Sermon of Tuesday, 17 April 2007, Alphege of Canterbury
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Readings: Revelation 7:13-17, Psalm 31 p. 622, Luke 12:4-12


Yesterday morning, a 23-year-old Virginia Tech student, killed thirty-three people – two in a dorm, then 30 more 2 hours later in a classroom building where he chained the door closed to prevent escape. His own suicide brought the death toll to 33, making the shooting rampage the most deadly in U.S. history. Fifteen others were wounded – either by gun fire or by jumping out of windows to escape.

It was very intentionally that I chose the readings for Alphege today. As a Christian martyr who served as bishop during the second wave of Scandinavian invasions and settlement in England, Alphege was captured by the Danes in 1011. When he refused to allow a personal ransom to be collected from his already over-burdened people, he was brutally murdered. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates that the Danes took the Bishop, and led him to their hustings, on the eve of the Saturday after Easter . . . and then they shamefully killed him.

In commemorating those who have been shamefully, needlessly, and tragically killed, we frequently think back on those who have suffered in the past as a means to find some measure of reassurance or comfort or hope that life as we know it will someday return.

The recent history of school killings has been alarming and tragic. With the addition yesterday of the tragic killing of thirty-three people at Virginia Tech, we are reminded again of the terrible tragedy of tortured and troubled people in our own close communities taking out their pain on others around them.

It is likely, especially in a community such as D-Town, that we are all feeling the heavy weight of this tragedy. The question at times like these frequently becomes, “where is God to be found in all of this?” As in cases such as Columbine, and the forty-five other schools in the US, Canada, and Europe that have experienced tragic shootings over the past eleven years, I believe God weeps with us. We know from Jesus’ experience with Lazarus’ death and Christ’s own death on the cross that the depth of human suffering is certainly not alien to God. Just as Jesus wept to see the suffering of Lazarus’ friends and family, so too, God weeps with us in each of our life’s tragedies.

As we are reminded in Revelation and Luke today, this precious time that we have on Earth is not our final destination. God never intends our suffering – suffering that so frequently comes at the hand of the free choice of others to do harm. But we are reminded, and we take comfort in knowing that God is always with us – in tragedy and sorrow as well as in joy and exultation. God’s love for us knows no bounds and I believe very deeply that God was with each of those frightened and suffering people yesterday just as God is with their families and friends and the rest of us as we mourn their loss.

I want to keep my own words short today to allow the opportunity for some silent prayer and candle lighting in memory of the three professors and thirty students who were killed yesterday. Please feel free to come forward at this time to light a candle.