“I’m ashamed of my school,” the seventh-grader said quietly.
Since 12 year-olds are prone to finding fault with anything and everything having to do with school, you might under normal circumstances dismiss this statement as normal griping.
But, these were not normal circumstances.
April 20, 1999.
On that date, two teenage boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
Harris and Klebold were members of a group/gang called the Trench Coat Mafia. Embittered over years of bullying, the two went on a shooting rampage in which they targeted athletes, Christians, and African-Americans. They killed 12 students and a teacher, and injured 23 others before they turned their guns on themselves and committed suicide.
Harris and Klebold were such extremely disturbed loners that authorities should have seen it coming. It should be easier in the future to identify potential school shooters because of the profiles that could be developed from analyses of Harris and Klebold.
And that’s how it happened . . .
Or is it?
Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”
-- John 2:15-16 (NRSV)
On Sunday, March 15, 2009, the Third Sunday of Lent, the Reverend Janelle Tibbetts-Vaughan, the incredibly talented and creative Associate Pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Encino, California, delivered the best sermon on the above passage (and several surrounding verses) I have ever heard.
Janelle thoroughly analyzed the passage and concluded that Jesus was not angry over the simple fact that business was being transacted on the grounds of the Jerusalem Temple. No, Jesus was angry because the Jewish peasants who came faithfully to the Temple and attempted to practice their faith were being fleeced mercilessly by predatory merchants taking advantage of certain mandatory Temple rules that left the poor of Judea no choice but to be gouged before they made their sacrifices.
As I was listening to my colleague deliver her powerful message, I could not help but relate it to some headline events from the preceding week.
It’s almost too perfect.
On the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the U.S., Barack Obama takes the oath of office as America’s first black President.
The temptation to declare victory in the ages-old struggle against prejudice is strong. Inauguration Day 2009 is indeed a milestone, an event that few of us who are old enough to remember the civil rights struggles of the sixties and seventies ever expected to witness. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to think that the Obama presidency ushers in a new era of unprecedented equality?
