Lois Oglesby
The headlines, on Saturday August 3rd, 2019, were dominated by a mass shooting in a Walmart in El Paso Texas. The gunman walked through a Walmart at about 10:30 in the morning, methodically shooting people. He appeared to be singling out people of Latin descent. He shot 45 people, killing 23.
About 13 hours later, at about 1AM on the morning of Sunday August 4th, 2019, another mass shooting occured – this one in Dayton, Ohio. This shooting ended quickly… 32 seconds after the first shots were fired, the gunman was killed by responding police officers.
Still, in those 32 seconds, 9 people were fatally shot.
Derrick R. Fudge
The back-to-back shootings happened on Saturday and Sunday, so, my sermon, already written, nothing was said from the pulpit. But, thank God, I am not the only one with a voice and a conscience in this sanctuary. At that time we were still passing the microphone around during prayers, and Bob Balou raised his hand. Speech impediment, or no speech impediment, Bob, was not about to let the shootings go unobserved. We may not have understood every word he said, but we all had a perfect understanding of what he was feeling. His manner did not exhibit any of the tired resignation that has become our habitual response to mass shootings. Bob was frustrated. He was angry. Why was this kind violence so common in our country? Why did it seem like nothing could ever be done to stop it?
It was just too much!
We could no longer just sit on the sidelines.
We had to do something!
Megan K. Betts,
From one story to another.
Our response to the 2019 back-to-back shootings feels like the beginning of a story.
The reading from the book of Acts that Deb just read for us, also feels like a story.
I don’t really need to tell the story again, but I can’t resist, it’s so deliciously peculiar.
There are three parts to this story.
The first part concerns a slave woman who, the text says “has a spirit of divination.”
Isn’t it interesting that the person who can see beyond the surface of things is a female slave – the character most invisible to society?
Perhaps in keeping with her lowliness, she doesn’t even get credit for her clairvoyance, her ability to “see the future” is attributed to the spirit that “possesses” her. Since she is a slave, no thought is given to actually healing her – instead her possession is exploited – the advice she gives when she sees the future is a source of income for her masters.
No sooner does this slave-woman encounter Paul and the other disciples, then she (or the spirit that possesses her) recognizes them as “slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim the way of salvation.” This would be fine if she kept it to herself, but she follows them around announcing it to all and sundry, in a manner that Paul finds exceedingly annoying.
He could just ask the slave woman to be quiet or go away, but Paul does not do this. Instead he orders the spirit to leave the woman. The spirit obeys.
What happens to her? We don’t know.
The slave-woman, like the spirit that possessed her, promptly takes leave of the story. Speaking for myself, I’d love to interview her and find out how she felt about the whole thing, but the writer of the Book of Acts doesn’t bother with this. Paul’s abrupt exorcism effectively shuts her up and, like so many slave women before her, and after her, she is erased from view. She has done her part. End of part one.
Saeed Saleh
We prayed for the people who were killed in El Paso, and we prayed for the people who were killed in Dayton.
We prayed for their families.
And in our hearts, each one of us prayed that we – or more urgently, our children – might be spared from this terrifyingly random violence… this peculiarly American scourge.
But this too felt wrong, somehow. At that time Facebook was abuzz with activists and armchair pundits who were furious with people offering their “thoughts and prayers.” This phrase came to be seen as a kind of cheap absolution – the catch phrase people of faith say before they allow themselves to stop thinking about, or trying to address the real problem.
Were they wrong?
The next day, on Monday August 5th, the anger and frustration that Bob Balou had expressed in church, appeared once again in an email that Helen Coll sent to Chat.
Do something… just do something… just DO SOMETHING. We need to get active in our United Church of Christ here and nationwide. I have a mental picture of God crying.
If it was not obvious to me before, Helen’s words made glaringly clear that there was real energy coming from the pews that wanted to be harnessed. I sent an email to chat suggesting that we hold a brainstorming session in the Parlor. On Wednesday August 8th the meeting took place. According to the minutes, there were 9 people present: Pat Bullock, Helen Coll, Bob Dunn, Sarah Ellis, Mark Koyama, Liz Littlefield, Mike and Tina O’Neil, Deb Weissman.
For an impromptu meeting called in the middle of the week, that was a pretty impressive turn out!
Nicholas P. Cumer
The second part of the story from Acts, is when things quickly go south for Paul and company.
It turns out the owners of the slave-woman are not at all pleased with Paul who, in chasing the spirit from the slave-woman, has caused them a sudden loss of income. They seize Paul and the disciples, and drag them to the marketplace where they are set upon and severely beaten by the crowd. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, the Roman Authorities then join the fun, throwing the unfortunate followers of Jesus into the slammer. The keeper of the dungeon then appears. This unsavory fellow takes some pleasure in chaining Paul and his compatriots in the bastille’s deepest, darkest, most vermin infested recess.
