Lord, Have Mercy: Reflections on the Uvalde School Shooting
Dear Epiphany,
Lord, have mercy upon us.
Yet again this week we have found ourselves mourning a horrific, unthinkable massacre of children in our nation. We ask questions of “Why?” and “How could this happen?” and we send condolences, prayers and support to the fellow parents, grandparents, teachers and human beings in Uvalde, Texas. Once again, our country learns the name of a town few would otherwise know. Uvalde will become as recognizable now as Parkland, Newtown and Columbine. And yet again, we are so skeptical our nation’s political leaders will do anything about passing the gun control laws a clear majority of Americans support.
These deaths are our sin and our national shame. Lord, have mercy upon us. Nowhere else in the world does this happen. This is the trauma Congressional leaders continue to visit upon us and our children as they refuse to enact gun control regulations. At the age of 16, I watched in utter shock as teenagers like me were ushered out of Columbine High School and read the stories of how their peers had been killed. Our recent Confirmation students grew up with active shooter drills after elementary schoolers their same age were killed at Sandy Hook school. Incomprehensibly, each generation of our children seems to have a school massacre to mark their childhoods. Christ, have mercy. And that is to say nothing of the (mostly) elderly Black people grocery shopping in Buffalo who were racially targeted and killed two weeks ago. Lord, have mercy upon us.
This time I find I cannot offer Biblical platitudes about God comforting the mourning. God surely does. God shouldn’t have to comfort these mourners. Or how God will bring justice in time. Justice is ours to create, God has already showed us how. Our baptismal vows require it. So we remain horrified and powerless with little to do, but wait and see if half of Congress can stop blocking measures so these traumas might stop being visited upon us all. The kind of numbness many of us feel this week is a trauma response after all. The emotional distancing and the powerlessness serves to defend and cushion us from the horror because opening ourselves to it in the past has never helped prevent it from happening again. And the tide of daily life carries us onward.
So we are left with the most Biblical response of all – lament. Jeremiah spends nearly all his Biblical writing on lamenting the sins of the people and their leaders. “How long, O Lord, how long?” (Psalm 13) The Psalmist laments the pain and suffering of the people without offering “thoughts and prayers” or comforting words that fall flat in the face of inaction. Lament can and should live on its own, without responses that mask or minimize it.
May this time be different. May we finally be a nation of repentance and change. And if this time isn’t different, I do know that God will keep loving us without condition until we do better. Of that much we can be assured. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
Yours in that love and lament,
Rev’d Jen
