“The Shepherd and the Butcher”

April 29, 2007

Scripture Reading:   John 10:22 ff.

Rev. Dr. Carol  L. Kerr

 Blue Point Congregational Church

Let me start with a story:

While on a guided tour of the Holy Land the passengers on the bus had been told time and time again that the shepherd never drove the sheep like cattle but always walked in front, leading them.

As the bus came around a curve they looked out the window and saw a herd of sheep being driven by a man.  The tour guide was clearly flustered and stopped the bus.  He went over and had an extended conversation with the man driving the sheep.

He returned to the bus with a triumph smile on his face as he announced to the tourists, “He’s not the shepherd.  He’s the butcher!”

Now this is a funny story at first.  I almost put it as the meditation at the top of the bulletin.  But, when I started thinking about it, this winsome, funny story has a much deeper and much darker meaning.   We as sheep  can either follow the voice of the shepherd, or we can be driven by the knife of the butcher.   The good shepherd leads us to green pasture and beside still waters.  The butcher drives us into the valley of death and locks us in there.  Saying, “We have arrived!” 

What is the butcher that can drive us?  I think the butcher is violence and hatred.   It’s been not yet two weeks since the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech.  When events like the carnage there happen, it shatters our peace, it intrudes upon our consciousness, it interrupts and irritates and saddens and shocks.  It has been two weeks.  It is tempting to just give it up, quit thinking about it, and move on to something else.  But, violence too often erupts in our society for us as a church not to talk about it.  Remember Andrew Golden when he was 11 he and a friend killed five at their school in 1998.  Then there is this nice looking mild manner young man, Kinkel, who shot 27 in a rampage in 1998.  Of course there is Columbine.  We have the highest fire arm death rate among industrialized nations.  We have almost 11 deaths per 100,000 people versus England which has 1 death per 300,000 people.    Violence sells movies.  Violence sells T.V shows.  Then there are video games.   

Take the popular video game Doom, for instance.  As you sit in front of you TV screen, you experience the play as a first-person shooter.  You experience the use of the weapons through the eyes of the main character as if you are the one actually holding and using the weapon.   The plot is that demons from hell are erupting through teleportation gates.  You are the only human that remains alive and you have to kill all the demons from hell.   

What makes Doom chilling for me is not so much the plot, but the weapon arsenal available to the player.  The player starts armed only with a pistol and brass-knuckled fists in case the ammunition runs out.  But, larger weapons can be picked up such as a chainsaw, a shotgun, a chaingun, a rocket launcher, a plasma rifle and finally the immensely powerful BFG 9000.  There is the “berserk pack”  which is a black first aid box that puts the character into berserk mode allowing them to deal out rocket launcher-level damage with their fists and potentially splattering former humans and imps.    This is just one of the violent video games that our kids are playing for hours on end.  The butcher is in the game.  Somewhere along the line, the butcher moves out of the screen and plants himself into the mind of the person playing the game.  It is a fact that violent video games are significantly associated with:  increased aggressive behavior, thoughts, and affect; increased physiological arousal; and decreased social helping behavior. 

Of all the things that stick in my mind about the killer at Virginia Tech, Cho Seung-Hui, is the description of his eyes by a 20 year old biology major, Derek O’Dell.  At first he thought the slight young man dressed in dark clothes and holding a gun was playing some kind of bad joke.  Then he saw the shell casings popping out of the pistol as the shooter opened fire.  “I saw his eyes, too.  That’s probably the scariest thing.  There was nothing there, just emptiness almost.  Like you can look in people’s eyes and you can see life, their stories.  But his – just emptiness.”   So, I wonder, what happened to Cho’s soul?

Now, I am a clinical counselor, as well as a pastor.  I strongly believe that Cho was suffering from some sort of mental illness – certainly a paranoia with some sort of psychosis.  I can tell from his rantings on NBC.  Everyone was against him.  Everyone meant to belittle  him personally.  He was the real Christ to be emulated.  I agree with the report in Newsweek, that there are two kinds of killers.  One that is reactive and one that is proactive.  The proactive type kills from some other goal, such as robbery.  The reactive type kill because of some perceived insult or slight.  A person looks at them in the wrong way, pronounces the wrong political point of view, or teases him and the murderer feels that their core self, who they are has been completely annihilated and destroyed by the other.  Cho was the reactive type.  

I think he certainly had mental illness, but mental illness didn’t take away his soul.  What took away his soul is the violence and hatred that took over because of his illness.  It twisted his mind into believing the world is like one huge Doom video game.  It is one man against all the demons of hell trying to get at him.  The bigger the arsenal he has on his side – the more demons he can kill – is his last great chance of winning the game from hell even if he dies doing so.  The psychologist Jana Martin says that killers like Cho think “’I may never amount to much, but I’m going to die amounting to something.  This is my final mark on the world, my final statement.’  Their fantasy is that they will have the ultimate last word, even if they don’t’ live to see it.”  Cho said on the video that he sent to NBC, “You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing.  Thanks to you I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and defenseless people.” 

In the movie “Blood Diamond” set in 1999 Siera Leone while a civil war rages fueled by conflict diamonds which are sold to pay for weapons.  Leonardo DeCaprio plays Danny Archer, the anti-hero, a mercenary with something of a conscience, who along with the good guys and bad guys is hunting for this huge pink diamond.  The Revolutionary United Front meanwhile is leveling entire villages, chopping off the hands of some so they can’t vote in elections, and snatching young boys to become soldiers in the rebel army.  In a quiet moment of reflection while mayhem explodes around them, Danny Archer chats with a journalist, Maddy Bowen, and reveals that his “Mum was raped and shot and Dad was decapitated and hung from a hook in the barn.  Sometimes I wonder, will God ever forgive us for what we’ve done to each other?  Then I look around and I realize – God left this place a long time ago.” 

