Ancient story from India:

Four royal sons were questioning what specialty they should master. They said to one another, “Let us search the earth and learn a special science.” So they decided, and after they had agreed on a place where they would meet again, the four brothers started off, each in a different direction. Time went by, and the brothers met again at the appointed meeting place, and they asked one another what they had learned.

“I have mastered a science,” said the first, “which makes it possible for me, if I have nothing but a piece of bone of some creature, to create the flesh that goes with it.”

“I,” said the second, “know how to grow that creature’s skin and hair if there is flesh on its bones.”

The third said, “I am able to create its limbs if I have the flesh, the skin, and the hair.”

“And I,” concluded the fourth, “know how to give life to that creature if its form is complete with limbs.

And so the four brothers went into the jungle to find a piece of bone so that they could demonstrate their specialties. As fate would have it, the bone they found was a lion’s, but they did not know that and picked up the bone. One added flesh to the bone, the second grew hide and hair, the third completed it with matching limbs, and the fourth gave the lion life. Shaking its heavy mane, the ferocious beast arose with its menacing mouth, sharp teeth, and merciless claws and jumped on its creators. He killed them all and vanished contentedly into the jungle.

A story illustrating that we humans often are confident that we are in control of the world and create as we wish...but a lack of understanding of the big picture means we often get lost in the mix of life and, without that big-picture understanding, cause ourselves and others to suffer

Look at words of Cho

• You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people.

• Do you know what it feels to be spit on your face and to have trash shoved down your throat? Do you know what it feels like to dig your own grave?
Do you know what it feels like to have throat slashed from ear to ear? Do you know what it feels like to be torched alive?
Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon on a cross? And left to bleed to death for your amusement? You have never felt a single ounce of pain your whole life. Did you want to inject as much misery in our lives as you can just because you can?

“You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today,” Cho says. “But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off.”

Cho’s family and cultural reactions

The Chos spoke for the first time yesterday, releasing a statement to the Associated Press through an attorney, saying they feel "hopeless, helpless and lost" and "are so deeply sorry for the devastation" caused by the gunman. Naming all 32 victims, the statement said: “We pray for their families and loved ones who are experiencing so much excruciating grief. And we pray for those who were injured and for those whose lives are changed forever because of what they witnessed and experienced.”

"We are humbled by this darkness," wrote Cho's sister, Sun Kyung Cho, 25. "This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn't know this person. . . . My brother was quiet and reserved, yet struggled to fit in. We never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence."

Cho's isolation as a youth may have been exacerbated by the strains of the Korean immigrant life, sociologists said. Parents, working one or two jobs to provide for their families, often have little time to spend with their children, let alone have meaningful talks with them.( The father worked long hours pressing pants at a dry cleaner in Manassas.) Cultural stigmas make it difficult to deal with the mental illness or emotional stress of a child.

"Korean immigrants would feel shame," said Sang Lee, director of the Asian American Program at Princeton Theological Seminary. "There would be some reluctance and some hesitancy in admitting [a mental illness] and openly seeing a doctor."

"Here is this person at Virginia Tech who may have been an adult academically, but emotionally and socially, he's clearly a child who's been stunted," said Kim, who is also a licensed mental health professional. "He didn't know how to deal with people. He lived in pure isolation."

Was this act evil?

- Declare that this murder was a great evil, and that God's just wrath is greatly kindled by the destruction of human life created in his image.

- Express that Cho rebelled against the revealed will of God and did not love God or trust him or find in God his refuge and strength and treasure, but scorned his ways and his Person.

Who is responsible?

- (liberals say it’s lax gun control and want to knee-jerk respond by passing more gun-control legislation, NRA responds by suggesting incident happened because there weren’t enough guns, and if the students were packing heat, they would’ve neutralized the situation and minimized casualties, some want to completely blame the environment Cho grew up in (national, ethnic, misunderstanding of disease, school, loner status), some want to blame his family, some say the environment doesn’t matter at all and that he’s responsible for his actions and no one else is, some say Cho was evil, some say he was confused, some say he was mentally disturbed, some say he was a person like the rest of us who acted out of being in the grip of evil)

What is it in us that is fundamentally different than Cho?

