Gun Violence Awareness Sunday: Our faith calls us to more than just words

Sermon delivered Sunday, June 5, 2016 (The Third Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 5, Year C), at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA.



The women in the first reading and in the Gospel today are both grieving over lost sons. This is not an uncommon theme in the Bible; we could turn to any number of books in the Bible and find stories of grief over lost loved ones. In both passages today, the cause of death was illness or natural causes, but in many other parts of the Bible we have graphic stories of violent death and the mourning that follows when life is cut too short -- not because of natural causes, but because of the sinfulness of people.

This past Thursday, June 2, was National Gun Violence Awareness Day. This is a relatively new observance; only the second annual. And it came into existence not because of some government decree or some organization pronouncing it would be so, but through the grassroots organizing of a group of high school students in Chicago.

After losing their friend Hadiya Pendleton to a random shooting in January of 2013, Hadiya’s friends started a movement to raise awareness about gun violence. They encouraged their classmates to wear orange – the color hunters wear to protect themselves in the woods, the color of gun safety, the color that indicates that someone is not a target or something is not a weapon – they encouraged their classmates to wear orange on June 2, which was Hadiya’s birthday. The movement has gained momentum, and now people all over the country are wearing orange on June 2 to raise awareness about the toll gun violence is taking on our nation and to advocate for gun safety. And today, clergy all over the Episcopal Church are wearing orange stoles to stand in solidarity with this movement.

So as I looked at our lessons today, I noticed these grieving mothers. In these stories, both mothers get their sons back – God restores them to life, through the prayer of Elijah and the command of Jesus. These resurrection narratives remind us that death does not have the last word. We are given a promise that life will overcome death, that death cannot defeat us.

But what about Hadiya's parents? What about those mothers and fathers in Newtown, who will never see their children master reading, or get braces, or take the SATs? What about the mothers and fathers in Columbine, whose children never got to graduate from high school, who would have been my age now, had they lived, with careers and families and who knows what else? What about those children at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, whose parents were gunned down while they worshipped, whose parents will not be there to see them graduate, get married, have children? God hasn’t brought back their sons, their daughters, their mothers, their fathers, from the dead. What does resurrection mean for them? What does resurrection look like for them?

As a priest, I have a duty to remind the church of the power of the resurrection, to remind us that death does not have the last word. But sometimes that is difficult to do when all evidence around us seems to point to the contrary. Sometimes mere words don’t feel like enough. It’s not enough to say that death triumphs over life, it’s not enough to read the stories of Jesus raising someone’s son from the dead and hope against hope that this can happen for our loved ones, too. The purpose of our faith is not only to give comfort in times of despair, but to stir us to action, to work to prevent the preventable tragedies of this life. To demand that action be taken, to say “not one more!” Not one more life lost to preventable, unnecessary violence, to gun-related accidents, or to suicide.

Some tragedies in this life are beyond our control, like natural disasters – hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes – or many kinds of illnesses. For those things there will always be a theological question around why God allows these things to happen. But some things we can control. Some tragedies are due to human behavior, human sin, things that could be different if we were to be intentional about the choices we make and the actions we take. Gun violence is one of those tragedies. We CAN change it. It is within our power. We can’t blame God for it. We have to take responsibility for the ways we, as a species, have endlessly invented ways to harm each other and ourselves. We created the gun, and we are responsible for its misuse. We must, as our confession in the liturgy says, “repent of the evil that enslaves us – the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” And to repent means to CHANGE. To change direction. To turn around completely. To do something different. Not to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, which as we all know, is the definition of insanity. We must raise our voices and say, “enough is enough.”

In 2013, I led a Lenten series called “Christian Responses to Gun Violence.” It was right after 2012, a particularly bloody year in terms of mass shootings: the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in July, the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in August, and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December. We took the traditional Anglican “three-legged stool” approach and looked at what scripture, tradition, and reason had to say about the use of weapons and violent force. We realized that faithful Christians can and do disagree on the best way to protect innocent life, and that Christian ethics has historically had two different “positions” on the use of weapons and violent force: the pacifist perspective, which says that violence is never justified, and the just war theory, which says that violent force is justified in some circumstances, if the scenario meets a certain set of criteria, including that the violence is used as a last resort, that violence is done in service of the common good, and that only the minimal amount of violence necessary to bring about the desired result is used.

