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Sermons struggle for answer to 'Where was God' In the pews, worshippers ponder the need for love and healing Monday, May 01, 2000 By Jeffrey Cohan, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Across the Pittsburgh area, clerics over the weekend addressed Friday's two-hour shooting rampage that killed five people and left one man in critical condition.
But in preparing sermons, surely no one in the clergy faced a more complicated task than the pastors of Mt. Lebanon's Bower Hill Community Presbyterian Church, where the man accused of the killings received his religious education and where the man's parents still worship.
At the outset of yesterday's 11 a.m. service, the Rev. Jack D. Hodges told his congregation that he had already spent hours comforting Andrejs and Inese Baumhammers, the parents of suspect Richard Baumhammers.
"I need to tell you of their sorrow, but it's so deep, it's almost beyond human words to communicate," Hodges said, standing in the church's center aisle, flanked by about 75 congregants.
"As you can imagine, [the parents] are devastated," Hodges continued. "In the midst of these horrendous acts, they are people who are so deeply saddened."
The Baumhammerses did not attend the service.
Hodges told congregants that he and church elders would draft letters to Beth El Congregation of South Hills in Scott and Ahavath Achim Congregation of Carnegie, the two synagogues that the gunman vandalized during his shooting spree.
Referring to the shots fired and the swastikas spray-painted at Beth El and the bullet holes at Ahavath Achim, Hodges said, "Anything that says, 'You are of no worth' or 'I do not like you' or 'I hate you' is absolutely contrary to the Christian faith, so we want to respond in love to the members of those two congregations."
Hodges' associate pastor, David E. Ensign, had planned to sermonize yesterday about feeding the poor. Instead, he posed the question: "Where was God in the midst of this violence?"
To answer, he quoted from "Night," Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir. In the book, Wiesel recounts an incident in which Nazis forced thousands of concentration-camp prisoners to watch the hanging of a young boy.
When a fellow prisoner asked, "Where is God now?" Wiesel responded, "He is hanging here on this gallows."
Drawing a parallel to Friday's killings, Ensign said Jesus wept at the crime scenes that Richard Baumhammers left in his wake.
The associate pastor acknowledged during his sermon that his remarks would not suffice.
"Words sometimes can be enough, but not today," Ensign said. "Words, mere words, won't prevent such things from happening again."
After the service, Hodges said he had never met Richard Baumhammers during six years as pastor at Bower Hill. But the parents have remained involved in the church. Never, he said, had he detected even a hint of anti-Semitism or racism in his many interactions with them.
At another Presbyterian church in Mt. Lebanon, one more removed from Friday's events, the Rev. William I. Gracey also devoted his sermon to the killings.
"Who would ever have thought that something like this could happen so close to home?" Gracey told the congregation at Sunset Hills United Presbyterian Church.
"But it happened," Gracey continued. "And we quickly move from the numbing unbelief to the need to blame. And believe me, over the next few weeks, you will read and hear millions of words on theories of blame. And I can't tell you which theory or what to believe."
At Bower Hill, after the worship service, congregant Phil Johnson offered a similar observation, saying, "The question going through everyone's mind is, 'What would make this young man do this?' "
But Johnson sees a duty more pressing than identifying the killer's motivations.
"What is needed is healing in the community," he said. "That has to be done."
Staff writer Roger Stuart contributed to this report.
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