I am sure that some people no longer want to talk about the tragedy in Charleston, S.C. last week. “It was bad and it was last week.” I am not so sure we should be so quick to put this behind us and “move on.” Not because I have some political axe to grind but rather the sobering fact of how broken our world really is.

Whether it is racial hate, cultural hate, individual hate or even self-loathing hate… violence is not the answer. Violence is never the answer to anything and neither is hate.

The violence against our own (family of God) reminds me of other mass shootings in the recent past: Sandy Hook Elementary school, Fort Hood, Columbine High School, the Washington Navy Ship Yard, the Aurora, Colorado movie theater and the list goes on.

When I try to make sense of tragedies like these, I come to conclusion that there is no way to make sense of them. Sure we can describe what happened and what might have caused some to act in such a cruel and vicious way but it does not bring satisfaction or resolution and maybe it shouldn’t.

Killing fellow brothers and sisters in Christ at a Bible Study only because of their skin color is sickening.  There is no way to make sense of something like that.

The Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America wrote an open letter to us Lutherans. Here is what she wrote. . .

It has been a long season of disquiet in our country. From Ferguson to Baltimore, simmering racial tensions have boiled over into violence. But this … the fatal shooting of nine African Americans in a church is a stark, raw manifestation of the sin that is racism. The church was desecrated. The people of that congregation were desecrated. The aspiration voiced in the Pledge of Allegiance that we are “one nation under God” was desecrated.

Mother Emanuel AME’s pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, was a graduate of the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, as was the Rev. Daniel Simmons, associate pastor at Mother Emanuel. The suspected shooter is a member of an ELCA congregation. All of a sudden and for all of us, this is an intensely personal tragedy. One of our own is alleged to have shot and killed two who adopted us as their own.

We might say that this was an isolated act by a deeply disturbed man. But we know that is not the whole truth. It is not an isolated event. And even if the shooter was unstable, the framework upon which he built his vision of race is not. Racism is a fact in American culture. Denial and avoidance of this fact are deadly. The Rev. Mr. Pinckney leaves a wife and children. The other eight victims leave grieving families. The family of the suspected killer and two congregations are broken. When will this end?

The nine dead in Charleston are not the first innocent victims killed by violence. Our only hope rests in the innocent One, who was violently executed on Good Friday. Emmanuel, God with us, carried our grief and sorrow – the grief and sorrow of Mother Emanuel AME church – and he was wounded for our transgressions – the deadly sin of racism.

I urge all of us to spend a day in repentance and mourning. And then we need to get to work. Each of us and all of us need to examine ourselves, our church and our communities. We need to be honest about the reality of racism within us and around us. We need to talk and we need to listen, but we also need to act. No stereotype or racial slur is justified. Speak out against inequity. Look with newly opened eyes at the many subtle and overt ways that we and our communities see people of color as being of less worth. Above all pray – for insight, for forgiveness, for courage.

Kyrie Eleison.

The Rev. Elizabeth A. Eaton
Presiding Bishop
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

I also received an email from Pr. Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in Southern California. This is what he wrote:

How do we respond to such evil? The answer is that we must do the exact opposite of what the gunman wanted to accomplish. That way he doesn’t win.

The gunman’s intention was to divide people,
so we must unite in our grief.
His intention was to show hatred,
so we must show love.
His intention was to kill,
so we must protect life – all of it.
His intention was to do evil,
so we must respond by doing good
His intention was to start a race war.
We must be peacemakers.
His intention was to further segregation,
so we must model integration in our churches,
His intention was to do an injustice,
so we must stand for justice
And his intention was to do harm
so we must be agents of healing.

I am not going to tell you what to do or how to feel. I do hope that you take all of these words and commendations to heart. We have been reminded in the most horrible of ways that we live in a broken world and that we have been called to bring the Kingdom of God.

“Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Amen.