Text: 2 Corinthians 1:18-22; Mark 1:1-14 February 20, 2000
 
 

After the killings had taken place at the Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado last summer, a carpenter came to Littleton from another part of the country and erected enough crosses for all those who were killed. Included in those crosses, much to the chagrin of some in Littleton, were crosses for Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

At the foot of one of the cross for Eric, a teenaged girl from Vermont left an 8 paged letter in which she wrote: "Eric, why didn't you reach out? I am so angry with you! I too am an outcast, but I didn't kill anyone. I would have been your friend."

The soul searching that followed those killings and the more recent killings of adolescents by adolescents has not resulted in solid conclusions, but just a few observations. Kids can easily ostracize one another, and kids without friends are like time bombs. And kids without friends who are also without significant adult role models are like nuclear devices.

I barely remember my own adolescence. One of the key moments in my adolescence however was after high school when I read The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. I was lonely and depressed and this was-as far as I could tell-a novel about me. It is a novel about Holden Caulfield who was lonely and depressed and trying to figure out what the world was all about and what his place in it might be. It is a novel about the fear of losing an identity in a hostile world. A novel about a young person whose parents were too occupied to maintain their connection to him ("And all that David Copperfield kind of [nonsense]" Salinger wrote on the first page.)

When I was drafted into the Army in 1966 I decided that I would take The Catcher in the Rye with me and read it again. At that point in my life, I bet I had not read more than two books. Even the ones assigned in high school I didn't really read. But this one I read and I was about to read it again.

I had read, maybe 50 pages of the novel when we arrived at Fort Polk, Louisiana at the end of a long Illinois Central train ride. And the first thing that the Army drill sergeant who met us as we got off the train did was to take away all reading material. They took away my copy of The Catcher in the Rye which I thought was more than ironic since their whole purpose was to deprive me of my identity by taking away a novel about an adolescent who lived in mortal fear of losing his identity.

Holden Caulfield lived in fear of disappearing into the crowd at the same time as he thought that disappearing into the crowd would actually be a pretty good thing.. He flunked out of Pencey Prep School in Pennsylvania and the book ends with him back walking the streets of New York City trying to decide what to do next with his life. He decided that he would go down to the Holland Tunnel and hitch a ride and then hitch another ride and then another until he was somewhere "out West." And when he got out west he would just pretend that he was a poor deaf mute and people would get tired of having to write notes to him all the time and they would just leave him alone and stop speaking to him and just let him pump gas and then he could save his money and buy a cabin in the woods and not let anybody talk to him ever again.

I think that all adolescents feel this sense of a loneliness into which they might disappear. A vast void where all identity fades and we get lost in the undertow. And it is that creative and powerful search for meaning among teenagers that is so poignant because in a certain way it never goes away entirely. It is most compelling and honest a search for meaning in our late teen years, but it is a search for meaning that occupies our living to the very end.

They are questions that haunt us all our adult years. Does life have meaning? Is there anything worth living for? Is there anything worth dying for?

In the language of the Gospel, the question is asked like this, "What must we do to be saved?" Will anyone care whether I live or die? Does my life have purpose? Does it reflect larger commitments; larger concerns than just making a salary and making house payments?

I saw a bumper sticker the other day. It said, "Live your life in such a way that the minister doesn't have to lie at your funeral."

That is part of the existential crisis. Will there be something about my life that will mark it so that someone will have known or cared that I was here?

For Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the answer lay in self destruction. We will know that they existed but only because their existence will remind us that the void that terrifies us is all too real. We can indeed be sucked up into meaninglessness and as a way of scratching our way out of it, we are capable of doing insane things. We can remember them because they had no friendships where understanding might have overcome violent despair.⁽¹⁾

Luckily, they are not the only ones whom we will remember from those horror-filled days at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. We will also remember one Cassie Bernall the student in the library who was killed after she reportedly said that she believed in God. In the knee-jerk honesty of her adolescence, Cassie declared that she had something worth dying for in the face of these two young men who thought that they could establish their own identity forever by pretending that there was something worth killing for.

Cassie's biography written by her mother has just been released. And her mother insisted on writing Cassie's story in such a way that it told the whole truth. For Cassie was no saint. In her own Holden Caulfield search for meaning, Cassie dabbled in witchcraft and she took drugs. Her parents were at their wits' end. And then almost inexplicably, she turned ... well, how does a liberal Christian Pastor say this ... she turned to Jesus.

And then the modern phrase, "to die for" took on a whole new meaning. No longer did it mean that some Hollywood actor had a face or a body "to die for." And it didn't mean any longer that a particular line of clothes were "to die for." Now it meant that there was an idea-a person- that was, in her case at least, literally something to die for.

And Cassie's life has become a "witness" to the identity she had found in Jesus Christ. It is no small irony that the word "witness" in Greek is "martyria" from which we get the word "martyr."

Of the stories that have come out of the Columbine shootings we will likely remember that there were these two guys whose names we have forgotten, who went mad one day and shot up their high school. And one of the persons these guys shot was named Cassie. And before shooting her they asked her if she believed in God.

And she said, perhaps without thinking too much about it, "Yes." And for that reason, we will remember that her name was Cassie. And we will remember her name not because her life up to that point was so noble and saintly; it wasn't. But rather in her search for her identity, she put on the identity of Christ. "And in so doing she became what she already was: a reflection of the [very] face of God,..."⁽²⁾ A God whom we know most intimately in Jesus Christ. A God who died for us that we might know to the very end of our days, whether they come soon or late, that his promises can be trusted. "In him every one of God's promises is a 'Yes'" Paul says. For this reason, it is through him that we can say the "Amen." In him we can say, "Yes."

"Yes Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief."

1. Kenda Creasy Dean, "Proclaiming Salvation: Youth Ministry for the Twenty-First Century Church" in Theology Today January 2000, p. 530.

2. Ibid. p. 539.