Photo: Emily Elconin / Getty Images News / Getty Images
They probably would have been finishing Sacrament.
The Lord’s Supper. Communion. The simple weekly ceremony in which bread and water are blessed and passed and the participants silently renew their baptismal promise to take upon themselves the name of Jesus Christ, and always remember him, and keep his commandments, in hopes that they might always have his Spirit to be with them.
It is passed typically by boys. Twelve-year-olds. In wrinkled white shirts with poorly tied ties and smoothed down hair. Carrying little trays and waiting as they are handed from person to person down the pew, until all are served and they walk quietly back up in a line to return the trays to the Sacrament table.
That’s about where they would have been.
At 10:25, when the truck smashed through the wall.
Sunday, on the outskirts of Flint, up in Michigan, maybe a couple of hundred of them, gathered in the name of Christ. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Members of my church. The faith of my family. The heritage of my wife from the early 1800s. A uniquely American religion whose membership has spread across the world.
And on Sunday, the devil came to church. As he has come to other churches, and synagogues, and Amish and Catholic and Presbyterian schools. To spread pain and misery and sorrow. Like he did with Charlie Kirk and at Emanuel A.M.E. and in Charlottesville. To turn us against one another, to tempt us to rage, and to fray the fabric of our nation and our character.
To invite us to join him in hate.
And that’s what it boils down to. God is love and the devil is hate, and though those emotions percolate within us in varying amounts, they are ultimately mutually exclusive. You can only serve one master. Do you look up or do you look down?
And how do you see your fellow believers die for the Lord without turning to the Lord? Not with an accusatory, “How could you let this happen?” but with a plaintive, “What would you have us do?” Martyrdom is not new, sorrow is sometimes our companion, but discipleship is always our quest, the faith to say and mean, “Not my will, but thine, be done.”
And through tears and maybe anger, amidst fear and sorrow, when the senseless massacre of the day is against those particularly close to your heart, and the communion of suffering is expanded, like the old song asks, “Where could I go, but to the Lord?”
The Lord who commanded us to turn the other cheek, and to pray for our enemies, and to forgive ‘til seventy times seven. The one who used some of his last breaths to pray for the men who had killed him. And who most importantly said that after loving the Lord with all our hearts, the most important commandment was to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to ultimately love one another as he, who died for us, loved us.
There’s no asterisk on that. No exception. No conditional clause. Not when we have been wronged, not when we have been misunderstood, not when we have been hated.
And not when we have been butchered, like so many others, in our house of worship.
Treat people – individually, or the entirety of the world – not as they have treated you, but as you wish to be treated. Do not return evil for evil, do not put a chip upon your shoulder, do not rage or threaten. And most certainly do not give place in your heart to the resentment and evil which have so recently killed your brothers and sisters.
Choose good, not evil, cling to God and reject the devil.
That’s what Mormons will do, and that’s what Mormons have done before.
In 1844, when a mob in tiny Carthage, Illinois, killed Joseph Smith, the first president of the church, people fled into the countryside in fear, afraid of retaliation by the people of Mormon Nauvoo, then the largest city in Illinois. But they feared in vain. The Mormons didn’t rage, they didn’t march, they didn’t seek vengeance. They buried their dead, they shared their grief, and they went forward, striving to be better followers of the Lord.
And that’s what they will do now.
Because that was the promise they had just made. When the truck crashed through the wall. To take upon themselves the name of Jesus Christ, and always remember him, and keep his commandments.
That is the promise they made, we all made, and that is the promise, with the Lord’s help and grace, we will keep.