Life is short

Wow. Yesterday, I learned from my old supervisor that the bank where I used to work was robbed on Friday afternoon. I don't know any more details than what was on the news; because I'm no longer an insider, they cannot share those things with me anymore. Praise God, no one was injured, but they are understandably pretty shaken up.

I find it more than a little disturbing, because this is not the first time I left a bank just before it was robbed. When I was in Kansas City, I helped out at another branch that was short-handed for a couple of weeks, then literally the next week after I left it was robbed. Twice. I am not about to say that God was looking out for me or something and got me out of the way of trouble, because such is an alarming theology. Jesus said, "as for those eighteen who died when the Tower of Siloam fell on them, do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem" (Luke 13:5). I simply refuse to say that my friends and former coworkers who were there had it coming or something silly like that; but that is indeed the inescapable implication when someone says that God delivered him/her from some sort of tragedy or momentous experience that others had to go through. If memory serves, I preached on this text the first sermon I delivered after September 11. I spoke publicly on it at any rate, whether it was a sermon or a Sunday school lesson or whatever it was, because I think it was decidedly appropriate for that connection.

Turns out that later that day the man who committed the robbery killed himself. A resident found him hanging from a tree in the backyard, which is in itself a rather creepy thing to have happen. We can only wonder what desperation led him to go in and threaten he had a bomb, which turned out not to be the case (the thing he brought in with him, and later left in the bank, was harmless, though they did properly check it out). And then we can only further wonder why he then committed suicide. It is a dangerous world, and life is short. I am thankful that I did not have to experience this, sure, and I sympathize with my former coworkers, sure, and I pray for the family of that man, sure...but at the end of the day (and this is the end of the day), I do not know what to think about this. Theodicy is one of the most important and yet most disturbing theological concepts...more on this later.