Sept. 11 Reflections
I spoke at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Sept. 14, commemorating the 2011 terrorist attack on America:
On September 11, 2001, I was in Philadelphia. I was serving a congregation there, one of the larger Episcopal congregations in that city. Philadelphia is located close to all three places where tragedies happened, Shanksville, Pennsylvania; the Pentagon, Washington, D.C.; and New York City, which meant this was a congregation that had personal friends of people who had lost their lives or who had been affected in some way by the tragedy.
We instinctively — without even thinking much about it — threw the doors open and sent out an email broadcast that we would gather for prayer. The place was packed with people, Christian faith, some faith, no faith. They really did reflect the line in Carl Dawes’ hymn that we sang: Yet most of us are all aware of the emptiness and void of lives cut short, of structures raised, of confidence destroyed.
From this abyss of doubt and fear, we grope for words to pray, and hear our stammering tongues embrace a timeless curea. Lord have mercy. Those words were echoed by, at the time, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who was in New York City at Trinity Church when the attack happened and who had to be shuttled out of where they were. His group walked right into the middle of a panic-stricken kindergarten full of children, and, again, instinctively, just swooped them up as they made their way out of the building with the ash falling from the buildings that were very, very close by. He said, “All we could do was say, ‘God, have mercy.'”
Ten years later, I was in New York City serving a church that was preparing for a 10th anniversary time of prayer and celebration. The congregation had been very active in serving food to 9-11 first responders. Many of them knew people who had died or had themselves escaped out of the Twin Towers buildings. In preparation for that 10th anniversary celebration, I started asking those members, “Tell me what it was like.”
Inevitably, I heard three very different stories.
The first was offered by a woman I knew who later was serving as an assistant to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and she told a story about how she had been literally supernaturally led out of the towers. She worked in one of the top floors of the second tower that was hit. As soon as the first tower was struck, evacuation began. She was speaking to one of her co-workers and they had a choice between going down the elevator or going down the stairs. They parted. She said goodbye. She made it down the stairs. The elevator never made it to the bottom floor. She knew that, somehow, she had been directed.
By contrast, I asked another man who worked in that same vicinity what it was like for him. A strong, strapping, athletic man who, when I asked the question, just crumbled. He still, 10 years later, couldn’t talk about it. He’d lost friends. He barely made it out alive. It was impossible for him to articulate what was happening inside of him. So deep was the wound, he didn’t think he could go to the 10th anniversary commemoration because it would evoke too much that he had yet to deal with.
Then the third response was one of immediately springing into action, people doing whatever was necessary to take care of each other. In the midst of that profound kind of tragedy, that sort of thing actually reduces you down to either abject fear or choosing to act kindly. There almost is no middle ground. Either you’re paralyzed by it and you don’t know what to do, or you instinctively just begin to reach out to other people. It’s not even anything that you think about. Bang! You just begin to do it, and that’s exactly what happened.
So here we are, 13 years later. I still live with those conversations in my head. I think often of those people whom I deeply love and care about, but there was something else that happened. It was a few days after the attacks when the rubble began to be cleared away at the site of the Twin Towers. What was discovered: A huge, 12-15-foot high piece of twisted metal, two girders that in fact had formed a cross, and there it was.
That is still in the 9-11 Museum there. That photograph went around the world almost overnight. To the ire of some, but to the comfort of many, because a part of what the cross means for Christians especially, is the fact that God in Christ is not unfamiliar with the worst that humanity can mete out to each other, that God is not in fact aloof from suffering, but has tasted it, has drunk it deeply, and that he knows at a very visceral and personal level the worst agonies and the cries of dereliction that come out of the human heart.
Which is why Paul could write in Galatians 6:14, “May I never glory in anything except the cross of Christ,” because that’s where God and suffering are united. That’s where forgiveness is meted, where Jesus cries out on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” and in so offering that prayer, humanity knows that as we go to the one who has tasted the worst that humanity has to offer, whatever it is that I have to offer, even at my worst, I know that I can find in the face of the one on the cross, forgiveness, mercy and peace.
Why is that so important in this occasion, especially? It’s because as the words that we have read and sung, we are called to an incredibly high standard of doing justice and being good and living up to the responsibilities of the freedom that has been given to us. And if there’s anything that needs to be said in our culture today, it’s that the gift of freedom is not the right to do what I want, but the opportunity to do what is right, and they are very, very different from each other.
We still have, as we will all acknowledge, an unfinished work of democracy and freedom, wanting to open wide the circle for more so that all, as we sang way, way back at the beginning of today’s service under America the Beautiful, that as we look at the alabaster cities gleaming undimmed by human tears, we know that we live in a culture where tears are still shed for the unfinished work of liberty and freedom.
We are broken people. Worst than that, but more accurately, Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously said that, “The fault line between good and evil is right within the human heart,” and that I have to face, if my call is to live into freedom’s opportunities to do good, I have to face the fact that inside of me is the desire for the very things that we are told to avoid, revenge, anger, rage, my desire to get what I want, to horde the best for myself, to understand freedom is the opportunity for license rather than for service.
I’m not talking about people up there. It’s us, is it not? We’re in this one together. It’s us, which is why, far more importantly, at least if we are going to be a society where the tragic deaths of people like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown … you could make a list … are to be more and more a part of our past as opposed to our future, we need to be a men and women who are willing to cry out to God to say, “Take this fault line and work in me what is good, that I might be a servant for the best that liberty has to offer, that I might be the kind of citizen that honestly reflects the best of what it is that you have given us in this country, the opportunity to be able to express.”
Otherwise, what we’re talking about is patriotic cheerleading, and I hope you didn’t come for that. I didn’t. No, it’s a kind of humble resolve that God might not just shed his grace on thee, meaning our country, but that God might shed his grace on us, that we might, by God’s grace and mercy, be a people who in fact takes the opportunity to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God, and for us to do that means we cry out to God for a change of heart, that we might be the men and women, courageous, humble and strong, that God in fact has called us to be here on this planet, now. May this call us to prayer, to service, to courage, and genuine acted goodness.
Amen.