On the Orlando Nightclub Shootings

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

When God looks down and sees dozens of people shot dead in a nightclub he cries, bitterly weeps. He doesn’t dwell on their lifestyle, he doesn’t reason away their deaths, he weeps and regrets the loss his children have inflicted on one another.

God knows what it feels like to have your family slaughtered, your love ones taken from you. Two thousand years ago he sent his son with a message of love and hope, but his child was killed, slaughtered, by an impassioned crowd. In the present day a terrified crowd is slaughtered by a maniac, and his actions are praised by the impassioned religious bile that stains our world today, just as it did in the time of Christ.

God weeps when he sees his children killed, he loves them all. Our Christian beliefs may not affirm the lifestyle of the deceased, but those same beliefs also stop us rejecting people based on their chosen lifestyle. Instead they allow us to accept people for who they are and where they are at in there own lives, their own journeys towards the light. We affirm that every individual’s right to the Father’s eternal love is God’s true priority, so much so that the Son was willing to die on the cross to prove it. Every person’s worth is immeasurable in the eyes of God.

The Lord our God is not a god of hate and destruction, he is the one God of love and creativity. The one God who sent his own family to perish so that we might be able to come to him unashamed and so that we would see the importance of building a community of Godly love and support, where all will come and be nurtured, supported and empowered by the Spirit of the risen Lord Jesus and the friendship of the children of God.