Pastors: Palm Sunday a balm after school shooting
FRANKLIN, TENNESSEE >> It's Palm Sunday, and across the greater Nashville, Tennessee, region, many Christians headed to worship services grief-stricken and hurting for the lives stolen too soon in The Covenant School shooting.
Their heartsick pastors sought to bring comfort to those seeking answers to unanswerable questions after a heavily armed assailant turned a regular day into a horror story for the private, Christian grade school in Nashville.
“If a week like this teaches me anything, it's that today is the day to believe,” senior pastor Scott Sauls told his congregation at Christ Presbyterian Church which is hosting funerals for three of the six victims..
“None of us is guaranteed tomorrow, let alone the next hour,” Sauls said. “The only comfort that exists in life and in death, for body and soul, is that we belong to our faithful savior Jesus Christ.”
The promise of the gospel doesn't diminish the pain and the grief, Sauls added. And he acknowledged that scripture is limited when it comes to answering the question of why: “Why this child? Why this beloved educator and wife and mother and grandmother?”
On the first Sunday after the attack — and the start of Christianity's most sobering and sacred week — the tragedy could not and should not be avoided, said pastor George Grant, a local Presbyterian leader with ties to the school and the adjoining Covenant Presbyterian Church.
“We have to engage with what has happened,” he told The Associated Press a few days after the Monday shooting. “The Bible calls us to mourn with those who mourn, to weep with those who weep and so we will.”
Authorities say a 28-yearold former Covenant student killed six people at the school before being shot and killed by police. In the aftermath, Grant and other clergy decided to make space in their Palm Sunday services for communal grief.
“Any pastor or preacher that's standing up in a pulpit this weekend is doing so as a wounded healer,” said Nashville Catholic Bishop J. Mark Spalding, who believes being in community is key at this time. “In tragedies and disasters, many of us can isolate which doesn't help heal as well as reaching out.”
Together on Palm Sunday, and in between victims' funerals, their church members lamented the dead: the three 9-year-olds — Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney — and Katherine Koonce, 60, the head of the school; Mike Hill, 61, a custodian; and Cynthia Peak, 61, a substitute teacher.
While sense can't be made of the senseless, Grant said Christianity offers a message of hope that's even more pronounced on Palm Sunday, which marks the biblical account of Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem before his crucifixion and resurrection.