From the Book of Psalms:
Go away from me, you evildoers,
that I may keep the commandments of my God.
— Psalm 119:115 (NRSV)O that my people would listen to me,
that Israel would walk in my ways!
— Psalm 81:13 (NRSV)Give justice to the weak and the orphan;
maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.
Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.
— Psalm 82:3-4 (NRSV)
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Morning & Evening Psalms – May 28, 2014)
Two years ago I wrote a meditation on First Timothy on this blog about our need to pray for our political leadership, especially those with whom we disagree; yesterday, I repeated that same reflection. Really, our need is to pray for everyone, including those we really don’t want to pray for: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Mt 5:44) I believe that, I really do.
Since the first publication of that reflection in May, 2012, there have been nine mass shootings in this country, including the Sandy Hook tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, and this week’s killings near UC Santa Barbara in Isla Vista, California:
“Seven people are dead, including a suspect, and seven people are wounded following a series of shootings in Isla Vista. The identities of those who were killed are not being released until next of kin notifications are made. Of the seven people in the hospital, all are being treated for gunshot wounds or traumatic injuries and at least one of the victims has undergone surgery.” — Santa Barbara, California, Sheriff’s Office press release, May 24, 2014
After the UCSB deaths, this father spoke out:
“Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A. They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, ‘Stop this madness; we don’t have to live like this?’ Too many have died. We should say to ourselves: not one more.” — Richard Martinez, father of Christopher Martinez, one of the Isla Vista decedents
And these gun-rights advocates responded:
“No idea how my son will die, but I know it won’t be cowering like a bitch at UC Santa Barbara. Any son of mine would have been shooting back.” — Todd Kincannon, North Carolina Tea Party activist, known for thoughtless tweets like this one
“[Y]our dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.” — Samuel Wurzelbacher a/k/a “Joe the Plumber,” brought to national attention during the 2012 presidential campaign
And I wrote this on Facebook (after reading Wurzelbacher’s open letter):
“Between this (and that Kincannon person characterizing the Isla Vista victims as ‘cowering bitches’) we see the moral depravity, the ethical bankruptcy, and the just-plain vileness of those who have elevated the misconstrual of the Second Amendment’s provision of a right to bear arms above all other rights and laws.”
And The Onion published this biting satire:
“ISLA VISTA, CA—In the days following a violent rampage in southern California in which a lone attacker killed seven individuals, including himself, and seriously injured over a dozen others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Tuesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place. ‘This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,’ said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. ‘It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this guy from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.’ At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past five years were referring to themselves and their situation as ‘helpless.’”
I really, really believe in the power of prayer. I really, really believe that we are to pray for those who do wrong. I really, really believe we should pray for those we don’t want to pray for. I really, really believe that we are to pray for our leaders, even when we disagree with them and even when they are failing to lead, failing to protect the people, failing to take action that is needed.
But today I’m finding really, really hard to do that. So I’ll let today’s psalms do it for me.
Let the psalms do it.
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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
There was a meme circulating the conservative blogosphere and email circuit several months ago in which folks of a certain political persuasion asserted that they were “praying” for President Obama by reciting a verse from Psalm 109: “Let his days be few, and let another take his office.” The psalm continues in the next verse: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife become a widow.” And the petition get even worse after that. This is not what Paul is admonishing the faithful to do in his letter to the young bishop Timothy. In fact, it is clearly the very opposite. 
I’m going to do something I have never done before! I’m going to read someone else’s sermon. While I was pondering these lessons, doing the usual research, and thinking about what to say, I came upon a superb sermon preached on Memorial Day weekend three years ago when, as today, the lesson from Acts was the story of St. Paul preaching at the Areopagus. The preacher was the Rev. Kurt Wiesner who is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Littleton, New Hampshire, and whom many of us remember from his tenure as curate at our own Trinity Cathedral. This is what Kurt had to say and I earnestly commend his thoughts to you:
Does the name “Jesse Washington” mean anything to you? It’s unlikely that it does. If I tell you that Jesse Washington died in 1916 in Waco, Texas, would that spark any memory? Have you ever been taught about the incident in which Washington was killed? Have you ever heard of what came to be called “The Waco Horror?”
It has been almost 40 years since presidential candidate Jimmy Carter admitted to Playboy magazine, “I’ve looked on many women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. God knows I will do this and forgives me.” Caused quite a stir and, some say, marked the beginning of the erosion of presidential privacy, the start of an era of leadership toxicity in American politics when partisan reporters feel free to reveal any fact or rumor, no matter how irrelevant, if it will hurt a politician of the opposite party or position. I’m not sure that that’s the case; a good argument can be made that the current polarized, hyper-partisan atmosphere started building during the Nixon, or even Johnson, years. That, however, is not what I’m thinking about this morning.
John the Baptizer is speaking to the Pharisees and the Sadducees, warning them against the very common human practice of relying upon the piety of our forebears instead of practicing our own faith. Relying on the religion of our ancestors is weakens and attenuates our own spirituality. One might as well be rocks lying by the roadside.
The genius of Paul is his holistic approach to understanding the gifts of the Spirit, the talents and skills of human beings. Yes, he says, there are all sorts of talents and skills, but they all come from the same source – God the Spirit – and they are all to be used for the same purpose – building up the community. It is a genius that is lost in the modern world, I’m sorry to say. 
This verse is from the optional additional evening psalm for today. I chose to focus on it because today is the commemoration (on the Episcopal Church’s sanctoral calendar) of the martyred Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero. Today is the 34th anniversary of his assassination; he was shot to death while celebrating a private funeral mass for the mother of a friend.
This may be the simplest, truest, most profound thing Paul ever wrote. No flowery language, no showing of his erudition and knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures or of Greek philosophy, no convoluted logic, no run-on sentences. Just a simple declaration: if you are in litigation, you’ve already lost.
Is it just coincidence that we read in Genesis of a famine on St. Patrick’s Day? This day of international Irish pride, when “everyone is Irish,” would just be the feast of another insignificant local saint but for the Irish diaspora, especially the Irish emigration to the United States in the mid-19th Century. And that would not have happened then and in such large numbers but for an Gorta Mór, the “Great Hunger,” the Irish potato famine.
