Dear People of Christ Church,
Last night, I had the opportunity to attend a peace vigil at Medford City Hall in commemoration of the second anniversary of the Sandy Hook Shootings. It was organized by an interfaith group and spearheaded by Grace Church, where my husband is the rector. The vigil was held in the city council chambers, with a long row of empty seats at the head of the room with pictures of each of those killed. For more than ten minutes, children (mostly from Grace Church—kids I know) each took the mic one by one and read out the names of those who had been killed as someone at the lectern shared something about them—one was an avid soccer player, another loved horseback riding, one had moved to Newtown just two months earlier. My son Isaiah (7) took two names, anxiously awaiting his turn and trying to pronounce each syllable carefully.

80-100 of us were gathered—some kids, some parishioners from Grace and other congregations—and I’m sure that at some point in the evening we all teared up at least once. The apparent randomness of the violence—looking at those smiling faces, truly, it could have been one of my own children. I remember where I was when I heard about the shooting—I was in a van in Tanzania, on a pilgrimage/mission trip with Bishop Shaw and several other clergy and lay people from the diocese. Tom got a text from the diocese letting him know what happened, and we all prayed for a few minutes on the way. At that time, it seemed like there would be real energy for reform—that we would not permit our country to be a place where such things happened. And yet, and yet, one study lists 95 school shootings in the last two years (including both college and K-12 schools). That’s once a week. None has been “as bad” as Sandy Hook, but each one is too many.

Yesterday among all the dead, we prayed for Nancy Lanza, too. I imagine her heartbreak, too, in that moment before she was killed that she realized what was happening, remembered when her son was 6 or 7, the same age as those he killed. And of course the violence of Ferguson, Staten Island, and Cleveland were not far away. Sandy Hook six year old Noah Pozner could have been my son. Eric Garner could have been my father.

I heard a wonderful quote from Dorothy Day recently, which I can’t lay hands on to attribute exactly, but it’s something to the effect that we are called to love those in need as though they were Jesus. Not because they ought to act like Jesus, but simply because they are Jesus. That’s the trick—to see divinity in places that are foreign to us, to be willing to ask the Holy Spirit to intervene in the gaps between us.

I think some of what seems so hard about seeing Jesus in those who differ from us is that we need God’s grace to do it—we fool ourselves too often that we can do everything on our own, but in truth it’s more complicated than that. We need God’s grace all the time—to find Jesus in the nearest and the furthest.

As always, I’m short on answers and long on meandering questions. Where did you see Jesus this week? In those who are far or those who are near? In both? In neither? As our kids and I talked about on Sunday, what are you doing to prepare a way for Jesus this Christmas?

Blessings,
Sara+