How long, O God, how long?
Dear church,
I write this in the days after the deadly shooting of elementary school children in Uvalde, Texas. It is hard to know what to say in times like these, other than NOT ONE MORE. Only in this country do mass shootings happen so frequently. And due to the epidemic of white supremacy, people of color are often the targets of this violence, as we have seen in the mass shootings in the past two weeks. On May 14, Black people were targeted in a grocery store in Buffalo, NY. On May 15, Taiwanese worshippers were targeted in their church in Orange County, CA. On May 24, third and fourth graders were gunned down in their classroom. Rachel weeps for her children because they are no more (Jeremiah 31:15). Some cry “peace, peace!” but there is no peace (Jeremiah 6:14).
How long, O God, how long?
I was in college in northeast Ohio ten years ago when elementary schoolers in Sandy Hook, Connecticut were murdered. A young woman I knew from the interfaith campus organization was from Sandy Hook, and she was at a terrible loss for how this could happen in the elementary school she went to, in her hometown, to families she grew up with. At the time, I remember thinking that this would be it, that there must be legislative action following the murder of these children, just little ones like those I taught in Sunday school at my church. But there wasn’t action. Legislators continued to be cowards driven by greed and power, even though kindergarteners had been killed. Kindergarteners. Now I see that the USA lost its soul, if we had one after all the atrocities at the hands of this country, when it did not act to protect schoolchildren.
How long, O God, how long?
There is a crisis in this country and it looks like gun violence. It looks like assault weapons being readily available to buy with no background checks or waiting periods or training requirements. It looks like toxic masculinity, as two of these tragedies I named above were carried out by 18-year-old young men. It looks like weaponized whiteness that threatens—and carries out—destruction against people of color. It looks like sending “thoughts and prayers” without following up with action to prevent the carnage from happening again. It looks like school children being taught how to behave in active shooter situations instead of lawmakers doing what is in their power to make those drills unnecessary. This crisis looks like two generations (my own included) of traumatized children and youth who grow up expecting that one day they will be part of a statistic, and being surprised when they make it through.
How long, O God, how long? How long will we, the people, stand for this?
Beloved ones, if we treasure the children in our congregation, let us take action to protect them. It is not someone else’s problem, it is OUR problem. Any child that dies from gun violence, from poverty, from domestic violence, from abuse, from neglect, from malnourishment, from racist policing, from war—any one child is too many. As the choir recently sang, “there are no other people’s children.”
Here are some organizations to pay attention to for gun violence prevention.
Everytown for Gun Safety, everytown.org
Moms Demand Action, momsdemandaction.org
March for Our Lives, marchforourlives.com
The Baptist Peace Fellowship and the American Baptist Home Mission Society also have gun violence resources and advocacy information on their websites.
This world can be different, if only we make it so.
God have mercy.
With love,
Rev. Anita Peebles, pastor