Melissa M. Matthes - When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter

Southern California never awoke to a less warlike day. On December 7, 1941, American journalists across the country noted the dissonance between the beautiful weather, the relaxed, familial weekend atmosphere, and the horrible news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. This juxtaposition foreshadowed how Americans for decades to come would frame their national crises: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on an unseasonably warm and sunny November day; the collapse of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building against the clear, big Oklahoma sky; the destruction of the Twin Towers on a perfect autumn Tuesday; and the slaughter of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, during the innocence of the winter holidays.

There is something theological about this reporting of catastrophe. It reveals a belief and a consequent expectation that in a created order, there should be a correspondence between nature and human history. A beautiful day should not usher in bloody violence. At least not for White America. When Black Americans die, the natural order itself seems to convulse with grief. There are the thunderstorms that foreshadow Martin Luther Kings death during his last address. And the rainy night when Trayvon Martin is killed. In the hegemonic American imagination, even the natural order responds differently to the deaths of those imagined as its ownand those cast as its others.Embedded in this narration is a complicated political theology: a messy relationship between mourning and responsibility, between patriotism and religion, and between human history and the providential order.

At each of these historical junctures, Americans have turned to their clergy in an attempt to understand the dissonance, to reconcile their faith and their citizenship, and to find a way forward. Historically, American churches have been full in the immediate aftermath of crises. The pulpit, then, has unusual influence, and the clergy a large and vulnerable audience.