Pastor Adam Parker

My heart is very heavy. I’m referring, of course, to the shooting that took place at The Covenant School in Nashville, TN yesterday (March 27th). A 28 year old former student entered the school and fatally wounded three 9 year-olds, a custodian, a substitute, and the headmistress of the school before responding offers killed the attacker.

The church to which the school is connected is a PCA congregation. The current Senior pastor for the congregation was in a presbytery meeting at the time of the shooting with some friends of mine. Little did he know at the time that his own daughter was among the victims. She was nine years old. As a pastor myself with a nine year old attending a Christian school, it is hard not to empathize with the pain of this man, his family, and his church. One of my close pastoral friends formerly served at Covenant Presbyterian Church years ago and knows many of the families there. In fact, some families with children at The Covenant School attend my friend’s church. We may be all the way in Portland, but I feel as if I, and those I love were attacked today.

What do we do with such horrible events? I confess, in part, I am tempted to cope by being angry: angry with the shooter. I am tempted to feel desperate: desperate to know what could possibly motivate her to take the lives us such little ones. I want explanations and narratives, and I want to know who to blame. In time, we will likely learn more about the shooter and what took place in her life to potentially motivate such drastic and horrible wickedness. But I have also discovered, after years of school shootings, that ultimately there is nothing we can learn about the shooter that would repair what happened or satisfy the emptiness that these lost children will leave behind. None of it can be undone.

No doubt, human scrutiny is coming. Scrutiny for the shooter’s parents is coming. Scrutiny for Covenant Presbyterian Church is probably coming. It seems likely that those looking for explanations will scrutinize the previous sermons preached at Covenant Church, looking for something that can explain these events. Some will scrutinize the shooter’s social media. Indeed some are making much of the shooter’s struggles with transgender identity. I would discourage any of us from adopting simplistic narratives about how a person falls into such deep and horrible darkness. It is too horrible to have a reasonable, tidy, or sensible explanation of these things; and besides, sin truly makes no sense, anyway. It made no sense when Adam and Eve did it; it makes no sense each time we do it; and it certainly does not make sense in this situation.

What do we do, then, in moments like this? We put our theology into action, but don’t give theological lectures. Now is not the time. We don’t jump to our political positions on this and read this heartbreak through the lens of public policy. Instead, we think of the human beings made in the image of God whose lives were shattered today. We think of the people – the adults and the little ones. We pray. We go to the Lord in prayer. In fact, even in my anger, I feel the impulse to pray for the shooter’s parents. They sent their daughter to this Christian school hopeful that the gospel would be taught, that the Christian worldview would be expounded. I have to think they sent her to that school in the hope that the gospel would be something she would grow to treasure.

We must be wise enough not to invent overly simplistic explanations that satisfy our own craving for order and meaning. We should leave those to the Lord. All of this is darkness. We can’t see. We can’t understand. We can’t know. We grasp for understanding, and come up empty. We can relate to the Psalmist, and would be wise to remember his hope:

    If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,

        and the light about me be night,”

    even the darkness is not dark to you;

        the night is bright as the day,

        for darkness is as light with you. (Psalm 139:11-12)

“The darkness is not dark to you.” These things belong to the Lord. He knows what we can only guess at. What should we do, then? For the moment, we weep with those who weep. We mourn. We pray. We lift up hurting families. We pray for the families of those whose lives were lost. We pray for the children who lost their friends and who may now be afraid to go to school again in the future. We pray for the family of the shooter; they sent their daughter to a Christian school; it may well be that they are experiencing a broken-heartedness deeper than we may ever know.

We mourn, but the thing that makes us weird as Christians is that we mourn, but we don’t mourn hopelessly.

I said earlier that none of this can be undone. And yet there is a sense in which we know it actually will be undone. Pastors should always be sparing in their use of Lord of the Rings quotes, and yet I cannot help but think of one of my favorite passages from the Return of the King:

“Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?”

“A great Shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count.”

We yearn for the day when the shadow departs. And it will depart. We know, because God himself has told us.

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. (Revelation 21:4)

No more pain. No more tears. But not yet. Until that day, we cling to Jesus’ words, “Surely I am coming soon” (Rev. 22:20) and we respond, “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! Make all the pain and death and everything sad come untrue.”