Perhaps you have seen this picture on social media recently.  This image and images like this one, like of Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his small daughter Valeria whose bodies washed up on the shore of the river they tried to cross, like the one some years ago of the body of Alan Kurdi, the little boy on the Turkish beach – I struggle hard to keep looking at them.  Even as I type this post, I have to scroll down so that I see only the slice of pizza because I can’t look for too long.  I’ll scroll back up again in a minute, when my heart has had a chance to rest.  Because I know how important it is that I keep looking even if there’s not much I can do.

This past week, I started to work out again a little bit.  The last time I did any real physical activity was around the time I conceived my last baby – so it’s been a while!  I took up an old exercise program to begin.  It’s a series of high intensity interval training and I started on the pre-workout page, the place to start if you’re really unfit.  You’re supposed to go through seven or eight different exercises – squats and leg-lifts and curls and things – and then rest for three minutes and then do the whole thing over again and that’s your workout.  My first run-through was hard and I barely made it.  But I was so tired and just wanted to be done with it all that I only waited about 90 seconds before beginning again.  I made it through the leg-lifts the second time through and had to stop because I was sure I was going to throw up or faint or both.   There’s only so much your body can take without some period of respite. 

And I feel the same way about these pictures.  I’ve got to pause between looking.  I’ve got to give my heart a little bit of respite or else I will throw up, or faint, or both. 

But, I know that we must still look.  We must come back to these images, to the stories of the people in and around these images.  Whatever our politics, whatever our beliefs about immigration, surely we must let our hearts be broken again and again, over and over by these pictures, these people, so that we remain human.  So that such suffering – such innocent pain and suffering – has witnesses across the globe. 

Congregants at Thankful will tell you that I do not “preach politics” as the saying goes.  My congregation includes folks on both ends of the political spectrum and everywhere in between.  And everyone’s opinions and prayerful thoughts on the political challenges of our day must be welcomed, so I am careful that my preaching does not exclude anyone who prays and thinks and works from a place of love. 

And yet, it is that very Love that requires us to look at this suffering and to question to what extent we are responsible for it and to do everything within our power to keep it from happening again.  That, I believe, is the gospel truth.