- And if we are to say clearly and conclusively that Cho chose a course of action that was deeply destructive to others, and we are all humans just like him, we carry the same potential for destruction that Cho carries out. This is reality, and it should humble us. Temptation is temptation, and we are all susceptible to giving into it. So we should acknowledge what seems to be the natural rebellion in our own hearts, and turn from it, and turn to and cling to God.

- Results of a sick society and a sick individual within that system, and that system exists in a sick world

- Sin is a disease that has us all in its grasp, some of us deeper than one another

Tell story of Nazism, Stalin’s purges, brutal mistreatment of Native Americans

Burundi story

story from Bujunbura, Burundi…twin sister country of Rwanda in East Africa, with a group of fifty-five leaders from Burundi, Uganda, Congo, Rwanda, and they're grappling with this because Christianity has swept through these countries, in some of them large majorities of the population are Christians, yet in Rwanda, for example, one of the highest church attendance rates in the world, they had this horrible genocide in 1994, so, they're saying, "We got a message that told us how to get to heaven, but it didn't really tell us how to get along with each other…tell us how to live on earth very well,

Tell story of Rwanda and Uganda (Nelson and Wilson)

- could not sell fish because the water flowing into Lake Victoria was so badly poisoned with dead bodies

Biblical grounding: 1 Timothy 1:12-19

How do we face this problem and seek a solution? (with honesty and realistic outlook on our present state)?

Finish Burundi story

We got a message that told us how to get to heaven, but it didn't really tell us how to get along with each other…tell us how to live on earth very well, so that's what we're talking about, and I'm there talking about the gospel of the kingdom.

At the end of the day, everyone got up and left and we were going to have dinner together, and this one lady was left with her down on the table in front of her…she looked like she had passed out or was sick or something, so I went over with someone who could translate and we asked her, "Are you ok?" Her name is Ajustine, and she said, "I'm ok", she had tears coming down her face, and she said, "but I don't know if everyone in the room understood." I said, "what do you mean?" and she said "I think I understand the gospel of the kingdom, but I'm not sure if everyone else did, but if the gospel of the kingdom is true, everything will change…and that sentence has haunted me since. And that's what repent means, repent means change your way of thinking about everything."

Conversion really should have at least two meanings for us, then, as followers of Jesus. No follower of Jesus can prevent themselves from looking at the world honestly and saying conclusively that it is sick and fragmented and dying. In the same way, no follower of Jesus can avoid facing their own human condition, since in the midst of their struggle for a new world they will find they are fighting their own fear and twisted ambitions and selfishness and rebellion.

We are called to cut loose from our selfish needs for a safe and protected existence and face the fear of the miserable condition of ourselves and our world; conversion and repentance is all about changing the way we see everything.

Jesus is the man in whom it has become clear that both the social and the personal aspect of conversion cannot be separated in our search for truth and wholeness. His appearance in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as two beams of the cross.

Jesus was a revolutionary, who did not become an extremist, since he did not offer an ideology (or link up with the Zealots already there), but Himself and a way of life that exposed the twistedness of all involved. He was also deeply spiritual, and did not use his intimate relationship with God to avoid the social evils of his time, but shocked those of his time to the point of being executed as a rebel. In this sense he remains the way to liberation and freedom.

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” —Alexander Solzhenitsyn (background story?)

(In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia he was arrested for criticising Joseph Stalin in private correspondence with a friend and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labour camp, to be followed by permanent internal exile.

The first part of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several different work camps; the "middle phase", as he later referred to it, was spent in a sharashka, special scientific research facilities run by Ministry of State Security: these formed the experiences distilled in The First Circle, published in the West in 1968. In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners. During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundryman. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. )

Remember that even those who trust in Christ may be cut down like these 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech, but that does not mean they have been abandoned by God or not loved by God even in those agonizing hours of suffering. God's love conquers even through calamity.

Romans 8:38-39 “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,^[a] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Hold out the promise that God will sustain and help those who cast themselves on him for mercy and trust in his grace. He will strengthen you for the impossible days ahead in spite of all darkness.