When Big Things Happen
Saturday is the day of preacher anxiety. Not only does it mean that Sunday is just around the corner, but Saturdays are full of events- joyful and tragic- that have the potential to reshape how a community of faith like ours gathers on Sunday morning. Much of our worship life is prepared well ahead of time. Scripture and music are often set months at a time. Liturgy is written a week or two out. The bulletin is proofed on Tuesday and printed a couple days later. Sermons are written… when they’re written.
The rhythms that allow us to offer faithful worship each Sunday for a community of our complexity also make for a tricky Saturday Shift due to current events, disasters, and the like.
It’s often the case that we don’t have a great deal of clarity or detail when Something Big happens right before we gather. This Saturday was one of those days, as news began to spread that former President Trump had been grazed by a bullet at a rally in Pennsylvania.
By the time we got to worship on Sunday morning, few details were known- just that some had died, some had been injured, and the former president was safe. In these moments as a people of faith, rather than dive into the mire with speculation or blame, we turn to prayer and compassion. On Sunday we named former President Trump and all those at the rally in our congregation’s joys and concerns, and we lamented the violence that had come to pass.
When all else fails and you don’t know what is true or what on earth is happening, we may always rely on the choice to turn to prayer and compassion. Not ignorance, not naivete, not a forgetting of justice, not abdication of responsibility, but prayer and compassion.
Even as I write this on Tuesday afternoon, many details are still unknown. Questions and spaces of fear have multiplied. We continue to turn to prayer and to compassion. I share with you again the pastoral prayer from Sunday. I am indebted to the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Rev. Katie Ladd, and Rev. Katie Klosterman whose prayers are found within and provided guidance to this one:
God our deliverer, our strength, the source of our compassion:
We come to you this morning in humility and awe. Brood over this chaos, O God, just as your spirit brooded over the chaos at the beginning of creation. Brood over the joyful chaos of our lives this day.
What a privilege it is to have the opportunity to love; as one of the saints of the church has admonished us, “let us not satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”
O God, though we may oppose someone’s politics, words, and actions, may we never oppose their humanity. Soften our hearts, O God, that they would be moved with a generous compassion when our impulses of ‘us against them’ would rather close our hearts with judgment and loathing.
This week we are shaken by the shooting at the election rally in Pennsylvania.
We are shaken because this is not the first time that fellow children of God have resorted to violence against other fellow children of God.
We are shaken by the thought that someone would be so hurt or so hateful or so misguided as to turn to bullets instead of ballots, to prefer death over debate.
We are shaken because we fear retaliation and more violence in response. Violence begets violence.
We are shaken because we yearn for peace, for rational discourse, for a government who protects the rights of its most vulnerable. Violence brings us even farther from those yearnings.
In these times and in all times, you call us to be a people of prayer, love, and justice.
We pray for the family of those who were killed or injured. We pray for those who have been traumatized by the experience of a shooting, as far too many have been. We pray for all who are now fearful because of this terrible act of violence. We pray for hearts that may have been hardened because of this act. We pray for our nation. We pray for this election.
Let our hearts not hold resentment or contempt. Let them not hold prejudice or disgust.
As we seek to be gentle with others, may we also be gentle with ourselves, for we each hold multitudes.
We pray these things in the name of your son Jesus Christ. Amen.
Peace, peace, peace,
Pastor Karyn