Scripture: Jeremiah 8
Tomorrow is September 11, 2006, the five year anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I have had in my mind for some time now that I would need to say something today in relation to that anniversary, that my preaching would have to deal with this in some way. I don’t know where that idea came from, but it took hold of me some weeks ago, and it hasn’t gone away. I have actually tried to think of other things to preach about today, and it’s not that I can’t think of anything—and there’s always the lectionary scriptures that one can turn to for preaching material—but frankly none of it was very compelling. “Well, I could do this…or maybe there’s that…” The September 11 anniversary, on the other hand, kept pressing itself on me, even though I wasn’t sure what I would say about it. It wasn’t so much that I had some clear point that I wanted to drive home, just that this was a concern I wasn’t able to ignore.
So I approach this sermon feeling like it’s something that I have to do, not because of some external obligation but because of something inside me. It’s a sermon that I feel is necessary and that I approach with some urgency and a sense of investment. However, I also have to say that this is a sermon that in some ways I consider questionable and that I give reluctantly. That’s why I tried to think of some other things I might preach about. I have mixed feelings about this sermon, and whenever I have feelings like this going into a sermon, I generally feel it’s best to confess them to you and explain what I’m feeling a bit, to give whatever words I have to say a proper context. In this case today, as is often the case, talking about the feelings I have as I approach the sermon become part of what I want to say in the sermon, if that makes any sense. Whether it does or doesn’t, let me say a few things about why I have these mixed feelings.
I’ve been aware of course that there would probably be lots of attention paid to the anniversary of the September 11 attacks—memorials and remembrances, homage to people who acted heroically, all the different ways we might have of re-living events, discussion of all the various issues that are related, from wars to the compromising of civil liberties to the health effects on workers in New York and of course many, many others. I knew there would be lots of discussion around matters relating to September 11, and I was and am reluctant to add my voice to all the others. I have no particular reason to do so. It didn’t affect me personally in any way other than the ways it affected all of us. I didn’t have loved ones living in New York or working at the Pentagon. I haven’t visited any of the sites. And so to speak about it feels a little like jumping on a bandwagon. It’s the thing to do to say something about September 11 and I have this rebellious streak, I guess, where if it seems like something is “the thing to do”, it makes me not want to do it. But that’s just my issue. More importantly I have this conviction that although there continue to be many important issues to be dealt with in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and although there are of course many things that do legitimately need to be paid attention to, that there is also a tendency for the shadow cast by those events to become a kind of tyranny, coloring every aspect of our lives, exercising too much influence over how we think about all sorts of issues, dominating the social and psychological landscape we live in, and working its way into our souls. That is a tyranny that I believe must be resisted in the name of a larger vision of our humanity. And of course one way for me to resist this tyranny that concerns me would be for me not to preach about anything that had to do at all with September 11. Just talk about something else as a concrete demonstration that we don’t need to get sucked in to having our lives defined in relation to September 11, especially in church we don’t need to get sucked in to having our spiritual lives manipulated and drawn like a magnet toward this event that understandably draws so much attention elsewhere.
But of course there’s a paradox here, or a catch-22 kind of situation. If I don’t speak about it, then I will not get a chance to say that I think there is this danger of granting too much space to September 11 in our public and maybe in our private lives. And if I do speak about it, I may be contributing to whatever excesses there may be in the attention we pay. Since there is no way around that dilemma, I decided to go with my feeling that I needed to say something. Besides, we are more tyrannized by things that affect us unconsciously, without our being aware of it. Better to try and bring what is affecting us to consciousness, to be aware of it, so that it may affect us but not control us.
So I’ve been asking myself how my inner life has been affected, specifically that part of my inner life that I might think of as spiritual, how that has been affected by the events of five years ago. I take for granted that it has been affected. The question is in what way. I should also say that I don’t take for granted, of course I don’t take for granted that the way my spiritual life has been affected will be the same as the way it has affected you, and so I offer a few thoughts today simply as part of a conversation that I think needs to happen, even though a sermon is necessarily a one-way conversation, or I would like to think of it as one part of a conversation.
It would be nice, and certainly appropriate since we are in church, if we could turn to the scriptures for guidance or some kind of assistance in dealing with such matters, but honestly it’s not easy to know where to turn, other than maybe to whatever passages any of us may have that offer us consolation in times of distress. If we think there is some scriptural verse that is just waiting to be pulled out and applied to the current situation, worse still if we think we know what that passage is that has some pointed commentary or some explicit instruction regarding our situation and the world we live in on September 11, 2006, then we should be suspicious of our thinking. No, we should slap ourselves in the face and tell ourselves to come to our senses. That’s not what the scriptures do, offer us a complete set of life applications that cover every conceivable situation and all we have to do is find the one or few that apply. On the other hand, I’m not willing to dismiss them with a summary judgment that they are not applicable, so I did turn to them, though I wasn’t quite sure where to turn.
