Episcopal Church focuses on gun violence March 25

Stations of the Cross in Washington DC

On Monday, March 25 at 10:30 am Eastern, more than 20 Episcopal bishops from throughout the church will lead hundreds of clergy and lay people in praying the Stations of the Cross in Washington, DC, as they process along Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the US Capitol to challenge violence, especially the epidemic of gun violence that claims so many thousands of American lives each year.

The service will begin outside St. John’s Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square, at the corner of 16th and H Streets, Northwest, across from the White House, and conclude on the west lawn of the U. S. Capitol some two and a half hours later. The specially written Stations of the Cross focus on the tragedy of violence. Bishops, priests and deacons in the procession will wear cassocks or other clerical attire, and worshippers will carry a wooden cross, as they make their way along Pennsylvania Avenue, stopping in front of memorials, government buildings and works of art to offer prayers for an end to violence, the culture of violence, and the social and economic conditions that spawn violence. (visit: www.ctepiscopal.org/Content/Holy_Week_Witness_Liturgy.asp)

Bishop Ian T. Douglas of Connecticut, along with Suffragan Bishops Laura J. Ahrens and James E. Curry, organized the service immediately after the killing of 28 students, teachers and individuals at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. They worked in cooperation with Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of Washington, and a team from her diocese. Clergy and lay involved in the Diocese of Connecticut’s response to the killings in Newtown will participate in the service.

“The death dealing realities of violence are brought home to us as Christians when we recall the crucifixion of Jesus on the Cross this Holy Week,” said Bishop Douglas. “Walking the Way of the Cross invites us, compels us, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation.”

Many of the bishops who will participate in the event are part of Episcopalians Against Gun Violence, an ad hoc group of bishops, clergy and lay people of Episcopalians who are working, collectively and individually, to curb gun violence. Learn more at www.facebook.com/EpiscopaliansAgainstGunViolence and on Twitter at @TheCrossLobby.

Prayer – “Grieving our Lost Children”
O Lord, another brutality, another school killing, another grief beyond telling . . . and loss . . . in Colorado, in Wisconsin, among the Amish, in Virginia and Connecticut. Where next?

We are reduced to weeping silence, even as we breed a violent culture, even as we kill the sons and daughters of our so-called ‘enemies,’ even as we fail to cherish and protect the forgotten of our common life.

There is no joy among us as we empty our schoolhouses; there is no health among us as we move in fear and bottomless anxiety; there is little hope among us as we fall helpless before the gunshot and the shriek and the blood and the panic; we pray to you only because we do not know what else to do.

Loving God, we beseech you to move powerfully in our body politic. Move us toward peaceableness that does not want to hurt or kill; move us toward justice so that the troubled and the forgotten may know mercy; move us toward forgiveness, so that we may escape the trap of revenge.

Empower us to turn our weapons into acts of mercy, to turn our missiles into gestures of friendship, to turn our bombs into policies of reconciliation; and in this deep work of transformation, hear our sadness, our loss, our bitterness.

We dare to pray our needfulness to you because you were there on that gray Friday, and watched your own Son murdered for ‘reasons of state.’ Good God, do Easter! Here and among these families, here and in all places of brutality. Turn our Good Friday grief into your Easter joy. We pray in the Name of the one crucified and risen, who is our Lord and Savior. Amen.

(adapted from Walter Brueggemann, Prayers for a Privileged People. (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2008), 61-62.)