It happened again. Just a few weeks ago, it was the school shooting in Nashville. I did not know anyone who was killed, but I knew people who knew people who were killed. That tragedy was mourned, then shelved to make room for the next hot news item. 

This time, the shooting was in Louisville. I lived in Louisville for twelve years. I worked for a time just down the street from where the shooting took place. I was a chaplain one summer in the trauma hospital where the surviving victims were taken. I met the wife of Thomas Elliott, one of those killed, a couple of times during my Louisville sojourn. Mass shootings do not feel distant to me any longer. 

It seems unreal to me that we have come to this. Death by gunfire has been part of American culture since Europeans landed on these shores. Mass killings before the 1920s were larger acts of violence committed by a parent against a family. In 1928, Leung Ying, using a lever action rifle and a hatchet, killed 11 people on a Fairfield, California ranch where he worked. Despite what you have seen in old Westerns, this seems to be the first mass murder against non-family members by an individual. 

A Harvard study found that between 1982 and 2011, a mass shooting occurred every 200 days. Now a mass shooting occurs every 64 days. The United States has more mass shootings than any country in the world. Is this the mark of a Christian nation? 

After every shooting, the needle seems to drop on the same old debate: One side screams, “The answer is to get rid of guns!”; the other side screams back, “We need more guns to protect us from gun violence.”  The truth is most people bent on evil can find the gun they need to make their evil a reality. 

One reason to read the entire Bible is to be reminded the Ancient World was a bloody and violent place. Kings went to war every spring to gain a fraction more territory. At any given moment, a raiding band might swoop in on your village and steal your crops, your gold, and your daughters. The guiding value of the Ancient World was “Might makes Right.” 

The people of God, Israel, experienced this time after time. They would turn away from God, decide in their own hearts what was right, and chase gods of power, prosperity, and sex. God would allow raiding bands to come in to rob them. He allowed foreign kings to oppress his people.   Once, when he had all he could take, God allowed his people to be conquered and put into exile for 70 years. 

It was during these days the people God learned to lament. Laments are prayers of frustration. The classic lament is Psalm 13. The first verse expresses the deep pain of people who feel like there is no answer: “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?”  David says, “God, the only answer to this problem is you. So where are you?” 

Evangelical Christians struggle with lament. We sing, “Jesus is the answer for the world today…”  I believe that is true, but we forget Jesus will answer in his time, not ours. Sometimes all we can do is lament and cry, “How long, O Lord? How long will violence take our loved ones? How long must we suffer under a threat of gun violence? How long, O Lord, until you intervene?”

 To some, this may not feel like a prayer of faith. I believe this lament is a prayer of great faith. A lament brings all our frustration and anger about unsolvable problems and says, “Only you, Lord, can solve this. I do not know how. I do not know when. I can only trust in you. So I look to you not just for answers and action; I give you my feelings, my hurt, and my hope.”

 Can I say my African American brothers and sisters are better at lament than white evangelicals? Maybe their frustration at the unfairness of life and sinful culture is more recent than ours. Most people do not realize that Stephen Foster’s song, “My Old Kentucky Home,” was a lament of slave families being broken apart: husbands would be sold away from their wives; wives and children would be sold away from their husbands. The slave was helpless to determine his own fate. There is a part of the song that is seldom sung, but you can hear the pain in the words:  

A few more days for to tote the weary load,

No matter, ’twill never be light;

A few more days till we totter on the road,

Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight. 

I cannot change the law; I cannot intervene in mass shootings; I cannot force people to stop politicizing every issue. I cannot mandate the peace of Jesus to live in every heart. I can lament. I can go to God and cry, “How long, O Lord, how long?”  I can know he hears me. I can believe that one day, “Justice will roll down like the waters, and righteousness, like a mighty stream.”

One day.