As the police slipped and fell on the pools of blood in the hallways as they tried to drag the wounded and the dead out of Norris Hall a person could think that on April 16^th God had abandoned Virginia Tech.  Horrific, senseless mayhem – the butcher arrived and did his work.  But, then, for me, at least, what brings God back into the hallways, is of all things reading about the people who were killed.  There is something about their goodness that lives on.    Violence doesn’t have the last say after all.  There is Liviu Librescu, 76, a Romanian Jew, who survived the holocaust, only to be killed last week.  He was a brave and unworldly minded person with a heart of gold who would return from trips with gifts for his students and would often invite them over for dinner.  Daniel O’neil was 22 and pursuing a degree in environmental engineering.  He was a renaissance man whose passions included designing bridges and writing acoustic-rock songs.  Caitlin Hammaren was 19 with an international studies major.  She was a sparkling girl.  She had been president of her school choir.  She went to the junior prom in a Renaissance dress; her date wore a purple kilt.    These are just three of the 30.    On the one hand it is terrible that these good people died.  We can only wonder at how much more they would have contributed to our needy world.  But, they in their all too short lives, did contribute love.  Love is eternal.   Love is at the center of our souls.  And love is the voice of the good Shepherd calling us to follow him. 

Remember Easter?    We as Christians also believe God has left this place a long time ago.  The tomb is empty.    Except God did not forsake this place.  The tomb is empty because God is victorious even over death.  Christ is resurrected.  And remember this Easter I preached about when Mary Magdalene was at the empty tomb and she didn’t recognize Jesus until he called her name, “Mary.”  That is when she heard the voice of the good shepherd.  She heard the voice of time and eternity – the voice of the one whose word is behind all words, whose hand made every hand.  And she knew that instant that she was known completely, that every hair on her head was numbered, that every beat of her heart was intended, that every hurt and every hope was recognized.

So too, God calls the names of the dead at Virginia Tech, Liviu, Daniel, Caitlin, Matthew, Ryan, Jocelyne, Waleed, Ross, Julia, Brian, Jamie, Henry, Daniel, Maxine, G.V., Nicole, Leslie, Lauren, Kevin, Rachael, Reema, Emily, Jeremy, Erin, Matthew, Austin, Partahi, Minal, Juan, Mary, Michael, and Jarret. 

I believe God is trying to call even Cho’s name.  Can he hear it?  I hope so, somehow, somewhere.   Did he, does he ever have a chance of redeeming his soul?   All I know is that love is very very powerful, and Cho’s sister, Sun-Kyung, loved him at one time.  In a statement she released to the press she said, “We feel hopeless, helpless and lost.  This is someone that I grew up with and loved.  Now I feel I don’t know this person.”    

The 23^rd Psalm is practically always read at funerals.  So we can be sure that this Psalm has been read many times by now down at Virginia Tech.  Cho was raised as a Christian, a Presbyterian.  My guess is Sun-Kyung has been reading that psalm too.  Lets’ take some time right now, and turn to page 518 at the back of our red hymnals and join in unison reading #69.  (Reading of the 23^rd Psalm)

  I could end the sermon here.  But, I want to share one more story and make one more point.  Priests and ministers are often called pastors, referring to the metaphor as the congregation are sheep and the minister is their pastor.  Anyhow, the story goes like this:

A priest was teaching Sunday school class about the 23^rd Psalm.  He told the children about sheep, that they weren’t very smart and needed lots of guidance, and that a shepherd’s job was to stay close to the sheep, protect them from wild animals and keep them from wandering off and doing dumb things that would get them hurt or killed.

He pointed to the little children in the room and said that they were the sheep and needed lots of guidance.  Then the priest put his hand out to the side, palms up in a dramatic gesture, and with raised eyebrows said to the children, “If you are the sheep then who is the shepherd?”

There was an awkward silence.

Then a young second-grader said, “Jesus”  Jesus is the shepherd.”

The young priest, obviously caught by surprise, said to her, “Well, then, who am I?”

Jennie thought for a moment, and then said with a shrug, “I guess you must be the sheep dog.” 

The sheep dog rounds up and does the work of bringing the sheep to the shepherd.  I believe in the priesthood of all believers.  We are all priests for Christ.  And like sheep dogs we need to work rounding up people to hear the call of the shepherd and to follow him.   We believe God has left his place a long time ago, because we believe god is resurrected.  He left that place in order to bring us to a new place.  This new place is a place of love.  Violence is vanquished and the butcher is gone forever.    Sometimes in Christian liturgy there is a feature where we say to each other “peace be with you.”  It comes from the Greek in the New Testament eirene.  It means inner peace.  It is the blessing that one receives immediately upon having faith.  It is eternal life.  It is incumbent upon us as Christians to counteract this violence in our culture and to bring the peace of Christ to the world.  We can’t ignore it.  We must challenge the fact that movies have to be violent to sell.  That in order to win in a video game you have to build the biggest and most gruesome arsenal of weapons.  We must challenge violence in our speech.  Domestic violence and  international violence.    We need to talk about it with  each other.  And, parents, this is something we need to work on with our kids, who are most susceptible to it.

In the Old Testament the word for peace is Shalom.  Shalom is the peace of God on earth.  It is the inspirational dream of a new community which bonds the world together.  It is the establishment of God between the nations.  As the prophet Isaiah envisions:

They shall beat their swords into plowshares,

And their spears into pruning hooks;

Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

Neither shall they learn war any more.