Thoughts and prayers…

A mass shooting happens in a grocery store. “Thoughts and prayers” is the response.

A mass shooting happens in a school. “Thoughts and prayers” is the response.

A mass shooting happens anywhere. “Thoughts and prayers” is the response.

What exactly are we praying? Seriously, what words are we praying in response? Or is the phrase just the expected response and we aren’t actually going to do thoughts and prayers — even those are apparently too much for us to actually do. We just say it like we do when someone asks how we are doing — “fine, and you?” We aren’t fine. And no, we really don’t want to know how you are doing. We just go through the expected social norms that are anything but normal.

Walter Brueggemann, who is one of my favorite theologians, wrote a book called “Peace” in 2001. In a chapter titled, “Our Story Tells Us What To Do,” he wrote the following:

“The tricky demand in all this is that the Bible never settles for a morality that deals simply with individuals. It always asks about social structures, about government and law and social policy, about institutions that can cause exoduses or prevent them. Today that is the part of morality that tears at the church. We are often eager to confine the claim of biblical morality to private questions of right and wrong. We have a long history of thinking that we can privatize morality and settle for personal virtues of purity and honesty. But the deep issues of biblical morality consistently concern the public…