Today is the 2 year anniversary of the massacre at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School. I’ve spent the last year researching sermons preached by Christian, Jewish and Muslim clergy in the US that weekend. Clergy offered their congregants specific religious resources with which to process the tragedy. They named names of the individual victims, highlighting the image of God in each life. They enjoined silence, invoking the incomprehensibility of the tragedy and the inscrutable divine will. They encouraged lament as a biblical healthy communal practice. Some encouraged direct political action to tighten gun laws while others emphasized the futility of politics in the face of supernatural evil. More than anything, religious leaders sought to reinforce that their congregants’ reaction to this tragedy defines their identity as people of faith. 

When the rector says, “As Christians, we weep” he is describing, prescribing, and creating what Christians are: a people who weep and mourn. When the rabbi says, “In Judaism, we’re a tradition of action” he is creating Jews as a people of action. When the ‘alim says we must respond as “followers of a religion of peace and justice,” he constructs Muslims as peaceful and just. When the priest argues that as Catholics we defend and protect life, he is reminding Catholics that their identity is bound up with their concern for life. Above all, clergy used their sermons following the Uvalde shooting not just to tell their congregants what to do, but to tell their congregants who they are.

Let us hope that Americans of all religions heed the call to remember who they are and use the resources from their different traditions to work together to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again.