Seattle Mennonite Church Sermons

Lament & A Rainbow Promise for All

February 17, 2018 Megan M Ramer
Seattle Mennonite Church Sermons
Lament & A Rainbow Promise for All
Show Notes
Pastor Megan leads us in lament for victims of gun violence, specifically the 17 precious youth and adults gunned down by a teenager with an assault rifle in Parkland, Florida this past week. And then she reflects on the very first covenant described by the Bible - a unilateral covenant God makes to all creation to never again destroy, even when fed up with humanity's unquenchable thirst for violence....Sung hymn is a "hymn lamenting gun violence" - Tune: Jean Sibelius, 1899 (“Be Still, My Soul”). Text: Copyright © 2015 by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette. All rights reserved, New Hymns: www.carolynshymns.com. Email: bcgillette@comcast.net. Permission is given for free use of this hymn for local church use and by ecumenical groups by those supporting efforts to end gun violence. ...“In October 2015, we attended a church conference in Portland, Oregon. Days before there was a mass shooting at Umpqua Community College near Roseburg, Oregon. A 26-year-old student there had fatally shot an assistant professor along with eight students in a classroom; nine others were injured before the wounded shooter killed himself. This was the deadliest mass shooting in Oregon’s modern history. Carolyn wrote [this] hymn while we were in Oregon. In the last full decade between 2000 and 2010, a total of 335,609 people died from guns—more than the population of St. Louis, Mo. (318,069), Pittsburgh (307,484), Cincinnati, Ohio (296,223), Newark, N.J. (277,540), and Orlando, Fla. (243,195) (sources: CDF, US Census; CDC). This hymn was sung the following month at the Washington National Cathedral and featured in a Religion News Service article published by Christian Century.” (“Gun Violence and Peacemaking,” Bruce Gillette and Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, www.journalforpreachers.com/Lent-2017-Gillettes)