#Charleston :: Round-Up of Lutheran Voices & Resources

On June 18, 2015, ELCA Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton wrote:

“It has been a long season of disquiet in our country. From Ferguson to Baltimore, simmering racial tensions have boiled over into violence. But this … the fatal shooting of nine African Americans in a church is a stark, raw manifestation of the sin that is racism. The church was desecrated. The people of that congregation were desecrated. The aspiration voiced in the Pledge of Allegiance that we are “one nation under God” was desecrated.

Mother Emanuel AME’s pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, was a graduate of the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, as was the Rev. Daniel Simmons, associate pastor at Mother Emanuel. The suspected shooter is a member of an ELCA congregation. All of a sudden and for all of us, this is an intensely personal tragedy. One of our own is alleged to have shot and killed two who adopted us as their own.”

And so, for members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, this tragedy bears some complicated relationships to our tradition.

On June 19, 2015, ELCA Young Adults hosted a Twitter chat on faith, race, and justice with the hashtag #coloringfaith.  You can read through the Storify of this online conversation here:

For Sunday, June 28, 2015, Bishop Eaton has called for a Service of Prayer and Remembrance across the denomination.  Worship resources are provided here, and this is an excerpt of one of the prayers:

“Grant, O God, that your holy and life-giving Spirit may move every human heart; that the barriers dividing us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; and that, with our divisions healed, we might live in justice and peace; through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.”

The Bishop’s call to prayer and action concludes with the following words:

“Each of us and all of us need to examine ourselves, our church and our communities. We need to be honest about the reality of racism within us and around us. We need to talk and we need to listen, but we also need to act. No stereotype or racial slur is justified. Speak out against inequity. Look with newly opened eyes at the many subtle and overt ways that we and our communities see people of color as being of less worth. Above all pray – for insight, for forgiveness, for courage.
Kyrie Eleison.”

May it be so.