Pray. Talk. Act.

While I know I’m not the only mom who has ever received texts like these in the 30 years since school shootings have become a regular part of our national existence, I imagine I’m among a smaller group who has received them twice, a year apart from each other. The first was when a Freshman shot a Senior in the middle of a crowded hallway at Ingraham High School in early November last year. The second came to me yesterday from UNLV where my daughter swims and studies.

Once the thought of “Oh God, not again” passes, the automatic emails and posts to FB go out so grandparents and extended family can know your kid is safe before they hear the news and start calling in a panic. It’s not much, but at least you feel like you’re doing something.

Both times, the texts start in the family group chat, where the five of us all get our chance send love, ask basic questions, and offer support while we start tuning into the news and following police scanners because now that you know your worst fear is assuaged, the next tier of fear for their friends, teachers, and coaches settles in, and you wait for word of how bad it’s going to get.

Both the shooting at Ingraham and UNLV were resolved in about 2 hours, meaning we got word that the danger was over. However it’s not at all over. Classrooms are cleared room by room, with traumatized students treated as both victims and possible suspects, so they are searched and marched with their hands raised until they are fully identified. Then they are taken to some second area where they can be tracked and parents called. This process takes HOURS. With my son, we got his first text before 10am, but he wasn’t home until close to 6pm and the school is two blocks from our house.

It’s those hours after where the full impact of what has happened hits you. You sit at your desk and cry because you know your baby is OK but another parent or family out there didn’t get those texts and your heart is devastated for them. For me, I offered up prayers of gratitude that our family had made it through this terror twice, but I couldn’t help wondering if the odds would catch up to us someday.

This time it was harder than last time. The biggest reason is that I haven’t been able to hug my daughter yet. There’s still a week left of the semester and a swim meet to attend, so she isn’t due home until a few days before Christmas. My brain knows she’s fine, but my Mama Heart can’t fully accept it yet because your baby isn’t safe until you’ve put your body between them and danger. It’s just instinct and instinct doesn’t care about the news or texts or police press conferences assuring you the killer is down. Instinct wants them at your side where you can stare down whatever in the universe has dared to threaten your baby.

That is the perverted helplessness that only happens with gun violence. The campus safety alert that went out to the students at UNLV yesterday had three words: Run. Hide. Fight. That’s the order. First run. If you can’t do that, hide. If the shooter finds you, fight, because you’ve got nothing left to lose at that point. There is supposedly research behind that advice but as I sit the day after, the horror of that truth is overwhelming.

This is the second Advent in a row where I have walked with my child, family, and school community through gun violence and death. Advent is the time of the Christian calendar where we meditate on our God of the Now and Not Yet. Of our God who is both Parent and Child. Of our God who stays with us in our times of trauma while whispering quiet reminders of the time Love defeated Death. As a pastor, I cherish this annual reminder that we wait on peace that has already come and I grieve how many of my fellow humans have failed to accept the gift of grace and reconciliation, preferring to follow the lure of evil. I know that is a loaded word in so many ways, but truly what other word describes someone who destroys someone else’s life and brings trauma to thousands of others?

There is no good here. No pithy words of wisdom I can offer. Even renewed (and necessary) calls for gun control feel like screams in the wind to me today. The only solid thing I can bear witness to is the profound comfort I’ve felt from family, friends, and other UNLV parents. God blesses us with community exactly for times like this. I’ve had people praying for me and my family. I’ve had texts and phone calls from so many folks who are thinking of Erika today. And I’m also thinking of all the high school students in Seattle, including my son, who marched to the school district offices two days after the shooting at Ingraham demanding more mental health providers from diverse backgrounds at every school to help students manage stress and conflict in non-violent ways, which the district is starting to provide.

It is watching how the kids respond in the time after these events that has given me the most hope. They strive to make their trauma count for something. Perhaps we need a second-round of key words texted out to all of us. Three words that also reflect what Jesus did when he walked among us: Pray. Talk. Act.

We pray. We pray in gratitude for lives not taken. We pray for comfort and strength for the families who were not so lucky. We pray for a better way. We pray for change.

We talk. We talk about our fears and our gratitude. We talk to help our children process their trauma. We talk to other parents, teachers, coaches, and friends whose hearts stayed clenched through the day. We talk to our government and its representatives as we plead for ways to end this madness.

We act. We march or write or call. We hug and cry and soothe. We hold hands in resolve that one day, with God’s help, we will learn to live without violence and cease, as a culture, to worship guns.

Run. Hide. Fight. That is nightmare. Pray. Talk. Act. That is the hope.

Real Friends

A few years ago, a dear friend of mine who lives in the UK was passing through customs at SeaTac airport on her way to spend a couple weeks visiting me and another mutual friend. As the 20-something TSA agent grilled her about why she was coming into the US and who she intended to see, he asked, “And how did you meet Jeny?”

Her answer? “Have you ever heard of a show called The West Wing?”

I first met Pam through a West Wing fan website in 1999. The internet was new to all of us back then, but I was quite taken with this “love letter to American Politics” and wanted to connect with others who loved it as much as I did. After episodes aired, I went to the message boards to chat with others about the show and found myself talking with fans from across the US and around the world. Through that show, I found a group of friends I still keep it contact with today.

