Of ultimate importance ... part 2

This question of ultimate importance hit home for us in the last 72 hours. For those of you who know I serve in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, you may have heard about the tragic shooting which occurred in one of our parishes last Thursday. If not, you can read about it here.

I heard about this just before the opening of our diocesan convention. My oldest daughter, who served as youth delegate from our county, was out picking up breakfast for us when I heard the news. I was glad I had the chance to talk with her when she returned to our hotel room and break the news to her before convention opened.

When convention opened and the news was announced that the parish administrator and co-rector had both been shot, we were stunned. Brenda Brewington, parish administrator, was pronounced dead at the scene. Co-rector Mary-Marguerite Kohn+ was flown to Baltimore Shock Trauma and kept alive on life support so that organ donations could be arranged. Douglas Jones, the homeless man who perpetrated this act of violence, was found dead in the woods near the church of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

This was the first time my daughter had confronted a senseless, violent death. Given that a priest was dead, and her mom is a priest, this was hard to process and understand. She was very teary at the opening of convention. But we gathered together and other people at our table offered her comfort and consolation. She had a safe place to process this horrible news. And she was surrounded by people of faith who showed her how Christians cope with tragedy:

• We cried together and had conversation
• We offered forgiveness to the gunman
• We prayed the litany at the time of death for Mary-Marguerite+
• We offered Eucharist in thanksgiving for all who minister in Christ's name
• Two parishes offered their churches to the family of the gunman for his funeral
• We recommitted ourselves to helping the most vulnerable in our communities

So where did my daughter learn to cope with senseless tragedy? Where did she hear about the injustice of a society where the mentally ill have less access to treatment than they do to guns? Where did she hear about people recommitting themselves to serve Christ? Where did she hear an affirmation of life? She heard this surrounded by her Church. She didn't learn this on the playing field.

Enough said.

Remember you are dust

Ash Wednesday was this week which marks the first day of Lent. When I was a kid, I really didn't get the whole Lent thing. There was always the thing about giving something up for Lent. I tried giving up homework, but that didn't get me very far.

When I was really young, we were LCA (Lutheran Church in America) and we didn't do this kind of stuff on Ash Wednesday. Oh sure, we changed all the pulpit hangings to purple, but that was about it as far as I remember. Getting smudged with ashes wasn't part of it. When I started going to the Episcopal Church in 1975, we definitely did the ash smudging thing and I thought it was interesting, but I still didn't really get into the whole feeling of Lent.

I think it all hit home for me in 2004 - the year I turned 40. Not that turning 40 made me suddenly get all penitential or anything. It was Ash Wednesday in 2004 when I opened up my e-mail in the morning to the news that a childhood friend had died. She was the daughter of the pastor who baptized my younger sister ... and she was 40 too. She died of a heart attack. I was shocked and the reality that a peer of mine had succumbed to what I thought of as an "age related" illness was sobering. It was in that moment I realized that I was going to start losing friends more to illnesses than accidents ... a moment of facing my own mortality.

Shortly after receiving this news, my father called with more bad news: my sister had been fired from her job. She'd had an incident which should have resulted in a notice to her personnel file, but instead she was fired. Her boss was looking for a reason to fire her, and one came up. My sister appealed it and we heard the appeals board was in favor of her reinstatement; however, at the last minute, the board had it's empowerment rescinded and the management upheld her dismissal. It was unjust.

Death and injustice crashed into me that Ash Wednesday morning and that's when I got it. We are not God and we will die ... period. Unjust things will happen to us in our lives. Jesus knew this: he was set up too. But in both cases, death and injustice, God gets the last word. It's a word of life and of righteousness.