I intended a blog to acknowledge and honor today’s Labor Day holiday. In fact, I wrote it and submitted it … and then asked that it be pulled. 

Because all I kept seeing in my mind these last few days was the heart-wrenching picture of the mom in Minneapolis running barefoot toward her child’s school — shoes in hand, no doubt fear in her heart — knowing only that a person with a gun had opened fire on a church sanctuary full of children celebrating their first Mass of the school year. Her child. (Here’s a link to that copyrighted picture to which RJ does not have rights.)

All I kept hearing was the unnamed 10-year-old saying, “My friend Victor like, saved me though, because he laid on top of me. But he got hit.” 

The stories and images of school shootings in the United States have become all too routine, all too familiar, 434 such incidents since Columbine in 1999, according to the Washington Post. Each one brings a fresh collage of anguished parents, uniformed police officers, and traumatized students fleeing with their small hands raised in the air. Each one, at least for a moment, tears at our hearts and elicits a flurry of contentious outrage—and then collectively, most of us move on until the next one again raises the bile in our throats. 

Or until it hits too close to home. The Annunciation Church shooting happened in the city I served for the past ten years, and where I just concluded my most recent assignment; at a place I had driven past more times than I can count. I felt the Minneapolis mayor’s words deep in my soul: “Unspeakable.” I saw the anguish in a face I have seen many times, as I watched Archbishop Bernard A. Hebda of St. Paul and Minneapolis say, “My heart is broken as I think about students, teachers, clergy and parishioners and the horror they witnessed in a church, a place where we should feel safe.”

And when it does, when it hits so close to home, I wonder: is this the time it will be different?

When a life is extinguished, especially in the way we saw last week, life can grow darker, more divided. Nothing I’ve seen in the days since the Minneapolis shooting gives me any confidence that the political leadership of the United States will find the will to do anything different than its typical posturing and arguing. It’s all their fault.

But if they can’t find humanity, we must. We—and that means you and me and the faith we share—must re-commit this day to the belief that life is stronger than death; that love stronger than hate, hope is stronger than suffering; that true wisdom and justice is rooted in the flourishing for all instead of the horror we continue to inflict on each other. And that this reality, this good news, is rooted not in our politics nor our power nor the Dow Jones Industrial Average nor our TikTok likes, but in the God of Abraham and Sarah. 

Sixteen years ago, at a General Synod of the Reformed Church in America, with a vote to affirm as our own the Belhar Confession, we said out loud, together, that in a fractured age, there is no better example we can give to the world than to live out our faith not simply as a collection of individuals, each accountable to her or his own desire, as our society would have us, but rather gathered, together, with and for each other, as the body of Christ. 

It means re-committing to build a world where no mother should need to run barefoot toward a tragedy. Not in our neighborhoods, not to our children’s schools. And not in our churches. Every mom, every dad, every human who still believes all God’s children deserve safety and protection, deserves a place to flourish — and we must be their running companion. 

In Minneapolis, in a city that has weathered trauma on trauma, our lives have been changed. The futures of two children were violently taken from them, just as it was two months ago in the shooting of a state senator; just as it was five years ago in the murder of George Floyd. Our hearts have been shattered. 

But that does not, it cannot, mean our courage and resolve must be changed, too. For this we still know: that despite the chaos and despair around us, despite the blame game so many wish to play, there comes from God a compassion that acknowledges the presence of fear and learns how to work through it, and sometimes with it—and it lives in you. That despite the dark clouds roiling over the present, there comes from God a courage that doesn’t demand certainty or comfort, but rather seeks justice for all—and it lives in you. That in a world where the powerful seem only interested in their own comfort, where the earth is burning, where AI is further attenuating human relationality, there is love and grace and mercy and justice that comes from God—and it lives in you. And through you. 

For the children killed and the children wounded, for parents, families and all who grieve.

For the people of Minneapolis, shaken and afraid.

And for our nation, and for courage to pursue the things that make for peace.

Lord, make us instruments of your justice and peace.