You know the Edvard Munch painting entitled “The Scream”?

I am feeling it.

I am feeling it each time I try to plan worship or create a sermon in these days.

How to balance?  To name truths is to risk rupture.  To muffle truth is to risk madness.

The world is literally on fire.  Funeral processions are taking place in Iceland for a glacier gone extinct.

Our nation is being led by a man who incites violence and demeans the office of the presidency of a once-great nation and to name the obscenity of his utterances and actions, his misogyny and racism and ecologically debauched ways, is to court cries of partisanship and over-involvement in politics.

As though Jesus was not.  Politically engaged.

We are being led in a merry dance by manipulators skilled at their craft while  being incited to point fingers at people portrayed as suspect (those immigrants!  Those Muslims!  Those who are not white and male!).

We are losing our souls.

How to enter a pulpit and preach the good news of Christ Jesus when there is so much that is not to be said?

How to follow in the way of an insistent-upon-the-humnaity-and-sacred-worth-of-every-creature Jesus when it is somehow too political to preach the very gospel that so terrified the powerful that they silenced him?

As though Jesus and the heart of God could be silenced.

I serve a progressive church.  They are a people who lean in.

And, every week as I page through hymns in search of communal song that does not implicitly condone violence or triumphalism.

Every week as I consider the scripture text and how it might speak and must speak in a world gone mad with fear.

Every week as I long for the unfettering of my own voice and the joining of that voice with the so many others who are stunned by grief and disbelief.

Every week.

I feel the scream.