“Beloved:  A Reflection on the Knoxville Church Shooting”

A sermon by

The Rev. Robert M. Hardies

All Souls Church Unitarian

Washington, D.C.

Sunday, 7 September 2008

Let me add my welcome to all of you on this Homecoming Sunday; it’s so good to see all of you again.  There were many times over the course of my summer break when I found myself missing this community.  But none more than in the days and hours after I learned of the shooting at the Knoxville Unitarian Church, when I longed for nothing more than to be here with all of you, and for us to be together.  Which is probably why I’ve chosen this topic for my sermon for all of us to share on homecoming Sunday.  The title of my sermon, “Beloved,” comes from Paul’s letter to the Romans, just one brief line from that, which also, incidentally, served as the epigraph to my favorite novel, Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.”  That line reads “I will call them my people who were not my people and her beloved who was not beloved.”  But as I searched further for a text this morning, I realized that the text that was most appropriate for this service was not a piece of scripture or even a poem, but a hymn that I’d like all of us together to sing right now.  It’s hymn number one in your hymnal, a hymn that is often sung in Unitarian churches on homecoming Sunday, a hymn of blessing and an apt reflection, I believe, for our topic today.  I invite you to stand, as you are able, and to join in singing hymn number one.

May nothing evil cross this door,

and may ill fortune never pry

about these windows;

may the roar and rain go by.

By faith made strong, the rafters will

withstand the battering of the storm.

This hearth, though all the world grow chill,

will keep you warm.

Peace shall walk softly through these rooms,

touching our lips with holy wine,

till every casual corner

blooms into a shrine.

With laughter drown the raucous shout, and,

Though these sheltering walls are thin,

may they be strong to keep hate out

and hold love in.

Thank you.

Just six weeks ago this morning, the members and friends of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, gathered for church, not unlike we have gathered here this morning.  It was a special service that morning, a pageant led by the children of the church.  Not long after the pageant began, a 58-year-old man entered the building and, over the voices of the children, began shouting slurs from the back of the sanctuary.  Seconds later, he pulled out a shotgun and began firing into the pews.  Several members of the congregation rushed at the gunman to attempt to stop him.  One of them was Greg McKendry, an usher that morning.  As McKendry approached, the gunman shot him dead.

Eventually, several people were able to pin the gunman down, undoubtedly saving countless lives, for police later recovered 76 unspent rounds on the gunman’s body.  Six other parishioners were seriously wounded; one of them, Linda Kraeger, died the next day in the ICU.  In the days that followed, evidence in the gunman’s truck and home indicated that the shooting was premeditated, that the gunman had specifically targeted the Unitarian Church for what the police called its liberal, social views.  The Unitarian Church in Knoxville is well known for its historic commitment to desegregation and racial justice and, more recently, for its support of gays and lesbians.

We at All Souls have some close ties to the Knoxville Church.  Two former All Souls members, Don and Elizabeth Franks, had recently moved from Washington to Tennessee and were present in the sanctuary that morning.  The Reverend Chris Buice, the minister of the church, is a friend of mine from seminary and I know that others of you have friends in that congregation.  So immediately following the incident, my heart was filled, as I’m sure yours was, with concern and prayers for the members of the Knoxville congregation, for the dead, the injured and for the adults and children who witnessed the slaughter.  I also felt, and I know many did, a strong feeling of warmth and solidarity for this faith of ours, thinking of McKendry and Kraeger, I recalled the long line of Unitarians and Universalists dating back to the Reformation who gave their lives for our faith, sometimes unknowingly.  For me the tragedy was a kind of gut check that left me saying these are my people; this is my faith and I will stand by it, come what may.

But another line of thinking has occupied my thoughts since the shooting.  For almost as soon as I heard the horrible news, I found myself asking, “What kind of person would do such a thing?  What kind of monster would open fire on a group of 200 innocent men, women and children?”  And maybe some of you found yourselves asking those same questions; it seems that in recent years the opportunities for us to ask questions like that have multiplied.  But this time, instead of posing such a question rhetorically, as a way to set the killer apart and to demonize him, I’ve actually tried to take that question seriously.  What kind of person?  And rather than chalking his behavior up to something less than human, to locate the motivation for his behavior precisely in his humanity, which has proved a difficult exercise, for it’s made the killer less a monster and more like me, us.

