How did we get here? Despite declining religious consensus, our ability to connect has increased dramatically, through mass media, the internet and now mobile device technology. Marshall McLuhan's "global village," achieved primarily through television, was first felt most dramatically in the Kennedy assassination, played out over a dreary November weekend in 1963, which featured a live murder when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Having passively consumed what FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow called in 1961 the "vast wasteland" of television, many of us felt kicked in the stomach by reality, the immediacy of corporate grief and pain. A nation that mourned the slayings of RFK and Martin Luther King Jr. reeled with unanswered questions.

A medium which had promised light entertainment now administered heavy blows of grief. We could not escape it. The "cool fire" of television had drawn us in and we could not look away. Like an approaching tsunami, we had little recourse but to let it wash over us. A nation of spectators was powerless except to watch.

"Why doesn't somebody do something?" the nation seemed to plead. And so somebody did. Gradually, into the emotional landscape of television stepped our cultural interpreters and guides.

'Uncle Walter" Cronkite, with voice breaking, pronounced Kennedy's death on live television and narrated the proud moment of the moon landing in July of 1969.

The slow death of a presidency that was Watergate droned on through 1973-74 until President Nixon resigned, when two unknown reporters were elevated to sainthood by their colleagues.

When President Reagan became personally involved in the Challenger disaster in 1986, a new title for the president was born, "mourner in chief." President Clinton could "feel our pain." President Bush stood in the rubble of 9/11 and spoke eloquently at the National Cathedral. President Obama may have won re-election by visiting Hurricane Sandy victims and receiving praise from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

Is it any wonder that three straight presidents have won a second term? With the power of incumbency, standard media and now the internet, the sense of immediate connection between the president, media figures, national leaders and the public is more on-demand and omni-present than ever before.

The call to "do something" after murder sprees like Sandy Hook is now a command performance of tears and legislation.

In the wake of mass murder (not "tragedy"), we find ourselves awash again, waiting for someone to "fix things."

But there is one huge problem. The facts of the last generation tell us that our rising expectations have not been met. Our leaders have not solved our problems.

Despite constant cries for "change," human nature has not changed. Violence, though statistically down, has not dramatically diminished. Legislation has not solved the problem of mass shootings, nor lack of it.

National connectedness has us talking more but not solving our problems. Instead it has revealed them. And what are these problems? Here are just a few.

Our national leaders cannot save us because they are just like us. We ask why they cannot lead, never realizing that we won't allow them to. It is we who will not sacrifice and pay the price of fixing our own problems.

We ask someone else to pay the debt burden, when it is we who must pay it. We are angry at politicians. We might as well be angry at ourselves.

They are holding up a mirror of powerlessness to the American public. As long as we focus on them, we can deny our own culpability until reality breaks through again.

Politics cannot solve our problems. Whenever a "national crisis" grabs our attention, immediate cries go up. We need "more funding" or "more legislation."

And so we get what we want and with it more debt and 2000 page bills that multiply bureaucracy. Most Washington initiatives provide us with redundant programs and shattered hopes.

But the politicians love it and the interest groups rejoice because somebody is "doing something." And somebody or something is getting funded. No one seems to ask whether we are better off or whether any of it works.

It is simply "the system." We ask politicians to fix it, rarely acknowledging that they are cogs in its wheels.

We are destroying our "intermediate institutions." Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America praised the thriving organizations that inhabited space and belonging between the individual and the federal government.

Unlike the French who eliminated much of these groups, America has historically thrived on them. From family, church and school through to the Grange Hall, 4F, Rotary, charitable and mission groups, local and state governments and organizations, America was a country that took responsibility for its interconnectedness and did not push every need and cause into the federal government's bailiwick. But no longer.

Our connections today are more virtual than actual. Meeting "off-line" is the exception rather than the norm.

We don't have time anymore to fund and feed local institutions. But the federal government has both time and a money printing machine. It's too easy.

To reverse this, we must not only teach about America's civic past, we must recreate it on the local and state level. We cannot admit to our own evil nature.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook murder spree, many could not comprehend someone murdering innocent children.

And indeed, the juxtaposition of relative innocence and abject evil is hard to stomach.

But deeper analysis yields a more complete understanding: every human heart has evil within it and if we are honest with ourselves, we understand a simple truth.

Nearly all of us have done and said things that can only be called evil. We have betrayed those around us in one form or another, done things in secret of which we are deeply ashamed, wounded those we love the most and spent too much time contemplating resentment, revenge and retribution.

