If you can, try to remember how you felt when you heard the news about each of the following events:

• The massacre of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado by two students in April 1999;

• The killing of five young girls and the wounding of five others in an Amish school by a lone gunman in Pennsylvania in October 2006;

• The slaying of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech by a deranged student in April 2007;

• The gunning down of 13 people at a community center in Birmingham, New York, by a lone shooter in April 2009;

• The killing of three women and the wounding of nine others by a lone gunman at a fitness center near Pittsburgh in August 2009;

• The murder of 13 soldiers on the grounds of Fort Hood in Texas last November.

If you’re like most people, you experienced a sense of deep shock and dismay on hearing the news of the first of those events. But unless you were personally connected to a victim of one of the subsequent tragedies, it’s likely that each one had progressively less emotional impact on you. In fact, by the time the last of these was reported, your reaction may have been little more than a sad shake of the head and a weary utterance of, "Oh, no. Not again." And you probably turned your attention away from the news much more quickly than you did after Columbine.

That isn’t surprising. We’ve lived through 9/11. We frequently hear body counts from terrorist activity. By way of television and the Internet, we’ve witnessed such awful stuff that our shock threshold has been raised. Now when we hear of such tragedies as the most recent slaughter of innocents, our reaction is more controlled.

Following the Virginia Tech shootings, columnist Daniel Henninger, writing in the Wall Street Journal, commented on this growing numbness to bad news. He said that "it may be that as a nation we’ve reached tilt with tragedy. ‘Tilt’ is the famous metaphor drawn from the old pinball machines, which shut down if you banged on them too hard. Pinball machines could survive plenty of random shocks to the system. But there were limits. Lately, we have been banged on hard." Later in the same column, he wrote, "Our capacity for shock at genuine violence has been recalibrated."

I offer none of this as criticism. When tragedies become commonplace, it just isn’t humanly possible for those of us who are at a distance from them to experience the same level of emotional distress as those who are close at hand. And our lessened reaction has nothing to do with not caring or a lack of empathy. It’s that we have a survival function that causes us to become protective of our emotional energy. We cannot continue to dump it out day after day on extreme events and have any left for daily living.

And so a kind of numbness creeps in, and to some degree, it needs to. It’s a defense mechanism that keeps us from reaching our personal tilt point.

That said, such numbness also gives us a jaded view of life, a pervasive pessimism that whispers to us that the cards really are stacked against us, and that no matter how much we think we’ve organized our lives, the forces of chaos and destruction will ultimately prevail.

We are tempted to give in to a fatalism that we really don’t want to surrender to, but it nibbles at the edge of our minds when we contemplate awful things. If we dwell on those things too much, they can cause us to doubt God’s existence, or at least his goodness.

In 1983, singer Anne Murray had a hit song called "A Little Good News." It topped the country chart and even crossed over to the pop chart. The lyrics told of the sort of standard bad news that made up TV news shows and newspaper reports back then: fighting in the Middle East, the bad economy, a robbery, a hostage-taking, damage to the environment, killings and so on. But then the song says,

Just once how I’d like to see the headline say,

"Not much to print today, can’t find nothin’ bad to say," because

Nobody robbed a liquor store on the lower part of town

Nobody OD’ed, nobody burned a single buildin’ down

Nobody fired a shot in anger, nobody had to die in vain

We sure could use a little good news today.

... How I wanna hear the anchorman talk about a county fair

And how we cleaned up the air, how everybody learned to care

... Nobody was assassinated in the whole Third World today

And in the streets of Ireland, all the children had to do was play

And everybody loves everybody in the good old U.S.A.

We sure could use a little good news today.

What made the song so popular when it came out was that it voiced a sentiment a lot of people held: that the proliferation of bad news weighs down on us, and we need some relief. The song is a bit dated now because of some of the specific trouble spots it mentions, but clearly, we could simply update the specifics and the song would be as timely now as it was back then. It’s timely because it recognizes the underlying pessimism about this life of ours.

In one of the places online where you can find the song lyrics, there’s a field at the bottom of the page where viewers can add comments. One of those comments, posted last year, acknowledged that the song came out in the ’80s but then added, "It still brings tears to my eyes. What a great sentiment. Wish it could come true."

Do you hear the pessimism? "Wish it could come true," which implies, "yeah I wish, but I know it won’t."

Against all that, there’s the vision that John had while on the island of Patmos of the eternal age to come, where a multitude of people — so great it cannot be counted — with representatives from every nation, tribe, peoples and language group, stand worshiping before the throne of the Lamb of God. And they cry out good news: "Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!" When John seeks to know who these people of this multitude are, he is told, "These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."

In the context of John’s time, the "great ordeal" likely referred to the bitter experiences — the bad news — that befell the followers of Jesus at the

onset of the Jerusalem war in A.D. 66. But we can read it in our own context and apply it to the bad-news ordeals of our own time, or the bad news of any time, for that matter.

