The Lessons We Need To Learn

Sunday, December 14, 2025

Lesson 1: Be careful with your bragging.  First the host’s beloved, as he tells us constantly, Ohio State loses the Big Ten football championship (something he barely mentioned this past week) to former Big Ten doormat Indiana University (a name never mentioned in the week past) and now Indiana’s quarterback, Fernando Mendoza, wins the Heisman Trophy over Ohio State’s Julian Sayin.  Bragging just makes the eventual humiliation that much more humiliating.  Sadly, now we must turn our attention to far more consequential, and unfortunately deadly, news and lessons.

The last 24 hours have been marked by not one, but two deadly mass shootings.  One at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.  Two dead, nine wounded (some in critical condition) – shooter and motive unknown.  The other, involving two shooters, one now dead, targeted  a Hanukkah celebration on Australia’s famed Bondi Beach.  Ten dead, eleven injured, motive obvious.

The cries for gun control have not yet reached media reporting levels, but they soon will, and this holiday season I find them heartbreaking.  It’s the third Sunday of Advent, Joy Sunday.  Hard to find joy when this is the news – Mendoza’s Heisman notwithstanding.  We anticipate the arrival of the Christ child – Christmas.  As Matthew describes it, “‘Behold, the virgin will conceive and give birth to a Son, and they shall name Him Immanuel,’ which translated means, ‘God with us.'”  John says it more cryptically, “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us; and we saw His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”  We celebrate nothing less than God’s arrival in our midst.  That is indeed joyful news, but it is so hard to see Him when the world is marked by the sorts of things we find ourselves confronted with this Sunday morning.

But we can find joy by noting that the solution to things like this do not lie in gun control, but in God’s arrival.  Ask yourself why God, the infinite, omnipotent God would do such a thing.  Why would He that is clothed in glory put on meager human form?  The answer is that he sees the darkness in our hearts – the kind of darkness that can shoot up a university building or a beach full of people who are different – and he knows the only way things like this stop happening is if He removes that darkness.  And He knows the only way He can do that is personally, in the flesh.

We resist, we cling to our darkness, because we want to believe we are good.  He took on flesh to show us what good really looks like, and we do not measure up, not even close.  And yet we still cling to our darkness – all we need to do is see it, admit it, and let Him deal with it.  Rather than confront our darkness we try and remove the instruments of its expression.  But if we do not permit the removal of the darkness, it will simply find a new expression.

This Joy Sunday we find the darkness in the human heart screaming at us in the headlines.  Let’s not ignore it.  Let’s not try to hide it with with solutions that aren’t. Let’s find the joy we are meant to have this Sunday by giving that darkness to the source of that joy – a source whose light far outshines the darkness.