are historical factors which explain this terrible propensity of ours to kill people. But the widespread availability of firearms is a primary factor for our violence, although it is not the primary one.
Amos was a man from the southern kingdom of Judah who moved into the northern kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BCE. He was a marginal worker who was a shepherd and who also tended fruit trees. A happy soul he was not. He began his prophecy by saying that doom and gloom were about to descend on all of Israel’s neighbors, including his own homeland of Judah. But then Amos quoted God as saying that Israel also was going to experience God’s anger for their sins. If Amos ever had any prophetic popularity, with that no doubt it suddenly plummeted.
The Israelites found it hard to accept these harsh words, because they thought their king, Jereboam, was a noble chap, and besides, they were living in prosperity. A priest named Amaziah, who was an Israelite nationalist, reamed out Amos for speaking against the state. He told Amos to go back to Judah where he came from and to stay there, never to return to Israel again. So Amos answered Amaziah as follows: “Hear the word of the Lord. You say, ‘Do not prophesy against Israel.’ Therefore thus saith the Lord, ‘Your wife shall be a harlot in the city, and your sons and daughters shall fall by the sword, and Israel will surely go into exile away from the land” (Amos 7:16-17). We don’t know what happened to Amaziah’s wife and children, but we do know that the Assyrians invaded, conquered, and destroyed Israel, and it never again existed as an independent kingdom.
It wasn’t easy for the prophets to point out the folly of flawed laws and customs in their own country, and it certainly was bound to make Amos unpopular, especially with certain citizens who took issue with what he said. The biblical prophets believed it was incumbent upon them to proclaim what they were convinced was the word of God to all people, but especially to stiff-necked and recalcitrant people who resisted repentance.
This nation is becoming more and more polarized. We have a major problem with guns, and too many of us are ideologically unwilling even to consider it to be an issue. If GOP-dominated state legislatures keep passing laws that encourage rather than restrict gun ownership, the daily slaughter we see will only increase. The wrath of God never falls from above, although we somehow imagine it does. Instead it eats away from within, until the moral fiber of a nation disappears, and it collapses from its own blind ignorance and stubborn willfulness.
Too many American guns are killing us, and we foolishly keep passing laws to protect those weapons. That trend is as foolhardy as it would be to encourage people to ignore a virulent virus, were one to come. I ask you: What kind of people would do such a thing?