Right now, staff and elders at Northminster are working hard on creating a hybrid form of worship for when we return to our church sanctuary. Many of you may be asking why we are investing time, energy, and resources into ensuring our weekly Sunday worship will remain accessible on-line. My friend Pam is one of the reasons I feel so passionate about hybrid worship. 

In the year and a half since we were forced to cobble together an on-line worship space due to Covid-19 shutdown orders, we have gained folks who had never joined us in our physical sanctuary, but found us to be a peaceful and hopeful way to worship during a time of national trauma. They have been with us almost every week for over a year. Yet most of our pre-Covid congregation doesn’t know them because to do that requires two things: 

1) Noticing they are there.

2) Seeing their relationship with our congregation as real.

These new-to-us folks have offered prayers in the Chat, written their wishes of peace, watched after our YouTube channel, and mailed in offerings to our church and missions. They have sent emails to pastoral staff and expressed a desire to be connected to us, but from a place that is not Loyal Heights, Seattle, Washington. Still, they have come to regard Northminster as somewhere they find hope. 

What hybrid church offers us is a way for those who find entering our sanctuary to be a barrier for many reasons including, distance, bodily limitations, spiritual trauma and abuse, or illness, to still experience Northminster as their community of faith. What we have learned from this “Church in the time of Zoom” is that our spiritual connection and worship practice can be facilitated across the internet because for the past 18 months, that has been the only way we could do it. 

The first time I met Pam face to face, we had been friends for over 10 years. We have continued to stay connected over Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, email, and Zoom. My kids love her visits because she is hilarious and everyone adores her accent. She has become good friends with someone I worked with at Pacific Science Center and they have cultivated a beautiful and caring friendship of their own, and I am thrilled to have introduced them. 

In the two decades since The West Wing aired, my on-line friends group has continued to grow. A few times I’ve traveld to other parts of the country to meet some of them and they have come to see me. Mostly, though, we share our lives through the computer and not once has that meant we did not share real love, caring, and connection. We have gathered on-line and in-person to mark birthdays, weddings, births, and funerals. We have supported each other emotionally and sometimes financially. There is nothing virtual about them; they are my true friends. 

Expanding our sense of community to include those who worship with us on-line will take imagination and will be a paradigm shift for many, yet a gift of our imposed isolation is what we once would have thought impossible has become real. Our world has been made smaller as our church community has been made bigger, and that is a future we can all celebrate together.

A Prayer for Mask Wearing

Written by Rev. Richard Bott

Creator,
as I prepare to go into the world,
help me to see the sacrament
in the wearing of this cloth –
let it be “an outward sign
of an inward grace” –
a tangible and visible way
of living love for my neighbours,
as I love myself.
Christ,
since my lips will be covered,
uncover my heart,
that people would see my smile
in the crinkles around my eyes.
Since my voice may be muffled,
help me to speak clearly,
not only with my words,
but with my actions.
Holy Spirit,
as the elastic touches my ears,
remind me to listen carefully –
and full of care –
to all those I meet.
May this simple piece of cloth
be shield and banner,
and each breath that it holds,
be filled with your love.
In your Name
and in that love,
I pray.
May it be so.

Theology on Tap for June!

June is Pride Month, and our two Theology on Tap discussions this month will focus on issues of Queer/Straight culture and what role the church and Christianity plays in both. You may be asking why we would be focusing on these issues when we are finding ourselves and our communities deep in the midst of protests and the hard work of confronting systemic racism. The answer lies in the both/and of  racism and homophobia.

As a congregation, we have done some work around issues of race, particularly around mass incarceration and criminal justice. But Northminster is also a church that is predominately white, and our two Black congregants are under 18. As we engage in discussions of whiteness and its legacy at Northminster, we are doing so without having many “melanated voices” of varying age and experiences to engage with.

However, our congregation does have a several Queer persons of diverse generations. I pause to note that I use the term Queer not as a pejorative, which I know a lot of us grew up understanding it to be. In modern context, Queer is a form of collectively speaking of sexual, gender, and romantic orientations are not Straight/Cisgender/Monogamous. It is precisely because we have Queer persons on our pastoral staff, on our session, and in our worship each week that exploring issues of Queer and Straight culture can happen in dialogue within our community, which not only helps us to foster our growth, this same growth process can help us inform our conversations on whiteness and racial disparity.

It is also true that the Queer people in our midst may not want to be a part of this dialogue because they feel unsafe doing so or have because they believe we have not yet done enough work in this area to make these discussions fruitful for them. That is another way that these issue of race and sex overlap: often Black people don’t want to dialogue with white people about racism until they feel you have done the basic work of understanding race on your own. Our hope here is to encourage that internal work in both areas.

Theology on Tap continues to be a place of honest dialogue of theological issues in a pop culture context, which means our focus is on material and examples that are familiar to Gen X, Millennial’s, and Gen Z, HOWEVER, that does not mean older generations are not welcome or cannot participate in the dialogue. In fact, we hope you will. What it does mean is that some of the expectations you have about how these topics are discussed may be in ways that are unfamiliar or uncomfortable. Please remember that true growth usually happens when we are willing to be uncomfortable for a while. 

Our June 10th discussion will be on Marriage Culture and our June 24th will be on what it means to be a “Safe Space” Community. So please pour a glass of your favorite beverage and join us on Zoom at 8pm on June 10 and 24! Zoom links will be in each week’s What’s Happening, which is posted to our web page, Facebook page, and our Twitter feed.