For years, at the conclusion of public worship, I have used words that come from St. Paul, written 2,000 years ago.

“Go into the world in peace and courage.

Hold to the Good.

Honor all God’s children.

Love and serve the Lord,

Rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.”

Last Sunday, as a guest preacher at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan, when I came to the words “Hold to the Good” I almost couldn’t go on. The news from Pittsburgh Saturday morning stood as a contradiction to those words and to everything I hold dear and regard as essential to our life together….

…the trust that in the eternal struggle between good and evil, good will ultimately prevail,

…the trust that the heart of the nation I love, its government and politicians, is essentially fair, honest and good,

…the hope that the long arc of history bends, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said it did, toward justice.

The slaughter of eleven Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh by a rabid anti-Semite was not only horrifying, it was a clear contradiction of the optimistic hope I have always carried and held dear.

I am appalled that the wealth and accumulated power of the National Rifle Association has produced the insanity that anyone in the nation with an ounce of creativity can find a way to purchase a military style semi-automatic weapon, specifically designed to kill as many human beings as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I am equally appalled that our president and Republican leaders of Congress are so in thrall to the NRA that they refuse even to discuss common sense gun control.

I am appalled and dismayed that the President of the United States continues to spew hateful, racist rants aimed at immigrants, even ordering 5,000 battle-ready troops to the border to confront an “invasion” of poor and desperate Central Americans, mostly women and children, who naively continue to see our country as a haven for the oppressed. And then refusing to acknowledge and even denying that his provocative rhetoric comforts people like the Pittsburgh shooter and inspires people like the Florida pipe-bomber to cowardly violence. Of course it does. How could it not?

I am appalled that a sizable portion of my fellow citizens support him, as do Republican leaders of our Congress.

I turned to a book that has become a good friend over the years, Rabbi Irving Greenberg’s For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter Between Judaism and Christianity. The author is an ordained Orthodox Rabbi with a Harvard PhD, past chairman of the United States Holocaust Museum and Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at City College of the City University of New York. Rabbi Greenberg introduced me to the Hebrew words and concept of “tikkun olam”, to repair and heal the world, what Jews and Christians are to be about in the world. Greenberg says tikkun olam is what God has been doing from the beginning. “It was always God’s plan to bring the vision of redemption to more of humanity….the group that would bring the message of redemption to the rest of the nations would have to grow out of the family and covenanted community of Israel.”

We should already know it, but Greenberg eloquently reminds us that Jews and Christians are family, close relatives, cousins, partners in God’s great work of redemption. Reading Greenberg always makes me think and gives me hope and it did so again.

So we must all hold our close relatives in prayer, reach out in words of comfort, stand side by side with our Jewish neighbors in this most recent racist outrage, and remember together, even in dark and discouraging times, that our God-given and God-blessed vocation is to keep on repairing the world… tikkun olam.

Another precious reminder came in the words of Tree of Life Synagogue Rabbi Jeffrey Myers at the community Memorial Service in Pittsburgh, “Love is how you defeat hate.”

John M. Buchanan