After considering all this, we got to the “so what” question – the question I want to hold up for you today. What does our faith call us to do in response to the tragic loss of life in our cities and towns due to gun violence? Surely our location on the edge of East Oakland, one of the most notorious neighborhoods in the country for gun violence -- makes this issue relevant and important to us as we seek to bring God’s justice and mercy to the communities around us.

In my research on how Christians of all sorts have responded to gun violence, I noticed three basic ways they have done so:
• political advocacy
• prayer and witness
• community development and empowerment.

The Episcopal Church has a public policy network that focuses exclusively on activism through political advocacy. They lobby Congress and advocate for certain courses of action that they believe are most congruous with the values of our faith. A group of bishops that formed after Newtown, led by the bishops of Connecticut, called Bishops United Against Gun Violence, and another group of lay people called Episcopalians Against Gun Violence, fall into this category. There are many ways to get involved in their work if political advocacy is where you are feeling called.

In the prayer and witness category, a church in New Orleans stands out. St. Anna’s Episcopal Church on the outskirts of the French Quarter has become known for their “murder board,” (click the word "murder board" for a link to a video about this ministry) a wall on the outside of the church where they record the name, age, and method of death for all local murder victims each week. In a city that has one of the highest murder rates in the country, this church is bearing public witness to the very human toll of urban violence, reminding the community that each one of the statistics is a human being with a name and a face and a family. They pray for each week’s victims by name in the Prayers of the People on Sundays as part of their liturgy.

Another example in this category would be this new icon (pictured at right). This is “Our Lady Mother of Ferguson and All Killed By Guns.” It was commissioned by Mark Bozzuti-Jones, a priest at Trinity Wall Street, and was written by Mark Dukes, the iconographer who wrote the dancing saints icons at St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco. This image powerfully speaks to how sacred and valuable every life lost to gun violence is, and gives voice, through visual representation, to the grief of those who remain to mourn their loss.

Finally, community development and empowerment. When I led the Lenten series in Nashville in 2013, I highlighted the work of a trauma surgeon who had started a violence prevention program in the public schools after seeing too many young people come through the ER as gunshot victims. He wanted to address the root causes of violence – poverty, lack of education, lack of positive mentors and role models, and so on – to try to help prevent these kids from winding up on his operating table in the ER.

One organization I’ve discovered here in Oakland that’s doing a similar kind of work is a program called Oakland Unite, part of the Department of Human Services for the City of Oakland, that leads violence prevention and intervention programs in the most at-risk parts of Oakland – but I turn to you all, the experts on this area, to let each other know about other initiatives you are familiar with that are doing good work to address the root causes of violence.

So, whether it’s political advocacy, prayer and witness, community development and empowerment, or all three, there is bound to be some way in which your gifts can be used to address this issue. And who knows? Some of you may be called to go even deeper and take a leadership role in this area. Or maybe St. Cuthbert’s as a community might be called to be God’s hands and feet in addressing violence in the neighborhoods that surround our church. That could be a critical part of our way forward. Again, we must listen for God’s call to us – taking the time for discernment is key. Where is the Holy Spirit calling you, calling us, on this issue, if anywhere? The psalmist reminds us today that “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.” How can you, how can we, turn weeping into dancing for our brothers and sisters who live in constant fear of gun violence, especially our neighbors in East Oakland? Because our faith calls us to more than just words.

Reflections on "Ashes to Go" - an answer to the critics

Our rector, Bob Cowperthwaite, and parishioner
Gerald Hancock offering Ashes to Go
at our first shift from 8:30-9:30 a.m.

