We Are Dead.

It’s 4:47 AM, and I am unable to sleep. I realize that my insomnia is due to the fact that I am a few hours away from doing the most vulnerable thing I will do all day. Just before 8 AM, I will drop my children off at school. I will do this on the heels of another school mass shooting that claimed the lives of six, including three children under 10. This time, it happened in my state, in my former hometown of 12 years, a few miles away from the house my family lived in just 4 years ago.

The proximity of a school shooting doesn’t really affect the pain and grief I feel after it happens, but it does at a layer to the grief when you know folks who are a part of that particular school community, when your friends and former colleagues are personally connected to the families of victims, and when the father of your Goddaughter is a former teacher of the shooter.

As Christians sit here on the brink of Holy Week, I find myself drawing strong parallels between the horrific events at Covenant School and the annual events that are about to unfold. Yesterday, I wrote the post below on Facebook:

We are a people long dead to the grief of death from mass shootings.
We are a people long numb to the pain of innocent lives lost to gunfire.
We are a people long frozen in place when the agony of killing would and should have moved us to action.
As my fellow Christians and I get ready to talk about resurrection in less than two weeks, we need to truly own how dead we are - either from gunfire itself and the lives it destroys, or the unwavering tolerance of this way of life.
I have come to believe that the only way out of this death trap will be through a God event as incredible as resurrection.

We are dead. The fact that we continue to allow the most innocent among us, our children, to be killed in the most innocent of spaces, our schools, by individuals with unfettered access to weapons of war while we do nothing….we are lifeless, lacking the beating hearts and breathing souls given to us by God that should do everything and anything to make sure this never happens.

The final miracle that Jesus performs before entering Jerusalem, the backdrop for his public execution, is the resurrection of his beloved friend, Lazarus, who had died. Before he brought Lazarus back from the dead, he wept, even knowing what he was about to do. I believe God has been weeping with us and for us for a long time now, as we have continued to kill and mourn those killed by guns since their introduction to the world.

We are God’s beloved and we are dead like Lazarus, trapped in a tomb of our own stubbornness. We are wrapped in a burial shroud of grief and anger and our tomb is sealed by a large boulder that is the power, wealth and divisiveness that prevent us from even having meaningful conversation about how firearms are the number one killer of children and teens age 1-19. 

We need resurrection. When we are so dead that we bury our children while refusing to do anything to protect those still alive, we need a breakthrough so significant, so powerful and so unlikely that it can only be understood or explained as divine intervention – as God bringing us back to life. This is the only way to restore beating hearts that love one another, remove the shrouds of grief and anger that bind us, and roll away the stone of powerful politics that keeps us sealed in this tomb.

Of course we pray for comfort for the families and communities affected by this horror. We pray hard, as we cry and yell. But as a person of faith who never resigns herself to utter hopelessness, I have reached the place of believing that our only hope in breaking this horrific cycle of bloodshed lies in a God-like act of resurrection – a sudden transformation in which we move from death to life, recognizing that life IS our greatest treasure, and is far more precious and valuable than the cold, metal devices capable of snuffing out life in an instant.

We are dead. But we worship a God who can bring us back to life. As we pray for Nashville, and all the many others who are brought back to their own horror by the events of the last 24 hours, please join me in praying for our own resurrection. And not some resurrection after the end of days, but a resurrection now, since we are dead to the pain of the world through our unresponsiveness. How many more, O God? Revive us now. This minute! Give us hearts that beat and souls that feel so deeply that immediate, decisive and definitive action is the only option for us.

 Amen.

(Photo attributed to Nicole Hester)