Merciful God,

Hear our prayers in this hour for the victims of gun violence, the women, men, and children whose lives are shattered–even ended–by a bullet fired from a pistol or a rifle, a shotgun or some semiautomatic weapon; a gun bought legally or acquired through criminal means; a gun fired by an enemy or a stranger, in plain sight or in hiding, accidentally or on purpose. In the injury and death that guns visit upon victims, O God, we pray for your comfort and strength.

Comfort we would seek, too, for the ones who escape, those victims who endure the terror and the trauma of gunfire and live to tell about it, many whose job it is to protect and to rescue others. In their troubled sleep and their shattered nerves; in their pained questioning; in their testimony, O God, be present, so that the rupture introduced by a gun may be fused and their life restored.

Finally, Compassionate One, we pray for those who have lost a friend, a co-worker, a parent, a spouse–any friend and any relative–to the violence of guns. Be near to them in their grief; guide the anger of loss to life-giving and life-restoring ends; overcome despair with hope and numbness with action, not just for those who grieve, but for all of us who lament yet one more outburst of gun terror, feeling helpless, feeling devastated, feeling afraid.

God, help us.

My nine year-old’s teacher talked about the shooting in Las Vegas to her students, because her sister in-law nearly took her family to that concert and spent hours on lock down in the hotel as it happened.

This prompted a car ride conversation later in the day about American mass shootings. It’s the first time my wife and I have discussed one of these incidents with her rather than whispering to one another about it while she’s in the next room. We were delicate. We don’t want her to fear for her safety at school, at the park, at church, so we left out specifics.

She’s smart, though. She’s done lock down drills at both schools she’s attended. She heard the reference to “Sandy Hook Elementary School” in the episode of On The Media I had on while cleaning the kitchen after dinner.

Yet she’s not afraid. She’s angry.

The uninformed anger of a child at a complex political issue most adults don’t fully understand is easily sentimentalized or dismissed. Still I note how outrageous it seems to a nine year-old that the law does not prevent American citizens from purchasing machine guns and that you’re not supposed to talk about changing those laws right after one of those citizens kills a bunch of people with them.

I’m noting her anger. I’m listening. The politics of guns in this country endangers her as much as any grown up, and I am certain she understands that perfectly clearly. And she’s pissed.

Good.

The first concert I ever attended was George Strait, with my friend Josh, at the McNichols arena in Denver. It seems a lifetime away, but I have been revisiting that concert and the larger season of my early adolescence the past several days. Last week I  heard a beautiful episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast called, “The King of Tears.” It’s all about how country songs are built on specificity and detail, like a “lipstick letter ‘cross the mirror,” a picture tacked to a wall and a letter “dated nineteen sixty-two.”

I was an avid consumer of early 90’s country music: Garth Brooks, Diamond Rio, Tricia Yearwood, Brooks And Dunn, Alan Jackson, Wynona Judd, and, of course, George Strait. I owned all those cd’s. I listened to the weekly country chart countdowns on the radio. I learned to line dance.

It was a short-lived phase. I can’t stomach country radio now. But there is a lot of non-radio country music in my library. Just this year I’ve spent an inordinate amount of earbud time with Caroline Spence, Angaleena Presley, and Jason Isbell.

I only ever went to two country concerts, both of them George Strait.

This morning’s breaking news about a mass shooting at a country music concert in Las Vegas takes that placid western nostalgia and turns in bloody.

God help us.

 

I have to preach this week on a theme. I don’t like preaching on themes. I like preaching on texts. I have a whole system for exegeting a text and for moving from exegesis to sermon that I have used almost exclusively since 2004. Give me a text, a notebook, a few days to prepare, and I’m comfortable enough.

It’s getting late in the week now, and I feel like I haven’t done the kind of sermon preparation I need to have done, because I haven’t run my process on a text. But yesterday I listened to John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats explain why, for a very long time, he didn’t play one of his best known songs, “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,” in live shows, because it was recorded in an alternate tuning that he hadn’t preserved. Basically, an alternate tuning forces a musician to not know what they’re doing. Darnielle says,

“There’s always great advantages to knowing what you’re doing, but if I take a little of control away from you, I take a little something away and force you to think on your feet, you may resent it, you may enjoy the process less, but you will probably find stuff you weren’t going to find otherwise.”

If you’re proficient at preparing sermons (or lesson plans, or meeting agendas) with a hard-won process that works for you, maybe going without that process once in awhile is beneficial. Thinking of it this way, some of my most gratifying preaching experiences resulted from preparation deprived of my precious process.

Maybe this is how we create things that, like the best ever death metal band out of Denton, will in time both outpace and outlive us.

