Our Massacres. A Reflection on Sin.

Today I read up on the Rwandan Genocide twenty years ago, and I feel somber. Half a world away, while I was growing up in happy little Gillespie, Illinois, nearly a million people were brutally raped and murdered within the course of three months.

This was not some historical genocide that happened half-a-century ago -- which, of course, does not make something like the Holocaust or other mass-murders less terrible -- but this was a real, live, touchable (nearly) expression of how of sin affects the human soul. I wince on the inside as I consider how hundreds of thousands of Rwandans today now experience the HIV/AIDS epidemic due to war rape. I wince all the moreso from reading about the UN Peacekeepers who left a school full of 1,000 refugees, who were subsequently murdered by the drunk men outside.

And I have some problems of my own.

You see: Sin causes hurt. It causes hatred. It causes pain. It causes bitterness. Its effects are complete and total throughout the whole human being. One might say that those who died in the massacres were the fortunate and blessed ones: death is sweet compared to the active work of sin in the world.

Now, I may not have witnessed genocide in my life, but I have witnessed the workings of sin. In America, sin never functions as simply as it does in the rest of the world -- here sin prefers a more insidious system to dissolve the human spirit. It avoids murder for that "nicer" sin of hatred, which leaves a man hating his brother and murdering him in his heart for years, leaving him as an empty husk devoted to hatred. It avoids rape for simple objectification, which leads to sex trafficking and prostitution, enslaving young women to a hopeless life, and enslaving young men to a world of being abusers.

Sin has fooled the Church to reject rational thinking; and it has (strategically) fooled the rational thinkers into rejecting theology; and it has fooled the theologians from accepting a real and living God; and it has fooled the charismatics from accepting a logical and rational God. It has lied about God's supernatural power, and it has lied about His living mercy and justice.

You see, in America sin has lied to us about what sin is. Our Protestant-work-ethic, Bible-belt, Sunday-school mentalities have brought us to an understanding that sin is when you think a woman is hot, when you cuss at your neighbor for letting his dog poop in your yard, when you don't attend Sunday morning service. In America, one finds two groups with different perspectives on sin: the liberals who say that there is no sin (if they call themselves Christians, we can safely [alongside St. Augustine] call them followers of Pelagius); and the religious folk who say that sin rests in action.

But sin is a much bigger problem that our lust, our hate, our selfishness, our imposition of our will (our witchcraft), our murder, our theft, our lies, our massacres. Sin is a much much more offensive issue than any Holocaust or Rwandan Genocide. Sin is much much more destructive than the death of 800,000 men, women, and children, than the 50% divorce rate in America [and the broken families that result, than the 50,000 women who are brought into the US every year for sexual slavery.

The root-cause to our massacres is simple: we have chosen our leadership against the leadership and kingship of the Only King of Life. We have been disconnected to life and pleasure and goodness and mercy and love, and in that world outside of Him, which we can only accurately describe as Hell, we massacre. Sin is our state of rebellion, massacre is our response to living in the state of sin.

I write all of this with a heavy heart: the world is covered, as C.S. Lewis once said, by one dark shadowy wing. Evil rules our streets. Even today, sin is acting among people from sea to sea, from land to land, in obvious ways and in subtle ways, in overt wickedness and in sublime deception.

I do not write this to scare you, dear reader. My heart feels heavy as I thought on the massacres in Rwanda. I am sad. And I see its repetition, like that scene in The Last of the Mohicans, when the caravan is assaulted, or the moment in Blood Meridian when they attack the Indian village. Massacre is in our blood. Like when Russia directed Ukraine's former prime minister Viktor Yanukovych to fire upon the crowd amassing against him. Like Robert Mugabe. Like the unrest in Congo. Like the suicide bombers of the Middle East. Like the massacres that happen here in America: how we slay one another with our tongues and think that we are better off than "those African countries."

Again, my goal is not to scare you. But, perhaps, to sober you. This is to illuminate, not condemn. God says that He sends His Spirit to "convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment" (John 16:8) -- His conviction is His merciful revelation of our massacres.

I say none of this without Hope. My blog is called Apolytrosis -- that is, "Redemption." I do not believe in a God who gives up on us. Even in the days of Noah, God did not give up on His Creation, but He sent the floods as a demonstration of His mercy. (We can talk about that later!) The Gospel's summation is that God sent Christ in the midst of the depth of our death and human condition in order to save us and deliver us from our massacres.

Praise God, that He has set up the Way for us to be free from this world of massacre and death. Praise God! When Christians discuss the coming Kingdom, we should do so with the hopeful expectation of the coming King's Power to bring all things under His authority -- only in such a Kingdom can we truly be safe, can we truly be free from death, can we truly be free from massacre.