Scriptures: Psalm 122 and 121; 2 Corinthians 4:7-10; Ephesians 3:14-17; Zechariah 4:1-6; Matthew 5:3-10; Micah 6:6-8
I have just a few words I want to say this morning before we come to a time of sharing and prayer. I’ve called this reflections rather than sermon because “sermon” sounded too official somehow.
Like many of you, I’m sure, I am in no way through processing what has happened, and my feelings shift from grief over the loss of life and the pain so many people will live with, to worry about what the future holds, to thinking about what I or we ought to say or think or feel or do. I have found it hard to say very much at all, even to myself, while people are still trying to save lives and recover bodies and while just grief for individuals and for this world seems like the most appropriate response.
Still, also like most of us I imagine, I have been trying to think beyond the grief, and ask myself what attitudes and values it will be important to hold on to and raise up in the days ahead. Our faith has something to say to that, and although I am very aware that my own thoughts and understanding are still very much in process, there are a few things that I am ready to say, and that I need to say.
First of all, I am concerned and prayerful that the direction of our response not be to retreat into a kind of militant tribalism. When Christians say “our people”, when I as a Christian say “my people”, I do not mean simply other Christians. If my identity is that I am a child of God, then my people are God’s people, and God’s people know no boundaries of religion or nation.
It is not so much a time to rally as Americans but to rally as human beings, affirming, in whatever ways it may be possible to do so, our oneness as human beings, and asking God’s blessing not only on America but on all nations and peoples. This will include standing with those Moslems in our country, some of whom have already been scapegoated, and others who are surely living in fear of being scapegoated. It will include remembering that terrorism, torture, genocide, and other forms of sickening violence also know no national boundaries. It will include struggling somehow to find ways not to affirm our Americanness but to affirm our humanity in the days ahead.
I am also concerned and prayerful that we not believe that terrorism is the only evil that needs to be resisted in our world. Even if we can agree that no amount of anger or injustice could justify the killing that has been done or the sorrow that has been caused, still there remains injustice, loss of life, and sorrow in other places from other causes that are also evil and that ask our attention also. If we could somehow magically vaporize every terrorist impulse in every person on the face of the earth, there would still remain poverty and powerlessness that would need to be addressed. There is work for us to do besides finding the perpetrators of violence. There is work for us to do in fighting poverty, and in seeking relationships built on respect, not upon power. There is a larger work of justice that was there before, that we have so far failed in, and that we are in no way done with. Were we to somehow be successful in preventing further terrorism, our real work would be just beginning.
I am concerned and prayerful that we find some place of humility to stand in. I am not optimistic, but I am prayerful. If we cannot do this as a nation, then I pray that we may do this as people of faith. I think I am not ready to spin out very far what this might mean for us, but it is a concern that weighs on my spirit. I can tell you that it at least means that we not join the calls for the United States to show the world how powerful and how destructive we can be if we want to be. It means that we not join in any call for us to reassert our dominance or control over other peoples. It means that we repudiate any posture of swaggering arrogance. Beyond that, at this point I can only say that it means that we seek some place of humility for our spirits to be anchored in, and that we be diligent in that search.
And finally, I am concerned and prayerful that our actions, to use Paul’s words, be rooted and grounded in love. I have been thinking that it is probably not very helpful to judge myself or anyone else too harshly for feeling anger or rage at a time like this. On a personal level, we would not tell a person who had been a victim of a violent crime that he or she should feel no anger. We would not encourage that person to act on that anger, and we hope that that person could work her or his way back to a point where she was living her life not from a center that was filled with rage and revenge, not from a center that was filled with fear, but from a center that is filled with love. That is a not too easy task for us even when there has been no trauma. It is surely not an easy task now, but what else is there for us to do, but to continue now the tasks that were ours a week ago and that remain now ever more important—to seek justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God, and to be rooted and grounded in love. May our hearts be set on such things as these. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 16, 2001