Last Saturday, as you no doubt know by now, an attempt was made on the life of the former president at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. Two lives were lost, that of the assailant and of a husband and father protecting his family. Two others were seriously wounded. Mr. Trump sustained a minor injury. As I write this, more details about this tragic event are being revealed. Some of these details support and others contradict what was shared on social media in the minutes and hours after the shooting.
Last Sunday to address the shooting, before the readings from scripture, I took a moment to tell the story of King David, his son Absalom, and David’s general Joab (2 Samuel 15-19). I said that as we think about Saturday’s events, David’s voice, the voice of lament, is the faithful voice for God’s faithful people to listen to and to express.
A voice of lament I wish to raise here is one against political violence. Many prominent public officials, from President Biden on down, were quick to say after Mr. Trump was shot that there is no place in this country for political violence. It is not who we are as Americans. I lament that this simply isn’t true.
Politics is how we live and how we live together – it’s not merely how we elect people. The entire history of what came to be the United States until today has been and is politically violent: the treatment of indigenous peoples by the first European explorers and westward settlers; the capture and enslavement and brutality toward peoples of African descent; the wars we have fought on our own soil and across the globe; the overt and covert support or overthrow of governments in other nations; the military-industrial complex; the calculating care-less-ness of capitalism; the policing and carceral state; the ruthless behavior of criminals and organized crime; the glorification of cowboy culture, gangsters, and superheroes in literature, television, and film. We are a violent nation and a violent species. There is always a place in America for political violence – it seems we haven’t the imagination or will to act without political violence. It is how we exercise our power. It is how we build our cities and our systems. It is how we get things done.
This is lamentable, at least it is for me. And I believe that through Christ, incarnate and ascended, God laments when we behave this way – we Americans and we residents of the Earth. God became one of us in the person of Jesus to show us another way. Too many who claim to be his followers, myself included, too easily succumb to this sin by participating in it, benefitting from it, acquiescing to it.
What is to be done?
We can recall and celebrate those few saints who managed to live as non-violently as they could amid the violence of their cultures.
We can choose tempered, compassionate, self-effacing responses to the insults that come our way.
We can commit to speech and behavior of our own that promotes peace.
And we can be patiently truthful in admitting to ourselves and to others the violence in our nation’s past and present, that it is who we are – but it doesn’t have to be.
These are not Pollyannaish suggestions. I’m not charging you with changing the world. I am inviting you, in the ways that any of us can, to choose a better path.
Take a breath before you speak. Think a second time, and a third, before you act. Consider the purpose of your liking and sharing that snarky and sarcastic meme on social media.
And, above all, pray. Ask God for the grace you need to know God’s desire and will for you, and for the grace you need to accomplish it. Despite our violence tendencies and actions, we are mostly good, made in God’s image, loved deeply and limitlessly, trusted implicitly to share the Good News and to bear good tidings. We are made not to fall and fail but to shine as lights of the world.
God’s blessings and peace,
Dan +
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