“Was that about the shooting?”
The man paused in the receiving line, his hand still clasping mine, his eyes expectant, waiting.
My mind spun for a moment, trying to connect the dots in my head between the sermon I had just given and recent headlines.
“I suppose it could have been, yeah,” I replied, assuming that he meant the shooting of 22-year-old singer Christina Grimmie, whose murder had shocked the city of Orlando— our city— just two nights before. I started to mention her name and the parishioner cut me off.
“Not that shooting,” he said. “The other one. The one last night.”
What is this country, I remember thinking, that we can’t even keep our shootings straight?
I admitted with embarrassment that I did not know of the events he was describing. He told me I should look at the news and then bade me a good morning. I hurried into the sacristy to check my phone. Sure enough, there were the headlines: “Shooting at Orlando Night Club, Twenty Feared Dead.”
That morning, I had preached on Luke. The passage came from Luke chapters 7 and 8, where we hear of the story of the woman who bursts into the Pharisee’s dinner party with Jesus, proceeds to anoint Jesus’s feet with expensive perfume, and washes each foot with her tears and hair. I had spoken about how inconvenient it can be when “real life” breaks into the order that we construct for ourselves and we are forced to confront the sorrow, pain, and suffering that often lies just below the surface of our lives.
Graham Kings, previously Bishop of Sherborne in England before being named Mission Theologian for the Anglican Communion, was set to preach the other two of our three morning liturgies that day. He had the difficult task of acknowledging as a guest preacher– and one from another country, no less!– the tragedy of what we now simply call “Pulse,” while still drawing in his points about mission and ministry throughout the Communion.
By the time the 9:00am liturgy had concluded, the death toll had jumped even higher than before and the injured numbered in the dozens. By the end of the 11:15am liturgy the number of injured was said to be over a hundred, and the number of deceased somewhere around fifty.
“The Worst Mass Shooting in Modern American History,” the headlines proclaimed. In the end, 49 people died.
And soon it wouldn’t even be the deadliest atrocity of its kind.
So much of that day still feels so immediate.
I will, for instance, never forget a parishioner leaning close to me in the chancel of the church during Mass, asking me to pray for her husband, a cardiac surgeon at Orlando Regional Medical Center, because he had been called to the hospital a little before 4am and had been operating on victims ever since. I will never forget how jarring it was to hear NPR cut from their usual Sunday programming to cover the events of the shooting, or to turn on the TV when I got home to find arial video feeds of a location mere miles from my own house broadcasted across all major networks. I will never forget the tears I shed that day. I will never forget that my wife was out of town visiting family, leaving me alone in the house with our two dogs to watch the news coverage as the sun dipped lower and lower in the sky. I did not even bother to change out of my collar after church, nor could I bring myself to get lunch. I just sat, stunned, and tried to process everything.
Even now I can only imagine the grief and pain of those who actually lost a loved one that day. I can only imagine.
I will also never forget joining my fellow clergy in the Diocese of Central Florida in prayer and remembrance in the days that followed. I will never forget walking with some of my colleagues from the Cathedral Church of St. Luke in downtown Orlando to a public vigil a block away at Lake Eola Park, all of us dripping with sweat from wearing our cassocks, surplices, and stoles in the muggy Florida heat. I will never forget the numerous people, tears streaming down their faces, who approached me and threw their arms around me while murmuring through their sobs the words “thank you” as we cried together, praying prayers for our city too deep for words.
There was in the midst of so much tragedy and pain the glimmers of God’s grace and mercy breaking through. Stories of immense generosity, of people lining up for hours in the searing Florida heat to give blood, of those rallying in support of the bereaved. Voices rose up expressing support and demanding action. The Cathedral hosted a funeral for one of the victims.
Those moments of grace brought to mind the words of Rowan Williams. Back in 2015, Williams gave a lecture at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London about keeping a Christian Christmas. In the course of his remarks, he addressed the mystery of the Incarnation by employing a rich analogy of a master craftsman “restoring an ancient and wonderful musical instrument.”
Williams remarked:
“Looking at the old and damaged instrument, the craftsman might say, ‘Well, I could repair this with a bit of synthetic material. A bit of composite here, and a bit of glue there. But it’s not actually going to perform what it’s capable of performing unless I work very hard with the grain of the wood, and replace what’s worn out with the same material. Because that material is good. And it’s that material which is capable of singing.’ So God approaches our humanity. God doesn’t say, ‘With a bit of luck I might find some moral plastic substitute that will fill in the gaps.’ God says, ‘Humanity itself needs to be inhabited and transfigured from within.’”
Our reaction to this transfiguration, Williams asserts, should be that we are “Overwhelmed by the nearness of God, and properly alarmed by the radical nature of the claim made.”
Overwhelmed and properly alarmed, indeed.
It can be easy for Christians to conceive of God’s salvific action as an abstraction. We can easily construct a God that is so distant from us, that if God saves us at all it is from afar. We become alarmed not that God has inhabited us, but that God has abandoned us; overwhelmed not at God’s presence, but God’s perceived absence.
And yet instead our salvation is worked out by means of the most unassuming material: a baby, the flesh and blood of humankind.
This nearness and immediacy should indeed overwhelm and alarm us, as it means that we too are intimately bound up in the work of God. God came to us in the person of Jesus Christ not just to dwell alongside us, but among us, in an act of divine solidarity that speaks light into the darkest places.
Jesus lived and suffered and died as one of us.
The world doesn’t need any “moral plastic substitute” in moments of great despair, but instead needs people– needs us— to live a life transfigured and transformed. The world needs people who will stand in the gaps, who will walk through the streets and be present in the midst of pain. The world needs love.
Every year around this time, I am brought back to June of 2016. I grieve again– not just for the lives lost that dreadful night, but for the thousands more who have lost their lives since then due to gun violence. I lament the legislative inaction that leaves the door open for these shootings to continue happening, even as blood stains school hallways and places of worship and workplaces and movie theaters and shopping malls.
I’m heading into only my fifth year of ordained ministry, but already I’ve had to step into a pulpit the week of a mass shooting more times than I can count– so often, in fact, that as I preacher I could almost preach on nothing else.
It seems that, at least for the foreseeable future, gun violence and mass shootings will be a heartbreakingly common pastoral reality. Alongside drafts of wedding sermons and funeral sermons, a priest getting ordained today likely also has a file of “shooting sermons”– an indictment of our nation, evidence of the brokenness of things.
I live in hope that one day I won’t need those sermons anymore. I live in hope that one day we might see a new reality. I live in hope that one day the ubiquity of mass shootings won’t cause us to confuse and conflate them in the receiving line at church.
Pulse taught me– and continues to teach me– that even in the midst of unimaginable tragedy and grief, when it seems our instruments are cracked and broken, we possess the stuff necessary to herald hope.
Our material is good and still capable of singing.
CAMERON & SURPLICE 