Something has to change

Two days after Christmas 2007 our world at Cotton End Baptist Church began to rock. The telephone rang and the voice at the other end said simply: "Robert is missing." At first we thought that Robert, a young man of 17 in our congregation, had walked away from his family or possibly that something had happened as he'd made his way home the day before across the fields and foot paths between villages. Maybe he'd gone off the stay with a friend. Many 'phone calls were made, and we walked some of the routes he may have walked. A week later his body was recovered from the river and a murder investigation was underway.
On Monday of this week, February 11th, we said our farewells at his funeral. Friends, teachers and family members spoke about him and shared their memories with the congregation of over 300 people. "It was a great send off for him," was one of the comments I heard. But the problem is this, we should not have been giving a 17 year old young man a send off at all. Something has gone terribly wrong in our world that young men like Robert can lose their lives in the way he apparently may have lost his (a trial is set for later this year for three young men arrested in connection with his death).
Robert was not the first and he hasn't been the last person who appears to have lost his life to the angry and violent night-time society we have these days. And it has to change. The question is how do you change a society that has become increasingly touched by violence and disorder. Is it time to accept that while action films and violent films and TV do not produce violent behaviour in most people, there surely must be a connection with the things we watch and the way we act? When the only difference between the hero and the villain is that the hero shoots straighter and hits harder, does that not desensitise us to the fact that violence is not an acceptable way of solving a problem or asserting our point of view?
The poet in the psalms has a challenge for us all in these days of media bombardment when he says: I will set before my eyes no vile thing (Ps. 101:3), there is a choice to be made.

And if the root of our anti-social behaviour problems is alcohol, then maybe if we can't drink responsibly as a society it may be time that as a society we choose not to drink at all. Or at the very least make it easier to say no and more expensive to say yes. It would be interesting to know how the price of alcohol relates to the disposable income of teenagers and young people today compared with previous generations. How we make the changes needed I don't know, but somehow we have to find a way to break the chains of addiction that have brought us to this place.

And then I remember the cross. I remember that this exactly the reason that Jesus came into this sorry state of a world and exactly the reason he was nailed to a cross. The only hope our society has is in the cross, and the church, as the messenger for the message of the cross, is the the vehicle of hope God has chosen.

So we pray and we work and we live for the sake of the kingdom of God, to see lives changed, redeemed, restored and rescued. We know that only through Christ can things ever change. We can't legislate morality, we can only point to a better way.

Our society is probably safer than it was for many of our forebears. Many of the footpaths I walk for pleasure I suspect were not even safe during daylight hours in past centuries. The 21st century is no better and probably no worse. Whether it's safer or not, the simple truth remains that Jesus is the only hope for our nation.