Tag Archives: Violence

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What a week. Every day another story of violence around the globe and close to home. And Sunday’s coming. How to respond in worship when we are feeling gutted, threatened, horrified, ravaged by the world, pushed beyond any rational response in measured tones? Remember our “rage belongs before God–not in the reflectively managed and manicured form of a confession, but as a pre-reflective outburst from the depths of the soul. This is no mere cathartic discharge of pent up aggression before the Almighty who ought to care. Much more significantly, by placing unattended rage before God we place both our unjust enemy and our own vengeful self face to face with a God who loves and does justice.” – Miroslav Volf. Click above for more from W. David O. Taylor’s blog, including a Prayer of Penitence excerpted from a Liturgy of Reconciliation and Restoration, produced by the Church of England.

It’s a lovely prayer, but much further down the spectrum toward a “reflectively managed and manicured… confession” than most people will walk in ready for. In fact, I think many of us are disoriented and overwhelmed. The world persists in being worse than we were prepared for. We need an opportunity to place that “unattended rage [despair, fear, etc.]before God.” Even if it’s something as simple as giving people a few quiet minutes of access to pen and paper to pour out their guts. What phrases keep running through your head? What images? What do you want to yell from the rafters? What do you want to spray paint on a wall? What do you need God to hear? What are you afraid God will know you are thinking? Get it down. Get it out. Have it out. Tack it face-down to a temporary wailing wall. This bit is between you and God. No one else will look at these, so don’t censor yourself. We can know that those pages will be all over the map and still bring them together before God to transition into corporate lament.

And what might that kind of corporate lament sound like this week? Click below for a powerful example which ends “We need new songs whispered into our ears, new rhythms to pound in our chests, so that we may join in the chorus of new life. God of love–you open our eyes to the suffering all around us. AND WE WILL SEE God of justice–you open our ears to those who cry out in pain. AND WE WILL HEAR God of healing–you open our hearts to expose our own pain and the pain of the world. AND WE WILL BEAR IT TOGETHER” – Ian Simkins.

After the lament we are prepared to recognize and repent of our own parts in the disorder of the world with that reflective prayer of confession. Let the music reflect this progression as well. Dwell on the stages of lament and avoid the temptation to rush to that “but it’s all good with Jesus” tune you like to end on. We can end declaring we have a hope and a future, but this service isn’t about cheering ourselves up.

Also this week, the sending is key. We cannot simply leave comforted or emotionally spent and numbed, content with our own individual consolation or private commitments to choose love over hate in the abstract, having made our peace with the world as it is. We hope to leave renewed, more sensitive than ever, with resolve, and charged to do the work of making peace with one another. In the words of Erin Wathen, “When hate gets this loud and violent, we are called beyond love. We are called to active compassion; prophetic speech; deep listening; transformative engagement”

 

Advent Week 2: Waiting for Peace

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ADVT02 “Peace” by Stushie

Another tough week. A week of violence and revelations of violence and of just how deep the violence of the so-called good people of the world runs.

Thankfully the same scripture that instructs us to seek and receive peace, which seems so far removed from our world right now, also discourages us from faking it, from pretending the wounds aren’t so bad and spouting nonsense about peace when there is no peace. We of all people should trust neither in political promises of security nor in our innate collective goodness to one another to eventually win out. The kind of peace we can drum up ourselves doesn’t require waiting.  It tends toward immediate gratification (taking whatever pacifies our desires)  or mollification (caving in to other’s illegitimate demands) or diversion – gorging our senses to overwhelm our sensitivity to one another’s needs, eating to the point where we can no longer imagine starvation, turning up our own personal soundtracks so we don’t hear the suffering of others, looking at anything as long as it is away.

The sense of shalom peace that courses throughout the words of Genesis and Jeremiah and Jesus entails relational wholeness. None of us can achieve that kind of peace alone. It has nothing to do with getting away from it all and everything to do with assuming rightful places within a righted all. It is a peace we receive from drawing near to a God who would suffer the violence of birth and death to be with us. It is a peace we seek for our cities and neighbors as we strive to do right by one another.

from “Here on Earth”

The old man living
In his rented room
Grows lonely as the night comes on
Especially in winter

And the boy shooting drugs
On the tenement roof
Is lonely whether or not
He has companions

Lovers lie sleeping
Side by side
A wilderness between them

And their unborn infant
Is already alone
So soon to be discarded
Even as he begins
Unfolding in the womb
Of his lonely mother

Because the scatterer
Has overtaken us
Betraying promises
Estranging lovers

Tearing us inwardly
And tearing us apart
One from another

And this is why
Those of us who are sated
Find it so easy to ignore
Those of us who are starving

And why we have been known
To torture one another
Why there are times
When we are far more cruel
Than the animals.

Nevertheless
Taken all together
Or taken one by one
We are the holiest
Of all earth’s creatures

For he who kindled
The fire of the sun
He who draws out the tender leaves
From the dark twigs of winter

He who has whittled
A cabin for the snail
Has also carved our names
In the palm of his hand

And he became a child
The better to be near us
Born in the wintertime
Born on a journey….

– by Anne Porter, from Living Things: Collected Poems (New Hampshire: Steerforth Press, 2006), p. 124.