The parents of the students I work with are asked to contribute to the cost of the church’s ministry with their teenagers multiple times during the year, and I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t a better way.

Like most churches, ours conducts a stewardship drive in the fall to raise pledges toward next year’s operating budget. Youth ministry staffing and youth ministry program expenditures are in that budget.

Then we conduct fundraisers toward the costs of mission trips. The entire congregation is invited to participate in this, of course, but the backbone of involvement is the families of students. What parents give at a pancake breakfast or bake sale is in addition to the “suggested contribution” toward the trip’s costs we’ve already asked them to give.

We also suggest a parent contribution toward the cost of retreats.

There is money in the operating budget for mission trips and retreats. Parents support that operating budget with their pledges and offerings. But then we also ask them to contribute toward those events’ per-person costs and to kick in for fundraisers.

The dominant feeling I have about this is gratitude for the faithfulness and generosity of church folk when it comes to supporting ministry with teenagers. Many, many of those givers are not themselves parents of students, and the ones who are know full well they are supporting more than just their own kids. I think that’s marvelous.

But I’m also curious if it’s the norm, this multiplication of asks from parents. Does your youth ministry do this, too? Do you plan on parent contributions toward things like mission trips and retreats?

I put the registration link on the website three months before the event. I sent that link out on a flyer, and then I included it in the weekly e-newsletter a half a dozen times. It was plastered across the mailing we mailed a month out. And yet the week prior multiple people say they’re not coming because they don’t know what it is.

Note: they know THAT it is. They don’t know WHAT it is.

Information is not the same thing as interpretation.

A few descriptors, a couple of concrete details about the process–it doesn’t take much more than this to create a sense of expectation, which we really should do, because, absent ours, people provide their own, and that one’s not very good (a student asked me if he was required to wear a suit to the church retreat).

Retreat. Lock-in. Mission Trip. Youth Group. Worship. You know what these things are, and so do the students who are already there. Unless you can show what they are to  people who aren’t already there, though, those people will keep finding reasons to stay away.

They have a bunch already.

So much feels like provocation.

The slammed door.

The mutter.

Silence.

When I answer provocation, I am most of the time playing to a crowd I can’t see. They’re watching, I know, arms folded, eyebrows raised: “Are you going to stand for that?”

“Yes” is an option, though it almost never feels like one.

Provocation wants to move you. You still get to choose when and how you move, though.

The spider webs at the camp where we held our Confirmation retreat were something to behold. At night you saw them stretched from the tops of outdoor lights to the pillars on which the lights were mounted, two, three, even four of them, inches away from each other, and each one occupied by a massive host. The gnats drawn to the light kept the webs twittering constantly.

They were fascinating. Though there was a time when such a sight would have repulsed me and filled me with terror. You grow out of that, maybe.

What else can I grow out of?

The Killers haven’t released an album since 2012, but they haven’t released a Killers album since Hot Fuss, the 2004 debut that nearly everyone loves. I can’t say if Wonderful Wonderful reaches those heights (reviews so far are tepid), but I do love that there’s a song on there about the Mike Tyson and Buster Douglas fight.

The only other new release that catches my attention this week is Phoebe Bridgers’ Stranger in the Alps. I’ve not heard her sing a solitary note before today, but Album of The Year says she’s on Dead Oceans, the same label behind Destroyer, The Tallest Man on Earth, and Japanese Breakfast, all artists who make rich, atmospheric, poetic music. It only took listening to the first two songs on the album to click “Add To Library.”

Happy Friday!

The students I work with, like the students you work with, are committed to many valuable things. In addition to their families and their schoolwork, they have dance rehearsal, lacrosse practice, and, of course, church. They also are devoted friends to their peers.

Church is not the most elevated activity in their lives. It’s not even the most important extra-family, extra-curricular activity.  I’ve made my peace with that. First I stopped insisting that church should trump soccer and band out loud, and then I stopped complaining that it didn’t to my colleagues and thinking that it should to myself. I started to say that church should be the thing that backs down.

So now when parents ask me, “How important is the Confirmation retreat?” because Arthur has Friday night football, my answer is that it’s important for sure. But it’s not required. How could it be required? What will the church take away if Arthur doesn’t come? Football will bench him for skipping. Church won’t.

So Arthur comes on Saturday morning, driven three pre-dawn hours by his dad. He joins 17 of his peers there. That’s only about half the Confirmation class, but nonetheless it’s 18 8th graders, many completely unknown to one another, voluntarily sequestering themselves at a church camp for an entire September weekend. That feels pretty huge.

Maybe when the church backs down teenagers step up.