Archive for October, 2026
Lockerbie
On the frigid night of December 21st, 1988, I sat in my car in the parking lot of an apartment complex in Palatine, Illinois, waiting for it to warm up. I had just visited a coworker and her husband in their home to see their first baby. It took a while for my little VW Jetta engine to warm the interior, so I turned on the radio and was stunned to hear the news that a plane exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. killing 270 people, including 190 American passengers and 11 people on the ground.
With the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks just past (yes, Canada, terrorist IS the right word), it is said some 20% of Americans have no living memory of them, being too young or not born yet, and that over time people’s memories have shifted. This is why it is so important to gather and record facts, testimony and evidence as quickly as possible after a crime.
Lockerbie is now almost 38 years ago. Watching a recently made show on Peacock, “Lockerbie: A Search For Truth” (2025), based on a book by Dr. James Swire, father to one of the victims, it occurred to me that probably considerably fewer people living today remember it, outside of the victim’s families and other affected by this terrorist act.
This moving dramatization, which included actual news footage from 1988 through 2012, brought it all back for me. Even though I have no personal connection to the event, I did follow the decades-long quest for justice. The only person ever convicted was Abdelbasset al-Megrahi, who after suffering from prostate cancer, and not expected to live more than a few months, was released from a Scottish prison on ‘compassionate grounds’. It was a controversial move, condemned round the world. He was flown back to Libya in 2009, to a hero’s welcome, and lived until 2012.
Jim Swire never believed that Abdelbasset al-Megrahi was guilty of the charges. His book, and the Peacock series based on it, lays out the case for at least possible reasonable doubt that al-Megrahi was the one. At great personal cost, over many years, Dr. Swire pursued the facts and the truth, desperately wanting to know what really happened. The outcome was unsatisfying, but I cannot help but admire Dr. Swire’s dogged commitment to the facts and the rule of law. It is possible that al-Megrahi is completely innocent. Is it also possible that he was involved, but not in the way depicted. Or it is possible that the verdict was correct.
It made me think of much more common tragedies, and the heroics of people who will relentlessly pursue truth and justice, even if in the end what they find matters only to the people involved, who must live with the imperfect, incomplete, the unknown. The shootings and killings on the streets of our cities, in our schools, in our homes. The insistence by our leaders that violent crime is going down – while they don’t fully report all crimes to the FBI, which is voluntary, and anyone living in those communities knows the facts on the ground don’t match what is reported.
“Anger seeks a target” – that often anger is displaced onto a more accessible substitute. In our fallen, imperfect world where crime too often goes unpunished, innocent people are slandered, targeted and victimized for things they didn’t do. They may not be the person guilty of a particular offense, in fact they may be completely blameless – but they can be painted as guilty of something, even if it is just being disagreeable to you, to justify being a substitutionary sacrifice to our thirst for retribution, false flagged as “justice”.
Even the dead, who cannot defend themselves, are not immune. After his murder, conservative speaker Charlie Kirk was posthumously turned into a “fascist”, a “threat to democracy”, his murder justified and even celebrated. Insurance executive Brian Thompson, assassinated while walking in Midtown Manhattan, shot from behind by killer Luigi Mangione. Mangione has been turned into a bizarre folk hero by a leftist lunatic fringe who somehow hold Thompson accountable to pay with his life for their frustrations with medical insurers. Kirk and Thompson, innocent men, were condemned to die by those who became a law unto themselves.
And now, France is in literally in flames. What appears to have started as protests by students over the conditions in their schools has turned into a nationwide orgy of violence, looting and destruction by Islamists, nihilists and anarchists. Innocent people have seen their property and livelihoods burned and looted. What did they do? Own property that is coveted by others? Work, pay taxes, support the social welfare state that enabled this kind of violent entitlement?
When al-Megrahi stepped off the plane in Libya in 2009 to a hero’s welcome of thousands, were they cheering because he was innocent? Or because he killed 270 people from America, the UK and 20 other countries in 1988? What did these people do to them?
Anger seeks a target. Anger fomented into blind rage results in people turning on those who didn’t do anything to them. The anger may be legitimate, but the response is not. The internet is an outrage machine. False statements, amplified by chatbots across social media platforms, give new meaning to the saying, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it” (Jonathan Swift, The Examiner, 1710). People are no longer interested in the facts, in truth, they are convinced they are right, and can justify whatever means that lead to the ends they desire.
It has its ultimate expression in violent crime and retribution, but it is not limited to that. As we approach elections in the U.S., there is much to be angry about. It is also possible to draw a direct line to the White House for much of what distresses us. But – being unable to hit back at Donald Trump, anger seeks other targets. Innocent targets. Good public servants, who have performed in their offices well (and if seeking election, are well-qualified). Especially if they have an (R) by their names, they must be (insert slanderous adjectives here), so they are lied about and smeared. We have Supreme Court justices who wear bulletproof vests on their way to court, for looking to our laws and rendering judgments based on them.
Jim Swire’s drive to know the truth, no matter the cost, brought to mind questions of faith and scripture. Swire paid careful attention to all of the testimony and documents and challenged the conclusions he believed were not based in truth. Despite his grief and anguish and anger, Swire was able to recognize when the evidence called into question the legitimacy of the verdict. He wanted to get the actual bad guys who killed his daughter, not someone served up to satisfy vengeance. In Lockerbie, there was no “smoking gun”. Years of painstaking investigation explained how the plot was executed, but not exactly by who. Questions remain.
Protestants, particularly Lutherans, just observed Reformation Sunday, observing Martin Luther’s questioning of the conclusions and practices reached by the Roman catholic church in 1517. A priest and monk, Luther had studied scripture and prayed continually. He was troubled by the gap between the truth of the Scriptures and the teaching and practices that conflicted with them. At great personal risk, he labored to accurately translate God’s word from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, to be known and understood by all people. Tynedale (who translated the Scriptures into English) and others followed his Spirit-led quest for the eternal truth of God’s word and the life-giving message of the Gospel at the heart of the Word of God.
When it seems like evil is winning, when we feel like God has fallen silent, we turn away from God, from the truth of the scriptures, from all good gifts which come from God, away from what He has instituted, and we turn to our own devices. We reach our own conclusions and act on them, often wrong, too often unsatisfying. This is not the life our Lord intends for His creation.
He may unsheath His sword of justice in our lifetime, in accordance with His will. But when that doesn’t happen in the way we think it should, on our terms, we should need no reminder of the ultimate justice and judge, the Lord Jesus Christ. We should also be reminded that we are all sinners who have fallen short of the glory of God.
In great mercy the Son of God gave His life for the sins of the world on the cross at Calvary, that anyone who believes in Him would inherit eternal life. Eternal life with God doesn’t start when we die, but when we are baptized into His kingdom and His saving death and resurrection. When are sins are covered by the blood of Christ, when we are made new in Christ in Holy Baptism, we enter into his glorious eternal kingdom. He will come again, as He has promised, to judge the world in righteousness and make all things new.
Return to the Lord, and live.
I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth;
and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord;
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried;
he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen.