Two weeks ago, our church participated in Ashes to Go for the first time. In additional to our regular Ash Wednesday services at 7 a.m., noon, and 7 p.m., we stood out on a street corner near our church and offered ashes and a very abbreviated version of the liturgy to pedestrians from 8:30-11:30 a.m. and from 2:30-5:30 p.m. This street outreach was intended to reach both those who couldn’t get to service today and those who might not have even thought about going to church today if they hadn’t seen us out on the sidewalk. At the end of the day, we had imposed ashes on 106 people outside.

Ashes to Go has become a nation-wide movement. It started with several Episcopal churches in the St. Louis and Chicago areas in 2007 and 2010, and it “went viral” in 2012, with more than 80 churches in 21 states participating. In 2013, it went international, with participants in Canada, the UK, and South Africa, in addition to the U.S. (Statistics from the Ashes to Go website at www.ashestogo.org.)

As Ashes to Go has become more known amongst “church people,” especially amongst professional church people like clergy and church staff, there has been a lot of discussion about it. It has its share of critics, who assert that this “quickie” liturgy cheapens what should be a somber call to repentance. The critics say that people should make time to attend the full-length liturgy on Ash Wednesday, and if they can’t attend church, that shows that their priorities are in the wrong place. They worry about people taking Ash Wednesday too lightly, or going to an Ashes to Go site just to “get their ashes” as some kind of a token or rote ritual rather than out of a true sense of repentance and desire for connection with God.

I must admit that despite the fact that my call to the priesthood emerged out of my involvement with a street church for homeless people in Cambridge, Mass., and the fact that I was naturally drawn to Ashes to Go when I first heard about it because of the "street church" element of it, my training in seminary conditioned me to always take a step back and listen to the other side of the story, to another perspective. The critics'  arguments against Ashes to Go were well-crafted enough that they gave me pause. Maybe this was an inappropriate cheapening of the dignity of the liturgy. Maybe we shouldn't do it.

But after serving two one-hour “shifts” out on the street corner on Ash Wednesday, I can say that not a single person we encountered in those two shifts seemed to be taking this encounter lightly. Some people had driven from the other side of town just to participate in this brief encounter on the sidewalk. They’d seen an article that the local paper had run about the fact that we were going to do this, and they made time in their day, they went out of their way to come to downtown Franklin just to get their ashes. Their schedule may not have allowed them to attend services at the traditional times of noon or later in the evening, but for whatever reason they were able to get away mid-morning or mid-afternoon, and they were so appreciative because otherwise they really would not have gotten to have an Ash Wednesday experience today, however brief our encounter was. Several people even got tears in their eyes as they thanked us, clearly moved that we were taking the time to bring church to them.

There was a depth of gratitude in their voices as they thanked us that echoed the deeply grateful sincerity I’ve heard in people’s voices when I’ve taken communion to people who are in the hospital or homebound. “Thank you so much for doing this!” they say, with a depth of gratitude that goes beyond the cursory “thanks” we give the cashier at the grocery store or a friend or family member who passes us the salt at dinner. This is a different kind of thanks, a thanks born out of touching a place of need and vulnerability, of mediating a brief moment of grace from one human being to another – whether an Ashes to Go recipient or a parishioner recovering at home from surgery.

As I reflected on this, it occurred to me that I can’t imagine any of the critics of the Ashes to Go movement who are within the Episcopal Church saying that we shouldn’t take communion to people at home or in the hospital because it would “cheapen” the experience, that if they can’t get to church on Sunday for the entire celebration of the Eucharist, then their priorities must not be in the right place. We consider Eucharistic visitation to be one of the most sacred and holy things we do as priests. And yet, what we say and do when we take communion to people is a very shortened version of the full Eucharistic liturgy, just as Ashes to Go offers a shortened version of the full Ash Wednesday liturgy.

That’s when I realized that Ashes to Go is basically a series of “pastoral visits” on the street. It’s about offering a shortened version of the regular liturgy to those who can’t be with the rest of the gathered community. And just as we do when we visit people in the hospital, if there are several people present visiting with the patient, they are all invited to join in the communion, so on Ash Wednesday, when two people happened to walk up at the same time, we invited them to all join together with us in the brief liturgy. Even though none of us had ever met before, in that one brief moment, we were a community of faith praying together. “Wherever two of three are gathered,” Jesus said, “I am in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). Not “wherever there is an officially sanctioned, full-length liturgy approved by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.”

