It has been a horrible weekend for gun violence in America. I cannot keep my heart from going out to the family of the teenager gunned down at a high school football game, while I was listening to the strains of the halftime band drift over from our own local school on Friday evening.

Even so, I confessed God and the congregation during the prayers of the people, in the midst of all of the gun violence of this weekend the Jacksonville shooting stands out for its chilling hatred. Steeped in the blood of past victims and dragging injustice and prejudice with it like a standard, such ugliness pulls us back toward the history we hope so hard to escape.

I prayed, something like, Convert the hearts of this nation, O God. Subvert the forces of racism, hatred, violence, and evil. Help the broken, comfort the grief-stricken, stand close to those who are fearful, break open stony hearts, heal our hope.

Prayer, of course, does not alter the mind of God, who was anti-racist before we invented ways to shatter the image of God into pieces so that we could pick up an individual piece of mirror and call it whole, never mind that it cut us. Rather, I prayed it in order dimly to remember what I once heard God whisper to me: love wholly, trouble the demons, do not repay evil for evil, but overcome evil with good, with God, who alone is good, who alone is holy, who alone is whole.

From the cross we hear the incarnation of a sigh, Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.

But don’t we?