Logan M. Turner
We came out of the meeting in the Parlor with an interesting plan.
We would install white crosses on the front lawn of the church – one for each person who had been killed in a mass shooting so far that year. We would create a worship service around the process of pounding the crosses into the front lawn.
Internet research revealed that some 283 people had been killed in mass shootings in the first 8 months of 2019. We also learned that we could not afford to buy the crosses, so we would have to make them.
Making the crosses turned into a vital part of the spiritual experience of this project.
It took a lot of effort. And this effort brought us together around a shared purpose. Local businesses donated the wood and materials. A large number of people in the church took part in cutting the wood, figuring out how to put them together in a uniform manner, and painting them. The room that is now the food pantry, became the workshop where the crosses were manufactured. The vast number of crosses, drying on tarps and jumbled into bins, humbled us.
Thomas J. McNichols
The story’s third act revolves around the Dungeon keeper – an improbable main character if there ever was one.
If the Slave woman was an annoying character who the storyteller was eager to silence and erase – the storyteller cannot seem to get enough of this ne’er-do-well. When we first meet, I picture this character as Hollywood might dress him – as a big unshaven oaf of a man clad in leather and threadbare burlap, as bald as a baby, mumbling profanities as he lumbers through his subterranean kingdom of stone and steel, a massive ring of jangling keys at his hip. He went to bed that night rather satisfied with himself for skillfully disposing of the rabble rousers and pleasing his Roman taskmasters to boot. His smugness is short-lived however, because he is awakened at midnight by a terrible earthquake.
Down in the dark depths, Paul and his crew had been praying and singing. Was the earthquake God’s answer to these pious exertions? It seems so, because the earthquake had a miraculous edge, flinging wide all the doors and breaking all their chains asunder. When, in this story, the Divine intervenes – it is to free the prisoners… not just a few of them, but all of them.
Rushing down to see the damage, the Dungeon keeper discovers all the cells broken open, assumes that all the prisoners are loose, and promptly decides to kill himself.
If there is one person who might be beyond the reach of redemption, wouldn’t it be the man who makes his living by imprisoning other people? Here is a man who, hours before, had, without hesitation, shackled Paul and the disciples in a dark hole. If we were watching an action movie, you would expect this scoundrel to meet some delightfully poetic end at the hands of the righteous hero…
But that is not how this story is told.
Paul will not let the jailer be so easily erased from the tale. In a loud voice Paul shouted:
“Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.”
The act now changes gear. Instead of a great escape, it becomes a story of transformation as the Jailer is revealed, not as the vile brute we first imagined, but as a family man who places himself, and his children, at the mercy of the Christians. The Jailer is not just a jailer. He feeds the erstwhile prisoners and washes their wounds. They, in turn, teach him about Jesus and baptize him.
The Jailer is not erased. He is redeemed.
Monica E. Brickhouse
We do not hear from the slave-woman, but even as she disappears, she is healed – liberated from the spirit that possessed her. Though the story does not follow her, perhaps we can hope that she, too, was liberated. No longer exploited for her clairvoyance, do you suppose she was more free to become herself?
The jailer – the one who imprisons – discovered that he himself was imprisoned. Through his interaction with Paul and company, he stopped being a stock character in a B movie, and became a man, with hope for a new life in Christ.
This is a story of transformation and liberation. The slave-woman and the jailer are each attended to carefully by God. One-by-one these unsavory characters are redeemed.
Beatrice N. Warren-Curtis
When we held the service in front of the church, we formed a line and prayed as, one-by-one, we pounded the white crosses into the ground.
I got nervous. It was taking a long time. My plans had not accounted for this. Were people getting fed up?
I expressed my concern to Sarah Elliss. She said:
“It’s ok. This is supposed to take time.”
It was at that moment that I realized that we were not pounding white crosses into the grass.
We were carefully attending, one-by-one, to the souls of these people who had been violently erased.
God does not erase people. God redeems them. We can help by offering prayerful attention.
The names that I have read aloud this morning, are the names of the nine people who died in Dayton. I chose to speak their names because, for some reason, their names did not appear in the Wikipedia post about the shooting, and this was a way to reverse that erasure.
As people of faith, our prayers need not be cheap absolution.
Our prayers can be our moral practice
our sacred attentiveness,
Our prayers can bethe way we stretch and exercise our spiritual muscles…
our stubborn insistence not to let any child of God be erased.
Amen