Our own difference from Adam Lanza is one of degree not of substance. But here is the problem.

While falling in love with the age in which we live, we have lost even the language to speak about these things and our own evil hearts. Against all evidence, we have deceived ourselves that we are not all that bad. And we wonder why people do not embrace the gospel? Jesus called humanity "evil" and said his message was designed for the "sick."

We are misdiagnosing our own generation by false esteem and superficial flattery. We tell ourselves: If we could just remove the Adam Lanzas from our midst, we could solve our problem. It is in times like this that we should turn to the language of another time and place to understand the true nature of our plight. In the general confession of the Book of Common Prayer (1928), we read these words about human wrongs.

"The remembrance of them is grievous unto us. The burden of them is intolerable." Really? How many of us believe this any more? These words seem like antiquated language from a by-gone era. But they reflect the truth about our inner selves this very hour. In fact, if they were not true, why would human beings spend so much time and effort locating evil outside themselves, much less asking government to take it away. We may not be "religious" but acknowledging our evil hearts or contemplating what resides there is as "intolerable" as it has ever been. The proof that our wrongs are intolerable is this: we spend a lot of time and effort projecting them onto others.

The fact is: wrongs must either be acknowledged or they will projected onto others. There is no third alternative. Those who walk in 12 step recovery know this to be true. A wrong unacknowledged is a wrong falsely projected onto others.

The failure to acknowledge that we ourselves are the problem continues the never-ending cycle of scapegoating and false remedy. During World War II, the Times of London ran a series of columns asking the general public, "What is Wrong with the World?" After publishing a number of letters citing hunger, poverty, disease, war, injustice and other causes, the Times published one from the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple. It read simply, "Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely, Archbishop William Temple."

But to admit the problem is to ask for the remedy. As the Apostle Paul asked, "Who will deliver us from this body of death?" Which brings us to Christmas and the man born to bear our sins, Emmanuel, God with us. But is bearing sins away a 21st century problem?

You decide. A person once wrote, " I needed someone to bear my shame and guilt. It was crushing me and I couldn't stand it anymore. So I tried to get rid of it...on someone else. And it worked for a time. It kept me from looking at myself. Of course, I had no idea that I would have to keep finding scapegoats again and again and again to transfer my guilt onto others....I can't bear my own wrongs.; they destroy me. But I have to have someone to bear them or I die."

This is the real condition of every heart and it cries out for an answer. The world may not believe in "sin" anymore, but in gospel provision, we can acknowledge the reality to which it points.

It is time that the church of Jesus became what the New Testament calls it, the "pillar and bulwark of the truth." The world is asking for a reason to get connected in Christ's body and it turns out we have it for them. But it requires we penetrate the veil of denial over all humankind. We must fearlessly acknowledge the fierce psychological and moral battle waging war in every human heart and declare the good news that the innocent Son of God has made its only provision.

Only Jesus can set us free. But until we analyze, dissect and penetrate hearts with this diagnosis and remedy, secular connectivity will appear to be enough. No program, personality or promotion will be enough to mend broken hearts and broken people. It turns out our wrongs are as "intolerable" as they have ever been and it is only Jesus who can unburden us. This is the ultimate connection, the God--shaped void to which the gospel fits perfectly and permanently.

Is the Christmas story a quaint little myth whose substance is ignored or missed by most? Apparently so. Last week NPR ran a story of a woman in Bethlehem, Pa., who has collected a substantial number of crèches from all over the world. When asked about her faith, the woman replied, "I'm not a Christian. I am a Unitarian Universalist. I just like babies." Being so close to the symbols of Christmas, can we miss the substance? If we do, the angelic glory will remain unseen and our knees unbowed.

The events of Christmas portrayed in each and every one of those crèche scenes is this: that God became a man in Jesus and bore away the sins of all humankind. The message of Christmas is freedom at the deepest level of human hearts.

In a world where people blame each other and where scapegoating and false hopes lurk constantly, the Christmas story tells us we are free to let go and admit our own wrongs in the presence of a Savior who has made provision.

It is we who need a savior, the only one who can make the world new again. Jesus brings both a "new and living hope" and, as Hebrews tells us, a trail blazed to heaven. If we truly look to him, we will see the world with different eyes. We will know a freedom that is both unmistakable and imperishable.

Jay Haug is author of Beyond the Flaming Sword available from Amazon.com. He is member of the Church of the Redeemer (Anglican) in Jacksonville, Florida and can be reached at cjcwguy@gmail.com