“Very truly,” Jesus tells Simon Peter, “when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished.” This saying about the belt has its roots in a first-century proverb about youth being able to go wherever they want. A young man could wrap his robe around him, cincture it so it didn’t fall open or hang too low, slip into his sandals, and head out the door. So could a young woman, for the most part.

But that was then, and this is now; that was there, and this is here. In first century Palestine, youth could go almost anywhere with the assurance that they would not be bodily harmed. In twenty-first century America, youth cannot go even to a classroom with that assurance. Virginia Tech is only the most recent evidence that I am speaking the sad truth. College, high school, and grade school children (and in many instance, their teachers) have also been multiply-murdered at Columbine High School in Littleton, CO, at an Amish school in Nickel Mines, PA, at Westside middle school in Jonesboro, Arkansas, at Heath High School in Paducah, KY, at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, VA, and at the University of Arizona School of Nursing in Tucson. These are only a few of the instances I could cite. Go to <holology.com/shooting> if you want to find more. But, aren’t these enough?

Jesus says to Peter, “Feed my lambs.” Perhaps you will agree with me that as Christian citizens who profess to be disciples in Peter’s footsteps, we are charged as much as he with feeding lambs. And maybe you will confess with me that collectively speaking – unless we count bullets as food – we’ve been doing a pretty lousy job. We’ve had our day of national mourning. What we need now is a day of national remorse.

I’m sure you know without my telling you that in every instance of school-place multiple murders, the common denominator has been automatic or semi-automatic weapons. In first-century Palestine, youth could reasonably hope to defend themselves against possible assailants; if they couldn’t defend themselves, they stood a reasonable chance of outrunning their assailants, or of dodging thrown stones. In regard to safety in the school place (or anywhere else, for that matter), the biggest difference between then and now is the type of weapon available.

Cho Seung-hui does not represent America's students, any more than Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris did when they slaughtered 13 of their fellow students at Columbine in 1999. Such disturbed people exist in every society. The difference, as everyone knows (but no one in authority said this past week), is that in America today, such individuals have easy access to weapons of terrible destructive power. Cho killed his victims with two guns, one of them a Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, a rapid-fire weapon that is available only to police in virtually every other country, but which can legally be bought over the counter in thousands of gun-shops in America. Had powerful guns not been available to him, the deranged Cho would have killed fewer people and perhaps none at all.

I am not anti-gun. I am pro-sanity. But I find myself a citizen of a country that people abroad widely consider insane. An English friend, a Vicar, took me to a parishioner’s rural estate in Cornwall for a lovely Sunday dinner. After scooping what I thought was potato salad on to my plate, only to discover that it was mayonnaise and to find everyone staring at me as if I was indeed insane, the host started a discussion of American gun-laws. He and his son were bird-hunters, and by British law, were required to keep even their shotguns in a central armory. Not only were these hunting guns registered with the government, they also had to be checked out and returned. There was accountability. My host was absolutely dumb-founded over America’s laxity with even shotguns, let alone AK-47’s, Glock 9 mm’s, and other lethal weapons not meant for hunting, but for murdering. “Pardon, please,” the country gentleman said, “but I think America is daft.”

How could I answer him, even then? That was in 1995. In 1997, according to the U.S. Department of Education, nearly 6,300 students were expelled from our schools for carrying firearms. Fifty-eight percent of the expulsions were for handguns and 17% for shotguns. The way some schools have responded to this threat of greater violence has been tighter security -- spiked fences, motorized gates, bulletproof metal-covered doors, metal detectors, and security guards who search student desks and lockers. “Tend my sheep,” Jesus tells Simon Peter. And we herd kids through gates into fenced-in compounds as if they were literally sheep and lock them behind closed doors not for fear of the Jews as with the disciples in last Sunday’s Gospel, but for fear of their classmates. And despite the already authoritarian atmosphere in public schools, the cameras and the security guards, shootings continue.

“Tend my sheep,” Jesus tells Simon Peter. But there is little or no morally-acceptable defense against the kind of weapons so readily available to our youth. Schools might hire as many counselors and violence-prevention coordinators as they wish and can afford, but as we realize in the aftermath of Virginia Tech, that, too, fails to adequately tend the sheep.  

When you were younger, and when I was younger, we used to fasten our own belts and go wherever we wished – at least, relatively speaking. But since John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, more Americans have died by American gunfire than perished on foreign battlefields in the whole of the 20th century. How can a gun-culture like ours tend its sheep and feed its lambs?

Believe me, please, hunters and friends, I am not anti-gun. I spent enough time in rural Kentucky to accept shotguns and rifles’ being carried on racks in the rear windows of pickups. Better that than legally concealed handguns, I think. I have hunted rabbits with a 12-gauge pump and have found them much more edible than they would be if I had used an assault weapon. In my own humble estimation, I am merely pro-sanity. And as a Christian American, I assert that the issue here is not about our supposed Constitutional rights as much as it is about our Christian responsibilities.

“Feed my lambs,” say Jesus. “Tend my sheep.”