Praying with several people who walked up at the same time. "Wherever two or three are gathered..."

So even the Ashes to Go recipients did get an opportunity to join with other Christians in prayer today. Yes, they could have gone home and read through the entire Ash Wednesday liturgy in their prayer books instead, to get the “full experience,” but there’s something about the encounter with another person, that incarnational experience that is really at the heart of our faith, that is sacred and powerful, however brief.

The difference between Ashes to Go and a traditional pastoral visit, of course, is that we are doing it in a public place. It is no small irony that the Gospel reading for Ash Wednesday is the passage from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus warns us to “beware of practicing your piety before others, in order to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1), and tells us not to “stand and pray… at the street corners, so that we may be seen [by others]” (Matthew 6:5). Um, gulp. The critics of Ashes to Go point out that we appear to be doing exactly what Jesus told us not to do! When I was “plugging” Ashes to Go to one of my classes at church, encouraging lay people to sign up to help out with it, I made a joke about the irony of this passage and what we were going to do. Everyone laughed, but one of the parishioners spoke up in a serious tone and said, “But I don’t think that’s the same thing as what you’re doing. Jesus was talking about being hypocritical. I don’t think that’s what this is. I think this is different.”

I was surprised by her immediate positive view of what we were doing with Ashes to Go and the disconnect for her in associating it with Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount. But after my experience on the street and my insight into the ways in which Ashes to Go is a pastoral encounter, it makes me appreciate her insight even more. If we’re doing Ashes to Go primarily “to be seen by others” in a showy kind of way, then yes, we should hear Jesus’s words of rebuke in the Sermon on the Mount for showy displays of piety. But if we’re doing Ashes to Go out of a sincere desire to serve others and to care for them, then perhaps the more appropriate words of Jesus to remember would be the ways he rebuked the religious leaders for being unwilling to break tradition in order to address human need. “What is lawful on the Sabbath, to do good or to do evil?” (Mark 3:4) he said to those who criticized him for healing on the Sabbath. And while I’m not saying that it’s a matter of life and death for people to get their ashes on Ash Wednesday, I do think that we are addressing a very real need and a very real and sincere desire and longing to connect with God and the liturgies of the church, not throwing tradition to the wind or dismissing the gravity and seriousness of that day.

An Ashes to Go recipient jumps for joy after receiving her ashes.

If anything, Ash Wednesday seemed more serious and more sacred to me through the encounter with folks who cared enough to drive all the way across town to participate in even a shortened version of the liturgy, for whom it meant enough to them to seek it outside of the traditional means of delivery. And the number of people we met and engaged with who didn't have a church home, or who had been hurt by the church, but were making this tentative step back toward connecting with the church -- what could possibly be more holy than that? We didn't just slap some ashes on their foreheads in a cursory fashion and say goodbye, we stood there and talked, sometimes for an extended period of time, with them about God, the church, and the community of faith at St. Paul's and what might be waiting for them there if they chose to join us. Isn't that what the church is supposed to be about? Meeting people where they are and inviting them into the faith? What is lawful on Ash Wednesday -- to make it difficult for people to reach the church or to reach out to them?

I hope that the critics of Ashes to Go might be willing to just give it a try one year and see what happens. The great thing about Ashes to Go is that if you do it, you do it on your own terms. Do you think people should recite at least part of Psalm 51 for it to really be Ash Wednesday? Then include that in the brief liturgy you offer to people. Or, decide to do the whole Ash Wednesday service at a non-typical time in a location more convenient to working people in your area. Take ashes to people in the hospital and in nursing homes and do an abbreviated version of the liturgy with them. Whatever you do and however you do it, the intention is to bring the church to people where they are, to represent symbolically the truth that although it is true that we must make the choice to step toward God in faith, God also is already stepping out to meet us wherever we are. I can think of no more sacred and holy task than to serve as a symbol of that for the world.