We send grace, peace, and love from Oklahoma City, where we’ve spent a couple of days with dear friends and their amazing children. We’re heading home later today via Indiana, where we will have a chance to help Carla’s niece move on Saturday morning. Thank you for your prayers and blessings for a restoring vacation; it has certainly been that by some measure.

And there is also Uvalde…

And the heartbreak of grief, horror, vulnerability, rage, volatility, and readily accessible weapons for such atrocities.

Sin.  

Luke 19 tells us about Jesus weeping over the city of Jerusalem as He entered into it. He wept over it, saying:“If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes.”

Sin. 

We need to join Jesus in weeping for precious lives lost, and for the magnitude of our collective sin.  Our great failures and need of repentance and change.  Much of what, it seems to me, remains hidden from so many eyes.  

We must talk about sin.

I’m not talking about the moralistic “fire and brimstone” version of sermonizing. I’m not talking about guns blazing “kill the monsters” version of ancient or modern law.   I’m not talking about demonizing inaccurately any individual or group. 

I’m talking about our duty to weep, to lament, to tell the truth about trauma and despair and the causes of violence.  We must name – through the lens of the Gospel –  the affects and roots of the violence which seems so victorious today.   We must begin with weeping – refusing to be numb – and praying and then walking in trust of Jesus’ way as we face the pain and despair of our age.

These things are on my mind as we prepare to lift the story of  Jesus’ ascension and the empowering of the early Church to live beyond his physical presence.  Will we find strength and wisdom for our day to represent his peace to one another and our broken world?

Let us cry, pray, study, share… hope.

In Christ’s Peace,
Pastor Jacki