I really want to scream and swear at the top of my lungs because mass shootings are becoming routine in this country. We're horrified. We offer our thoughts and prayers. We go about our business. Then we do the same song and dance when the next tragedy occurs.

Horror, thoughts, and prayers are all appropriate responses to such madness. I don't question the sincerity to those reactions. And yet each time there is this narrative of "This has to stop!" But expressing horror, sending thoughts, and offering prayers are doing little to stand in the way of this swelling tide of death. 

Prayers are wonderful. Our church is having a prayer service on Wednesday and I am so thankful that is taking place. But prayers must be something that compel us to do something in this world

Introductory Note: I am presently residing on Writer's Block Island. The last couple of weeks have left me a bit emotionally and creatively spent. But I have been wanting publish something on this site for several days. Earlier I was going through an external hard drive that contains the soul of a since-deceased computer and found archives from my first years of blogging. And I noticed this one from 12 years ago today: September 21, 2005. I had not even been blogging for a month. So it is with great trepidation--and the reminder that this was 12 years ago--that I present this blog version of a #tbt. Please be kind.

I am sitting down to watch the season premiere of "Lost"--a recap of last season is currently on. I mentioned in an earlier post that this is my favorite show. Let me tell you a little about it:

Eight days ago, I woke up to a message that my Grandma had two brain aneurysms in the middle of the night. The next day I drove home to South Carolina and kept vigil in a hospital waiting room with my parents, Granddad, aunts, uncles, and other relatives as we hoped she would wake up. I returned to Nashville on Friday and Grandma passed away the next day. Tomorrow we will celebrate the life of Sharon Williams.

For days I have been trying to formulate the words that capture what losing her feels like and I can never grasp them. Emotionally I have been all over the map. I have cried. I have been okay. I have felt numb. And then I go through them all again. I don't know what to write about a woman who has always been there. I don't know this world without her and it feels sometimes like her absence will be akin to someone removing the color red from the world. I can imagine it, but it seems wrong.

Grandma was one of the most incredible, wonderful people I have ever known.

The three of us were rushing to the car in the rain. We were leaving the church later than I would have liked. EA was working late so I was staring down the barrel of getting the two of them to bed solo and they were wired. Then I heard the sound. A wailing siren. "Ugh," I said under my breath, but apparently loud enough for Jim to hear me. "Why did you say, 'Arrrrrrruuuuugggggghhhhh'?"

I probably should have thought a second before I answered. Jim can get a little skittish sometimes, but after work my mind wasn't in top gear. "You hear that noise? It's a tornado siren." Mild concern. "What does that mean?" Didn't think again. "It means someone has seen a tornado." More concern. "HERE?!" Crap, not one of my finer parenting moments. "No...probably some place further away, but it does mean we need to get home as quick as we can." This response was semi-satisfying, but Jim obviously had more questions.

When I think about what it means to call oneself a Christian, I often return to the historic creeds of the early church. That's an odd statement from someone who was raised in a decidedly non-creedal denomination. I simply think that it's a good place to start the conversation. When we're talking about people who follow Jesus, that seems like a good place to define the parameters.

And when I look at the Apostle's Creed or the Nicene Creed, I see a lot of land. There is room to roam if you have different interpretations and takes on faith, scripture, and whatever else. It's not anything goes territory, but it has been home to lots of different viewpoints over a couple of millennia. That vast country is part of what makes the Church so complicated. Yet it is also what makes the Church so beautiful. There is space out here for Catholics and Baptists, Disciples and Eastern Orthodox, Methodists and Anglicans, Pentecostals and Presbyterians and more.

It gets messy. It makes the unity that Jesus prayed for in John 17 massively and ridiculously challenging. Yet when it works...my God, when it works, it is something amazing to behold. The real challenges occur when something like the Nashville Statement happens.

I knew the eclipse was going to be something special when I saw EA's face after first caught a glimpse of a sliver of the moon over the sun. She pulled off her glasses and her eyes were like that of a kid. It was like she had seen snow for the first time. Our faces don't beam with that kind of surprise so much when we're adults. That's when I knew.

The actual kids in our household were in awe also. Jim, our oldest, was beside himself for excitement. Schools in Nashville were off for the eclipse and they had been talking about the event at school. "THIS IS THE BEST DAY EVER!!!" he shouted. Granted it doesn't take much for him to declare a day as the best or worst ever, but he said this was the best more often than usual.

So we stood and stared at the sun through our eclipse glasses. We watched that sliver of a moon grow and grow. Eventually it hid enough solar real estate that the sun turned into a Carolina crescent. Then ultimately our solar system's great light disappeared into a sliver itself.

My U.S. History teacher was a nice woman. She was polite. She seemed like kind of a gentle soul. She was also the first person I met who seriously referred to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression. And that's when things got complicated. Even as a 17 year old lifelong South Carolinian, I knew that there were all kinds of problems with that statement. But I didn't say anything.

I didn't say anything because I was 17 and my teacher was nice to me. But of course she was nice to me. I was a respectful white kid who was darn good at U.S. History. This isn't to say that she was mean to anyone. I doubt I ever heard her raise her voice. But it was easy for me to push aside my unease with her language about the Civil War. She was nice and I was not going to run afoul of that niceness unless I set out to do so.

Sir,
I don't recognize your Jesus. That is the simplest way for me to say this. You say that God has given the leader of our country the authority to wipe another person off the earth by whatever means necessary. You acknowledge that this includes means that would annihilate millions of lives. Eliminating exponential scores of people alongside the man who has cruelly punished them is no sort of justice. It surely isn't in the realm of anything one would call pro-life. The act is evil, pure and simple and you are saying that God is blessing this: a means of death and destruction, tools full of utter disregard for humanity, and weapons that could wipe life from the face of God's good creation.

I do not recognize your Jesus. I don't hear your Jesus blessing peacemakers or loving his enemies. I don't see him offering forgiveness or weeping over the lost. I don't see him laying down his life for others. And I'm sure you might point out that Jesus once said that he would bring a sword. But this, nuclear destruction, is not what he was talking about and let's not pretend you think that was what he was talking about either.

Your Jesus is not the Prince of Peace and Son of God I see in the Bible. He is a cartoon cowboy riding a weapon of mass devastation in a Kubrickian farce. Your Jesus screams "MAGA!" and reigns over the Kingdom of the U.S.A. rather than the borderless Kingdom of God. Your Jesus blesses excruciating death rather than being one who overcame it.