So this morning I want to ask us to do some heavy spiritual lifting, perhaps more than you’d bargained for on Homecoming Sunday.  I’m asking you this morning to enter into an empathetic relationship for a moment with a killer.  Empathetic not in the sense of forgiving or condoning, but in the sense of understanding and, perhaps, even identifying with another’s point of view.  My intent in doing so is not to indulge some morbid voyeurism and certainly not to excuse a crime, but to better understand the roots of human sin, his and our own.  In the end, these reflections bring me back to what I believe is the unique importance of this Unitarian faith of ours.

No one took Jim Adkisson for a killer.  When told of his crime, his neighbors expressed shock.  They’d lived near him for several years and described him as a friendly man who, just a few weeks earlier, had stopped by the roadside and helped one of them change their tire.  They also described him, though, as a loner and reported that they rarely saw anyone coming and going from his house.  Money problems weighed heavily on Adkisson and added to his sense of isolation.  A truck driver and engineer by trade, he’d been out of work since 2006.  In an angry letter written days before the shooting, he expressed frustration with his inability to find a job.  And taking his cue from the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter, whose books were found strewn across his desk, Adkisson blamed the liberals and the gays for taking all the good jobs.  He fretted because his food stamps were about to run out.  Adkisson was feeling desperate.

While this is surely not a complete picture of the mind of a killer, it is enough to suggest that whatever other mental or emotional illness plagued him, Jim Adkisson suffered from a profound sense of alienation, anxiety and insecurity.  Like so many in our modern world, he found himself caught in tides of economic and social dislocation.  Seeking an explanation for his suffering, he gravitated to the loudest option available – the fear, hate and scapegoating of the shouting right. 

Reinhold Niebuhr was one of the giants of 20^th Century theology and an astute observer of human nature, especially its dark side.  Niebuhr once said that the root cause of human sin, all manner of human sin – the big stuff and the small stuff – is human insecurity.  He meant insecurity in an existential sense; as mortals who enjoy the gift of life but understand that this gift will one day be taken away from us, that we will die, we all live with a fundamental insecurity, the insecurity of our being.  All other anxieties, those that arise from our circumstances or our constitutions, are mere embellishments upon this original anxiety.  I don’t know about you, but for me this explanation of human wrongdoing resonates pretty strongly.  Perhaps your conscience, like mine, can right now call up a long list of things that you know you shouldn’t have done.  And perhaps you, too, find your own insecurity and anxiety lingering in the shadows of that wrongdoing. 

Insecure in love, we hurt those closest to us.  Anxious about our financial security, we step on others for our own gain, use them as means to our ends. What is true of humans is also true of nations.  We know that insecure nations conduct bellicose foreign policy, committing genocide, building fences along borders, starting preemptive wars.  When we look at what he did, Jim Adkisson appears to us as a monster.  But when we examine why he did it, when we understand his loneliness and his anxiety and his sense of powerlessness, suddenly he appears not so different from the rest of us.  Jim Adkisson is a little bit like a mirror for me; in him I see myself as I truly am, a vulnerable person, an insecure person, often seeking security from all the wrong places, often hurting people along the way. 

If this, indeed, is our predicament, if we do indeed suffer from this existential anxiety and if this is indeed the cause of our sin, is there no hope for us?  Is there no balm, no security for our anxious souls, or is it as the poet once said that the only sense of security is a false sense of security?  Well, if by security we mean escaping our mortality, then no, I’m afraid there is no security.  But if by security, we mean a reprieve from the anxiety and uncertainty of our being a resting place for our anxious souls, then I believe the answer is yes, there is a balm.

