Before our Pentecost services at St. Paul's last Sunday, my boss, Father Brad Whitaker, read a statement calling for action and prayer after yet another school shooting. My son leaned over to my wife and asked, "What happened?"
My wife said, "It was a school shooting, honey." My son said, "Was it an AR-15?" My 7-year-old son said that. In church.
I am not a constitutional scholar or a legal scholar or a politician. Arguments around the Second Amendment are important, but they are not my native language. My professional life, and my personal life of faith, mean that the vocabulary most natural to me is that of the Christian tradition. So when I heard that my 7-year-old was asking about AR-15s, I began to wonder what in my vocabulary speaks to that. What would I tell parishioners if they came to me wondering how, as people of faith, to reason for themselves and to talk to their kids about assault weapons?
I would tell them that we believe when God created the world, humans were created in God's image. So any weapon that allows a person to murder dozens of humans, of God's image-bearers, in mere dozens of seconds, has an enormous burden of proof before it would be a good option for Christians to keep and bear.
I would tell them that long after the creation came the Hebrew prophets, giants of the faith to whom God gave a vision of the world as it was meant to be. Those prophets had a strong conviction about the proper use of weapons. When God's reign is established, they said, people "shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more" (Isaiah 2:4). If God's expectation for the world is that not even militaries will be armed, then how much more should a civilian AR-15 be hammered into some kind of device for the storage or delivery of food or medicine? In God's vision, it certainly would not be kept as a weapon, no matter whether it was technically legal.
Speaking of technically legal, I would remind them of St. Paul's words. "All things are lawful for me!" he said, in one of his more heated paragraphs. Which I know, at first glance, seems like a tacit argument for doing whatever pleases us. So I would hasten to add that Paul continued, "But not all things are beneficial! All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything" (1 Corinthians 6:12). One wonders whether St. Paul would be impressed at the gun lobby's handwringing about the villainous attempt to outlaw the AR-15 by schoolchildren in fear for their lives. Perhaps assault weapons might fit his category of "unbeneficial."
Finally, I would tell them that I know it's not simple. The world can be a scary place, and staying safe is a legitimate concern. But in the broad vision of the Christian tradition, staying safe is not the highest calling of life. The church is founded on the faith that Jesus of Nazareth risked, and lost, his life because of love. That love kept him from fighting back, even though Jesus could have brandished 12 legions of angels (to which, by the way, he had full legal rights). And when he chose to die rather than to kill, when he surrendered his life out of love, God vindicated that love by raising Jesus from the dead, into the abundance of a life that never ends.
That life, I would tell them, has a peace, a safety, that no weapon can procure for us. Not even - perhaps especially not - an AR-15.
The Rev. Joe Woodfin, an Episcopal priest, is the associate rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Chattanooga.