“Comfort, O comfort my people,
Says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her...”
Friends, we all meet this day with heavy hearts over the events of last week. Five Dallas police officers, trying to protect peaceful demonstrators, were senselessly killed and seven others wounded, as well as civilians.
Two men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, were killed at the hands of police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota. It has been a week of sadness, confusion and anger as we grapple with violence and racial divisions that have a long and painful history in our nation.
It is so hard to understand one another. It is so hard to walk in another’s shoes. But that is what we must do. We must have compassion for Black and Hispanic communities who are losing their sons and daughters. We must have compassion for our police officers who are trying to do their jobs in difficult and confusing times.
Painting by Pastor Susan Trowbridge
What our nation needs right now is comfort and compassion. We need to hold one another tenderly and grieve together. There is a painting that Pastor Susan Trowbridge created as a response to the massacre of church members a year ago at Emanuel A.M.E. in Charleston, SC. It is her painted prayer and it depicts an African American woman holding the world gently in her hands.
I imagine God holding us like that, comforting us in our shock and grief. And I call the Church to hold all of our communities like that—black, white, Hispanic, urban, suburban, rural—comforting the people of our communities as we all grapple together with this violence. Friends let us speak tenderly to one another and cry to one another and to God in prayer, and try to understand.
banner photo courtesy Moyan Brenn / CC