Shooting in Mayberry

Thursday afternoon two Sheriff’s deputies were gunned down while they ate a late lunch in a little Chinese restaurant in Trenton, FL.  If you wanted to find a place more like the mythical Mayberry from Andy Griffin fame you would have a hard time doing it.   Trenton is just down the road from my house.  From my house to the scene of the shooting all you do is turn right out of the driveway, go 11 miles and turn left into the China Ace restaurant. 

Trenton is the county seat of Gilchrist County, the only place in FL with only one traffic light in the whole county.  This is rural, agricultural, country-living America in its pure form.  Folks are small town warm and friendly.  In the local drug store Theresa, the manager, knows the customers by name, their kids, their ailments, and who needs more help than they let on.  I recently needed 5 books from the store for a book tour event.  I went and picked them up at the store, told the girl at the counter I would replace them and walked out with nothing more than a, “See y’all later”.  The newspaper is owned and run by a husband and wife team that does the reporting, set up, advertising sales, delivery and run the office.  When the Trenton Tigers played for a state football title a couple years ago, 2,400 of the 2,100 residents drove down for the game.  Trenton is the kind of town where you can imagine the town drunk only gets tipsy.  Trenton is more like Mayberry than any place you can imagine; at least it was. A man known as a recluse and as being a bit odd demonstrated the expansiveness of evil.  

We want to pretend that we can find a safe place, that in small town America with a church on every corner we are safe.  Evil is there.  We hope that in our churches we will find a haven of innocents.  Yet we find evil there.  Surely in our families we can be secured from evil.  No, the invasion of evil has moved into the sanctuary of home.  Evil has convincingly told us that it does not exist.  That people are basically good and that with education, jobs, self-esteem, enlightenment, laws, gun control,  (you name the social plan) and man’s inherent goodness will prevail.   So far it hasn’t worked.  By the way, I have it on good, indeed, on Divine authority that it never will.

It is time for the church to being speaking frankly and honestly about the prevailing nature of evil in the individual’s heart.  We don’t need a program, a sermon, or even a comment about the evil of some social malfunction.  That is to play into the hands of evil itself.   Dietrich Bonheoffer once wrote:  “The great masquerade of evil has wrought havoc with all our ethical preconceptions. This appearance of evil in the guise of light, beneficence and historical necessity is utterly bewildering to anyone nurtured in our traditional ethical systems. But for the Christian who frames his life on the Bible it simply confirms the radical evilness of evil.”

The problem for John Hubert Hightower was not that he was lonely, had low self-esteem, had employment issues, owned a gun, or any other social theory of his dysfunction.  His problem was an evil heart.  Jesus said, “For from within, out of the heart of men, proceeds the evil thoughts…” ^{Mk 7.21 NASB} Because only the new life, available by our participation in Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection can cure evil; the world can never effectively deal with malevolence.

Mayberry doesn’t exist any more, if it ever did, and it is time for the church to stop pretending that it can.  It is time that we spend less time trying to solve social problems, address fears and phobias, worrying about appearing relevant to the world and become passionate about our message, which by the way is intensely counter cultural.  Here is that message, “We are sinners and it is killing us.  We have to be changed from dead to living and that is only by the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”