Pastoral Word for Uvalde

The tragic mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas has left many of us speechless.  We carry grief and sadness, rage and anger, confusion that verges on despair.  As people of faith our response begins with prayer.  Prayers for extra measures of God’s compassion and mercy for parents whose lives have been ripped apart, siblings who will live with a constant ache for the rest of their lives, extended family who will seek to offer comfort and find words and actions inadequate, children and educators who were in the building and who must navigate their own trauma response.  We pray for schools and teachers, administrators, office workers, custodians, and cafeteria workers.  We pray for law enforcement officers and first responders.  May we never dismiss the role prayer must play in our lives. Prayer is the breathing in and breathing out of faith.  

As we pray, we also pray for ourselves.  We pray that God will grant us the resources of strength, intelligence, and follow-through to make the necessary changes moving forward. We cannot go back in time and correct our previous inaction.  We must find the emotional stamina, collective courage, and God-given wisdom to make changes to protect the most vulnerable whom God has placed in our care.   

I believe the changes we need to make will require changes in our laws and changes in the ways we address mental health.  I believe it will require us to acknowledge our patterns of glorifying violence and of treating human life with irreverence.  As Disciples, we need to claim the resources God has uniquely entrusted to us.  The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has been a meeting space for people who profoundly disagree with one another.  We have been the people who have said change will require trust and trust requires dialogue and dialogue requires honesty and vulnerability.  We need to reclaim our culture of being the people who could stimulate, challenge, and even irritate one another precisely where the stakes are highest and resist the temptation to deny one another’s worthiness within the family of faith. The polarization within our culture and the death-dealing silent treatment and gamesmanship we permit with our social and political systems is destroying us from the inside out.  Disciples are not the only denomination who received the capacity for difficult conversation as a birthright, but it is a part of what God has enabled us to do in the past and a gift our world needs in the present.   Our General Minister and President, Rev. Terri Hord Owens, has said, “May they say of Disciples: they love Jesus too much to hate each other.”   

As Disciples, we identify ourselves by a call to create spaces where human wholeness is possible.  In that Spirit, one of our founders claimed the words of Ruth to Naomi as a communion meditation and invitation.  Today, these same words echo in my Spirit and make me wonder if we could form a covenant with one another in this fragile human family saying: Do not press me to leave you or every turn back from following you. Your journey is part of my journey; and the well-being of your home is as sacred to me as my own. Your people shall be my people just as your God is my God.  Where you die, I die also and the place where you are buried contains parts of my life as well. May I be supremely accountable to God if I allow anything—even your death—to separate me from the work of enabling your wholeness.  

Andy Mangum, MDiv, DMin

Regional Minister and President

Christian Church in the Southwest