In contrast to the pessimism that first-century ordeal might have produced, this Revelation passage sees the brightness, the good news, beyond it. These people, who have come through that great tribulation faithfully, "will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water."

They are the ones who were numbed by the battering of bad news in their day, but in the realm to come, they are "un-numbed." In fact, they have no need for defensive numbing, because "God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."

But what about us? If this passage is to fit into our existence somewhere, it has to be read as belonging to some future that we cannot see and can only, like John, envision. And then we can only hold on to that vision with the most slender of threads, those threads of promise and hope, and perhaps even wish.

Please note that the multitude in Revelation sees this brightness because they are gathered around the throne of God in worship together. Perhaps, in that time to come, that throne is the place where they get their questions about life answered. But what John’s vision shows us is that in that place of worship, they jointly perceive what they need to know, that the Lamb is their Shepherd

As we live on this side of eternity, what we need to know is that God is still here in this life, that he hasn’t left us, that he is our Shepherd, too. And corporate worship can bring us that assurance; it can give us a glimpse of the divine perspective.

It’s significant that we don’t come to church for private devotions. We come here as part of a congregation, and we get some of the uplift we need from our fellow worshipers.

Following the Virginia Tech shootings, the university reacted by holding a convocation, by creating a place for people to come together and talk about God. In an essay on Foxnews.com about the tragedy, religion correspondent Lauren Green wrote, "So where is God? He is in the prayer vigils. He is in the rivers of tears flowing from everyone affected. He is in the community coming together to offer support to the families. He is at work in the love and strength people are offering each other. God is with us."

We shouldn’t discount the power of corporate worship to help us when numbing news bombards us. A recent study by a Harvard researcher, in conjunction with a UC San Diego researcher, gives us some evidence in that direction. In 2003, this pair gained access to some old papers found in a storeroom in Framingham, Massachusetts.

They were the handwritten records of 5,124 male and female subjects from a heart study done in that community in 1948, looking for risk factors for heart trouble. It wasn’t so much the heart information that caught the attention of the latter-day researchers, but rather some clerical information on the forms. The original Framingham researchers had noted each participant’s close friends, colleagues and family members simply so that if the participant moved away, the researchers could contact the friends to locate the participant.

Looking at that information, the 2003 researchers realized it could be transformed into a detailed map of the human relationships of those folks. Two-thirds of the adults in Framingham had been included in the first phase of the study, and their children and grandchildren had participated in subsequent phases. Thus, almost the entire social network of the community was chronicled in these old records. It took nearly five years to input all that data into a computer format, but once that was done, the current researchers were able to construct detailed diagrams of the social networks of the Framingham residents.

As they began tracking those people as an interconnected network rather than as a mass of individuals, they discovered that the social networks influenced the behavior of the people involved, even as the participants spread out over a larger geographic area.

Because the study had kept track of the subjects’ weight, the current researchers first analyzed obesity trends. They found that in 1948, fewer than 10 percent of the residents were obese. By 1985, 18 percent were, and today, 40 percent are. That equates with national trends, but looking at it from the social-network angle, the researchers realized that while the whole group discovered fast food at the same time, the social-network effect was what caused obesity to begin to spread, almost like a virus. In other words, when your friends change their eating habits, it’s likely that you will, too.

They found a similar trajectory with smoking. In the early ’70s, 65 percent of Framingham residents between the ages of 40 and 49 smoked regularly. But by 2001, only 22 percent did. The researchers found that friends and family had a positive influence, and that people quit together.

Both eating habits and smoking are behaviors, but the researchers went further and found that such things as happiness are also influenced by our social networks. Because the original study asked people to describe their moods, the latter research showed that essentially, happy people have happy friends and unhappy people have unhappy friends. In other words, gloom is contagious, but so is joy.

It doesn’t take much thought to apply that same dynamic to people who worship together. One thing that helps us maintain hope when soul-numbing bad news is all around us is that we’re coming before God in company with others who share that hope.

So it’s no wonder that in the eternal age to come, those gathered around God’s throne aren’t described one by one but as an uncountable multitude. They grew to be so many because they were already following Jesus in company with each other when they were on this side of eternity.

They already knew that Jesus’ work on the cross, his death as payment for the sins of the world, his resurrection from the tomb that promises us hope of our resurrection, his ascension into heaven that promises us eternal life, have won out over the evils of this world.

There have been enough awful tragedies caused by somebody with a grudge, or paranoia or evil in his heart, or a desire to get even or whatever, that we have come to expect that similar things will continue to happen from time to time in some place in our society. Evil is real, sin rages in people’s hearts, madness descends, despair begets chaos. What’s more, there’s no guarantee that we or our loved ones might not someday be among the victims.

But standing here among the people of God, in the place of worship, we can sense the truth: that good is stronger than evil, that there is something — something — that cannot be taken from us, because through faith and through the cross and the empty tomb, God has given it to us. And furthermore, we together know that nothing — nothing — can separate us from the love of God.

It’s that knowledge that helps us not tilt when bad things happen. Amen.