Paul Tillich, another titan of 20^th Century theology, possessed a great and complicated intellect, yet for all his dense theological writing, Tillich was probably most famous for a sermon that he often preached as he made his way around the college campus chapel circuit back in the Fifties and the Sixties, preaching a sermon titled simply, “You are Accepted.”  You are accepted.  Now, at first this might seem a rather modest title for a sermon, not “You are Saved,” not “You are the Lucky Winner of a One-Way Ticket to Glory.”  You are accepted.   The modest title belies the profound experience at the heart of that sermon, the moment when, in the midst of our dislocation, our insecurity and our anxiety, we glimpse a truth that puts our souls at ease.  Listen to what Tillich said: 

Sometimes at that moment, a wave of light breaks into our darkness and it is as though a voice were saying, “You are

accepted.  You are accepted.”  Accepted by that which is greater than you and the name of which you do not know.

Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later.  Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do

much.  Do not seek for anything, do not perform anything, do not intend anything.  Simply accept the fact that you

are accepted.

If that happens, said Tillich, we experience grace.  Grace.  Do you know the experience that Tillich is talking about?  The moment of existential peace, belonging, acceptance?

I experienced it the first day I ever walked into a Unitarian Church.  Many of you know that story.  I was a 23-year-old, recently out of the closet.  I found myself living in Portland, Oregon, right at the time when the religious right was putting all these initiatives on ballots seeking to restrict the rights of gays and lesbians and the airways were filled that season with all this hate speech against gay folks.  One Sunday morning I found myself walking around the streets of downtown Portland, wondering how it was that my worth and dignity had become the subject of political debate, when I happened upon a church that looked a lot like All Souls Church, whose red brick walls and white columns were dotted with signs that said “Hate-Free Zone.”  A big church that owned an entire city block, and whose entire block, the church, trees, street signs and all were wrapped in flowing ribbons of pink.

I walked in that morning.  I sat in the far back corner which, if you pay attention you’ll notice is often where the vulnerable and the newcomers sit in our churches.  And on that first Sunday, an openly gay parishioner came up into the pulpit holding his infant child and spoke from the pulpit.  First time I’d ever seen an openly gay person in church.  And then the preacher, a woman, stepped into the pulpit – only the second time I’d seen a woman in the pulpit – and preached a gospel called universalism, of God’s love for the whole human family.  And it was during that worship service, on that very day, when I heard those words whispered to me:  “You are accepted.”  No, not even “You are accepted” – “You are beloved.”   “I will call them my people who were not my people and her beloved who was not beloved.”

Jim Adkisson walked into a Unitarian Church for the first time six weeks ago and he too was feeling under siege, alienated from the culture around him.  He too was seeking some kind of assurance, some balm for his troubled soul, not unlike me on that Sunday 15 years ago, not unlike you this morning.  Not unlike all the people in that church in Knoxville that he opened fire on.  And to me that just adds another layer to the tragedy of Knoxville.  But Jim Adkisson had come seeking the right thing, and had even come to the right place to find it, but had come with a loaded gun and a heart full of hate.  If he had come instead with an open heart, he likely would have been greeted that morning by the usher, Greg McKendry, the man he killed.  Greg would have, no doubt, handed him a program and given him one of those warm welcomes that Greg was so well known for in his church.  And then he would have sat down, most likely in the far corner of the sanctuary where the broken and the vulnerable often sit, and would have heard the words and songs of the children that morning.  And maybe, maybe, Jim Adkisson would have heard that whisper that Tillich speaks of.  “You are accepted.”  “You are beloved.”  But it was not to be.

Friends, on this Homecoming Sunday, I pray that you will take this good news into your heart:  You are accepted.  You are beloved.  And I invite you to experience the grace and peace that comes from that assurance.  Not only that.  I invite you to take some responsibility for creating an atmosphere of acceptance and hospitality here in this place.  You never know what will cause someone to hear those words of assurance.  It could be the smile of an usher.  It could be the way that you’re greeted by your neighbor in the pews on Sunday morning.  It could be something the choir sings or something the preacher says, or the meal that you receive in Pierce Hall afterwards.  I invite each of us to see ourselves as ambassadors of the love and welcome that are embodied in our name, All Souls, so that all who enter our doors, on any day of the year, might stand a better than even chance of hearing those words:  You are accepted.  You are beloved.  You.    Amen