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I have thought a great deal about what to say about the tragic, heartbreaking, senseless and meaningless violence in South Carolina.  With considerable justification, many have returned, as we have so many times in the past to the unresolved issues of race and race and economic justice that seem to plague and haunt our country.  Try as I might, the paradigm of race and class seems both intellectually and spiritually inadequate to wrestle with this moment.  Instead, I find my thoughts returning to the mysteries of my faith, a faith staggered by my mother’s tortured death of cancer, at points my own failures, and the tragedies of history.  I ask myself a very basic question, “Where was God?”  The God that claims, in the Christian tradition to love us so intimately as to know the number of the hairs on our heads, the God who walks so intimately in the midst of creation that he knows when a sparrow falls, that God in whom “there is no darkness”; where was God and where was God’s grace?

     I begin with the admission that there are no sure answers to these questions and their application to this moment.  There are only the stories of the Scriptures and their interpretation, the incomplete knowledge gained from study, and the certainly incomplete wisdom of having lived only sixty years, walk with God and watching close up and at a distance the lives of others.  There is that little that I know and that fir which I hope, which will hopefully sustain me, the grieving families, and a nation in shocked horror.

     I know that God in the Scriptures commands us to welcome the stranger and to provide hospitality, and this collection of saints did just that.  They welcomed him, offered him the example, warmth, and nurture of prayer and study. And he slaughtered them.   My knowledge ends there; it is also there that my hope begins.  My hope begins with God’s will, God’s grace, and other questions we must ask ourselves.

     My hope lies in the fact that God does not lie; that God’s claim of eternal presence and love is the bedrock truth of all creation.  It is a love expressed in the world’s major religions; I have seen that love and grace manifest in my life and in the lives of others, some close and some distant.  There have been Red Seas parted in my life, and on more than one occasion, I have been witness to and experienced resurrection on this side of the grave.  I’m sure my brothers and sisters of other faiths and traditions can say the same.  At the same time, God respects human freedom, the freedom that enables us to choose the self-serving, the short sighted, the evil.  There is the freedom in creation that allows cells to multiply and become cancer, for a tsunami, an earthquake, or a hurricane to take thousands of lives.  There is the freedom in God’s created order for a mind to become diseased and for hatred to become such a malignancy that innocent lives are taken. In short, there are no perfect shields from pain, tragedy, and suffering.

     But my hope also lies in the fact this this was not God’s will, and that at the moment when this insane young man pulled a gun and began to fire, there was no horror greater, no grief deeper, no heart more broken than God’s.  But, says the reasonable mind, why did God not stop it?  Why did his friend, knowing the insanity manifest in his behavior, steal the gun and then in some misguided and pathological loyalty, return the gun to him?  Where were his parents or other friends who might have intervened?  There is much blood on human hands here.

     My hope rests on the faith that while God did not will this evil for some good end, God will, in the end, use this awful moment to some good end that is part of God’s redemptive plan for all of creation and for all of humanity.  It has been my experience that we understand life more in the “rear view mirror” than looking through the wind shield.  It is my experience that we must grieve to a depth where grief threatens to consume us, we must suffer heart ache that seems as if it will stop our hearts from beating, and then we must survive, in order for wisdom, and a hope, and the beginnings of healing to appear.  Sometimes, the miracle is that we learn to live with the pain and simply continue to live.  “What, again,” says the reasonable mind, “Of God’s grace?”

     But again, I have no sure answers save this, it could have been worse.  Sometimes God’s grace is manifest in the fact that more lives aren’t lost, that in the devastation wrought by nature or one insane man, people survived that otherwise might not have.  Perhaps, there were those who planned to attend that Bible Study and chose, for some unknown reason to do something else and were thus spared.  Again, grace is most often and easily seen in the “rear view mirror.”  These remain, however, the questions we must ask ourselves, not God.

     Why have we turned the idea of having a “right” to own guns into, in the words of Larry Churchill, a political “trump” that feeds an “individual and private notion of self.”  Calling gun control a “right,” renders further probing, moral discourse, and analysis moot.   In particular, in our discussion about the right to own guns, we have so focused on the “my” and the “me” that we have lost sight of the notion of community and the obligation to sacrifice cherished autonomy and freedom for the good of the whole.  Is our right to own guns so unassailable that we lose the rich history and discourse around the individual and the community?

     But in the end, those are questions of politics, law, and philosophy.  I return to the awful truth that an insane young man walked into sacred space and with no remorse, wantonly ended the lives of people who sought no more than to have a sense of God’s power and presence in their lives.  He pulled the trigger and took their lives, but he did not win, and here I return to my hope.  He will go to jail, we will continue to pray and worship, and we will continue to look for measures large and small of God’s love, power, and grace.  We will cry this night together with the families of the victims for whom this night and many nights to come will be long and filled with tears.  But we, and they, will find “joy in the morning.”  I return to my hope: we will find “joy in the morning.”