It took less than three weeks of high school for my kids to endure the most frightening and pointless part of that experience. Not long after lunch on Thursday, we got an automated message from the school district announcing that our high school was locked down because of reports that a student had a weapon.
Teachers locked the doors and darkened the lights of their classrooms, while students kept silent and police swarmed to campus.
About an hour later, it was all over. False alarm. Just like a week earlier, when a social media threat against some of our district’s elementary schools turned out to be a hoax, police determined that there had been no weapon.
But there could have been. Those teachers and students all knew exactly what to do in that event, had trained for it, because we can all bring to mind a mass shooting at an American school. Maybe the one just over two weeks earlier, when a fourteen-year-old in Georgia left his algebra class, retrieved an AR-15-style rifle, and murdered two students and two teachers.
When I got the message that everything was alright, I exhaled sharply and wept. For an hour, I hadn’t known what to do with myself. We only live five minutes’ drive from the school, but I knew I wouldn’t do any good getting in my car. So I tried to do work — and promptly botched multiple emails and found myself unable to concentrate on research.
I texted my kids, knowing that it was pointless — their phones were in the bin where teachers always keep them, to avoid distractions during class.
The only thing I could was to think about them and pray for them.
And I know, I know: “thoughts and prayers” are not a sufficient response to the problem of gun violence in this gun-besotted country. But in the moment, it was the best I could do: bring to mind positive memories of my children, and bring to God a situation that was utterly, painfully beyond my control.
As always, when I don’t really know what to pray for, I tried to think of scripture that was appropriate to an entirely inappropriate moment. What came to mind was the psalm I was already reading for this week’s lectionary devotion:
Save me, O God, by your name, and vindicate me by your might. Hear my prayer, O God; give ear to the words of my mouth.
Psalm 54:1-2
Attributed to the time when David was hiding from Saul (“the insolent have risen against me; the ruthless seek my life”— v 3), Psalm 54 trusts in the God who is “my helper,” the Lord who is “the upholder of my life” (v 4). All of those sentiments were easy — and comforting — to pray during that troubling hour of lockdown.
But as so often happens in the psalms, David asks for something more, something darker, than momentary safety. He doesn’t just address the God who “has delivered me from every trouble,” but yearns to look “in triumph on my enemies” (v 7). His God will not just protect him in that situation, but “repay my enemies for their evil” (v 5).
On Thursday afternoon I stumbled over such lines. I wanted the danger to end, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask God to, “in your faithfulness, put an end to them” (v 5).
Partly it’s that it’s not clear who them was in that situation. I’d love God to put an end to the prospect of mass shootings as a category of contemporary life, but there’s a long list of complicated people involved in such events. In the tragedy earlier this month in Georgia, it wasn’t just the shooter who was arrested, but his father, who had bought his son the gun. Then there are the politicians who refuse to regulate and restrict such instruments of violence, the lobbyists who exhort such laxity and the manufacturers who profit from it, and whoever is responsible for the larger culture that can seem to worship death.
But what does it mean for a Christian to pray God to “put an end to” that them? The psalms express wonderfully the full range of human emotions and divine faithfulness, but the fact that those scriptures use imprecatory language doesn’t mean that followers of the Prince of Peace can desire imprecation. Even David, after all, when given a chance to kill Saul as he hunted for him, refused to do so.
What we can pray for is that God would “put an end to” sinners as they have been and transform them into the people they can become. We can pray not for death as the source of our peace, but repentance, redemption, and resurrection.
I couldn’t think through any of this in that awful, hour-long moment when my children’s lives seemed to be in danger. But looking back — and looking ahead to the prospect of the next scare — I do pray that God will not only deliver us from the trouble of gun violence, but let us one day look triumphantly over that enemy. May God heal the illnesses — mental, spiritual, cultural — that lead us to wield weapons against each other, and grant us the courage and wisdom to take those weapons out of our hands for good.
Next week’s lectionary readings: Psalm 124; Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22; Mark 9:38-50; James 5:13-20.