I’ll tell you honestly what I did. I looked up the word “terror” in the concordance, which is a useful little book that tells you where words occur in the Bible. I looked up other words too, but terror was one of them. And that led me to the chapter from Jeremiah that you heard earlier. What I found there was not some direct instruction or useful piece of advice, but a resonance. There are words written there—we don’t know the details really of what the situation was in Jeremiah’s time that produced these words—but there are words there that it seems could have been produced by events in our own time. It was 2500 years ago when Jeremiah wrote: “…from the least to the greatest, people are greedy for unjust gain; from prophet to priest everyone deals falsely. They have treated the wound of my people carelessly…they have acted shamefully, yet they were not at all ashamed, they did not know how to blush…we look for peace, but find no good, for a time of healing, but there is terror instead.” There was some resonance in those words for me, and that was before I came to the end of the passage where the question is asked, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” We sing a hymn quite often, and will sing it in a few moments, that says there is a balm in Gilead. Here in Jeremiah 8 is the question that the hymn offers an answer to. So there was that resonance too.
But there was also resonance for me at a deeper level. Again, we don’t know what occasioned Jeremiah’s words, but he says, “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land…For the hurt of my poor people, I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.” As I read those words and sort of dwelt in them for a while, they helped me realize what the core was of all the different ways my inner life had been affected by September 11. I had made a short list of the various ways I thought I had been affected, but reading Jeremiah helped me realize what the core of it is. It is that I have been overwhelmed in a way that I had not been before by the violence and the brutality of the world we live in and by the deep sadness that that awareness leaves me with.
Let me be clear here. I am not saying that I am overwhelmed by the violence of the attacks of five years ago, though those events were in themselves profoundly disturbing and the cause of enormous human sorrow. I don’t want to minimize any of that, but I am not overwhelmed by that violence alone but also by the violence of our response. And I have had the thought, as many others have had, that while the attacks of September 11 seemed like an unspeakable outrage to us, as indeed they were from one perspective, that at the same time there are millions of people, tens or hundreds of millions of people across the planet, for whom violence is a daily reality, perhaps not violence that leaves such spectacular images behind but violence that is every bit as deadly and dehumanizing. In the total panorama of the world’s violence, the attacks of September 11, 2001, however traumatic and devastating for the people involved, were a very small part of the larger reality of the world violence, some of which we are responsible for. This is not a new thought for me, but I say with some shame that it took the violence of September 11, 2001 to deepen my awareness of the depth and the pervasiveness of the violence that every day mars the lives of far too many people throughout the world, violence that far too few people are outraged about.
“For the hurt of my poor people, I am hurt,” Jeremiah says, “I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.” And I think to myself, that’s pretty much it. I have lots of feelings and lots of thoughts related to September 11, but that’s pretty much at the heart of it. I am dismayed. For the last five years, some before that but more intensely over the last five years, I have been dismayed and as the time has passed the dismay has grown worse, not better. And more than that. The scripture doesn’t use the words but the sense of it is certainly there. I am in despair over the violence we are doing to each other. I don’t know whether that is true for you. I know it is true for me. And I know I need to fight against the despair. But it doesn’t help to pretend it isn’t there, to cover it over by living on the surface of things, to just try to ignore it somehow, any way we can. We don’t need to say it explicitly all the time, but I am taking the occasion to say it today, that what we do here in worship and in our life as a congregation needs to be thought of in this context. At least I think of it this way. We are not here just going about the business of being a church. We are here doing the best we can together to fight back the despair that to be sure can come at us in many ways from many directions, that may have personal sources as well as public ones, but that comes at us importantly from the events of five years ago and everything that is related to them.
I have one more thought I need to slip in before I close. It’s in keeping with what I said earlier about not letting the attacks of five years ago define the psychological or spiritual space we live in. Some of you know that September 11 is not only a five year anniversary but also a hundred year anniversary. In August of 1906 the government of South Africa passed a law requiring all Indian people to register with the government, get finger-printed, and carry identification. The law was clearly discriminatory and aimed at intimidating the Indian population of South Africa. Among the Indian people living in South Africa at the time was a young lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi called a meeting for September 11, 1906, which was attended by about 3,000 people. It has generally been considered to be the beginning of Gandhi’s nonviolent movement.
That anniversary will hardly be noticed or play any role in the September 11 observances being carried out in the United States. But maybe we can do it just a little bit among us here today, remembering that anniversary too during our prayer time as a way of saying that there are alternatives to despair. May what we do together here at Sojourners also witness to that belief. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 10, 2006