It’s been a while, but I finally got my Maundy Thursday sermon added. Looking back at this sermon, I don’t know if I got it right or not. You’ll remember that April 2 was Maundy Thursday, but was also the day of the shootings in Garissa, Kenya. I spent the day holed up in a coffee shop working on this sermon, fairly oblivious to the events going on in a country I love dearly. As I wound down my sermon-writing, I saw the Facebook posts hinting at the terror, and I got some texts from close friends checking on my spirit.
My response? “I can’t think about this now…I’m in sermon-writing mode.”
And yet, as I re-read my sermon manuscript, I wonder if I helped anything by reinforcing the insulation that keeps us from wrestling with the tough stuff like shootings at universities and riots and unspeakable pain and tragedy. Could I have changed directions to include the tragedy in Kenya in my sermon? Is there something about Maundy Thursday and Jesus giving the disciples a new commandment that speaks to our response to these kinds of events?
It occurred to me that very frequently these tragic events happen right during times when Christians are focused on telling the central stories of our faith. And I remembered in my own life when tragedies coincided with these high holy seasons. The Sandy Hook Elementary shooting was during the season of Advent. In my first year of college, my roommate spent Holy Week in a psych ward and was released on Good Friday. I remember a Christmas Day in Kenya spent listening to the short-wave radio as missionaries evacuated due to tribal unrest. I very clearly remember wrestling with the question, “how do I make sense of these events in light of this season in the church year?” or “how do I make sense of this story of faith in light of these events in life?”
There’s no easy answer.
So I don’t know if I got it right with this sermon…