Across the nation, United States flags are flying at half-staff, a solemn tribute in response to the devastating school shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. President Trump described it as “a senseless act of violence.” Pope Leo XIV urged,
Let us plead [to] God to stop the pandemic of arms large and small which infects our world.
Paige Bueckers, well-known UConn women’s basketball star and Hopkins, Minnesota resident, courageously added her perspective, calling for more robust gun legislation:
You hope that there’s stricter gun laws put in place so that parents don’t have to worry about sending their kids to school, people don’t have to worry about attending church and all these places are safe. It’s just really unfortunate that gun violence continues to be an issue, and there really is nothing being done about it. I’m just hoping and praying for a future where stricter laws are put in place, and you just pray for people in the world who are going through stuff like that, for the families involved.
In her Guest Essay for The New York Times (August 29, 2025), acclaimed novelist Anne Lamott shared her reflections in What I Told My Sunday School Students About Death:
Driving to church after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, I remembered a commentator saying that the measure of a nation is how many small coffins it allows. Of course, this explanation would not be useful to the younger ones in my class, two 9-year-old girls, or even to the teenagers, but it provided me with a hit of self-righteousness: We all know what the problem is. We allow people to own and use military-grade guns.
All the professional sports team from Minnesota issued statements but I thought that the best was from the Lynx coach, Cheryl Reeve, who expressed her sorrow and frustration:
It's such an indictment of our society, our lack of regard for life. There are things that we can do about it, and we don't, but for some reason as Americans we value something different. It's sickening. It's sad for the kids, it's sad for the kids that have to grow up like this. It's sad for the kids to walk through the door and not know what's going to happen.
Each school shooting stands as a stark rebuke, an indictment, of our society. As a nation, our measure falters if we count the small coffins we have permitted.
That image, small coffins being counted, has haunted me since first reading it.
In the aftermath of yet another tragic shooting, the nation grapples with questions that echo from church pews to legislative chambers. Communities gather, hands joined, spirits heavy, candles lit, searching for comfort and answers in the face of relentless sorrow. Clergy and counselors, teachers and neighbors, each try to make sense of the senseless, to offer some balm to wounds that never fully heal.
Yet amid the vigils and calls for change, it is clear that grief alone cannot suffice. The recurring nature of these events has bred a weary familiarity, one that threatens to dull our outrage and soften our resolve. With each new loss, the cycle—shock, mourning, debate, inaction—loops again, challenging our capacity for hope and solidarity.
In this fraught space, the church and its leaders are called not only to mourn, but also to speak and act. Their prophetic task becomes ever more urgent, asking what truth must be named, what comfort must be given, and what hope must be rekindled. The challenge is not merely to respond, but to insist, persistently, on the sacredness of every life and the possibility of transformation, even when the path forward seems obscured by despair.
The nation is again conducting debates about what to do about gun violence and gun control.
In such moments, we are reminded of voices who have shaped our understanding of faith and society. The death of Walter Brueggemann on June 5, 2025, a renowned scholar whose work illuminated the prophetic vocation of the church, arrived as another occasion for reflection. His words, circulated widely in the aftermath of this shooting, captured the very heart of what these tragedies demand from believers: the courage to move beyond illusions, the depth to mourn what is lost without denial, and the audacity to hope even in the grip of despair.
Tributes poured in from all manner of colleague. Quotes from his works also circulated and one that stands out is:
The prophetic tasks of the church are to tell the truth in a society that lives in illusion, grieve in a society that practices denial, and express hope in a society that lives in despair.
Typical of Brueggemann, it is a powerful quote and helpful as the church tries to find its voice in a charged political atmosphere and at a culturally toxic time.
It is in wrestling with these prophetic tasks that communities begin to question: Are we, as the people of faith, living up to this calling? Are we confronting hard truths, allowing grief its full weight, and daring to imagine a future transformed? The challenge reverberates not only from pulpits but also through editorial pages and academic forums, asking if the church has grown weary or silent in the face of recurring heartbreak.
Increasingly, the temptation is to look away, to flatten one tragedy into the next, to let grief become routine rather than revolutionary. Yet, the legacy of prophetic voices like Walter Brueggemann’s calls the church to renewed vigilance and engagement, to resist numbness and to reclaim its role as both witness and healer in a wounded world.
These prophetic tasks are not abstract ideals but living imperatives that must shape the church’s response to every crisis that challenges our collective conscience. In the aftermath of tragedy, it is tempting to retreat to ritual or platitude, yet the church is summoned to embody presence and protest—to stand beside the grieving, to speak uncomfortable truths, and to nurture hope that refuses to be extinguished.
To measure our faithfulness, we must move beyond self-congratulation and ask tough questions: Are our sermons honest, our prayers courageous, our actions tangible? Have we risked discomfort for the sake of justice, or have we grown content with words that do not compel change? The pulse of the prophetic—truth-telling, grieving, hoping—must beat not only in our liturgy but also in our witness to the world.
I recently revisited a Faith and Leadership website, a learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions, published by the Department of Leadership Education at Duke University Divinity School. The first article offered an alarming title and challenge, suggesting why we lag in our effort to fulfill the tasks. Aleta Payne, senior editor, writes:
Are we losing our ability to lament gun violence? When the memory of one shooting blends into another, we start to become numb to the grief and guilt of America’s crisis of gun violence. (Aleta Payne, Senior editor, Faith & Leadership)
Are we becoming numb and have we lost that urgent sense that we must speak the truth when others tell lies? Are we becoming numb to the grief of parents who carry those coffins, whether they are in Minneapolis or Gaza? Do we have a word of hope while so many feel so helpless and unseen, unheard?
Another article on that same Faith and Leadership website was written by Lisa L. Thompson: “Preaching and Teaching about Gun Violence.” She writes:
Guns and gun violence may not be addressed in Scripture, but human dignity, the sanctity of life and other matters that speak to the issue and resonate with Christians’ core beliefs are.
If the text, and our faith, values life -- the sanctity of life, the imago Dei in every individual -- then somehow that has to hit the ground today. If we say that gun violence leads to disregard for human life and dignity and does not recognize the image of God in every person because it takes life away so carelessly, then we begin talking about gun violence as people of faith.
Respecting human dignity, protecting the sanctity of life and recognizing the image of God in all people are core requirements of living by our Christian faith. For the prophetic tasks to be accomplished, they must be preached from our pulpits and lived out in meaningful ways when the pews empty and we go forth into the world.
And our efforts start in Sunday School with our kids and for our kids. Anne Lamott reflects what she experienced in Sunday School, saying:
I mostly listened to them as they worked. I mostly listen to my peers, too, when they express the same helplessness and sense of doom. I remind them of what we can do — sing, sit in silence, light candles, take walks, make art. We register voters, pick up litter, overeat, sigh a lot, carry our pleas to our lawmakers: Please, please stop this. Only you can.
It is rough and harsh out there, and it seems, to my worried and paranoid self, worse by the day. We are a violent species in a currently violent nation. How do we take on these systems and structures of death?
We have to show up. We want to stay isolated from the suffering, but maybe the answer is to draw close — to the crying woman whose husband was deported to Manila, to the person whose son drove off a cliff, to the little ones who are practicing how to stay alive. You can cry with them, get them a glass of water, move their car if it is going to be towed, take a sandwich to the grandma who hasn’t eaten all day.
After one school shooting, my beloved rabbi friend Sydney Mintz told me a story from the Midrash (a collection of stories about what the Hebrew Bible teaches). When Moses smashed the original tablets with the Ten Commandments and stomped off back to Mount Sinai, someone swept up all the shards. They were eventually added to the ark alongside the replacement copy of the commandments.
We drag around our brokenness in the same container as our holiness.
As a nation, we are sadly being measured by the number of small coffins we allow. As a church, we are being measured by the truth we speak, the grief we share and the hope we proclaim. We are all containers carrying around our brokenness and holiness, but it is from that holiness that we must fulfill the tasks of our prophetic call to faithfulness and action.
Blessings to all.