Homily for September 11, 2011

I usually don't post sermons. I write them to be spoken, and they're not the same when they're read. But the process of preparing yesterday's message was important for me, personally. So, here's an edited version of my message from worship at the North Decatur Presbyterian Church yesterday. Hope y'all had a meaningful day of remembrance.

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Today, we remember 9/11 - but I’m conscious that maybe we shouldn't. In Alan Bennet’s 2006 play “The History Boys,” Irwin, a teacher, says "there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.” Commemorations can become soothing rituals, pacifiers, bundles of easily forgettable words, denuded of the primal power and emotional gravity of the event itself. When authorities (like government or church) take a hold of remembering, they smooth out the rough edges, remove the internal contradictions, even re-write what happened.

I wish the church could be trusted to remember events with rough edges and deep complexity. Christians take our identity from an instrument of capital punishment, but we have often made the cross something fit for jewelry or t-shirts - an easy symbol of a "helpful" faith (tattoos, burned into the skin, are probably better). I hope, today, the church can be responsible with the contested memory of 9/11. I hope that our commemoration is not an act of forgetting, but of remembering faithfully.

Meaning is never inherent in any event. Meaning comes not from the event to us, but from us to the event. Three things help us create meaning: what we see, what we feel, and what story we tell about the claim that event makes on our lives.

9/11 does not have meaning inherent in it. We give it its meaning. What happened that day? It depends on whether you watched it in on television - or over your shoulder as you ran up Varick St. What you felt depends on whether you knew someone who was on an airplane that day; or had a family member in New York whom you couldn’t reach because the phones didn't work. How it changed your story - what claim that day made on your life - depended on any number of things: your occupation (were you a firefighter, a flight attendant, a Marine); your religion (the day meant something different for Muslims than for Christians, and it meant something unique for Sikhs who were often mistaken for Muslims in the days after); where you lived (were you here in Atlanta where it all felt far away, were you in Lower Manhattan breathing in the dust cloud, did you live in Afghanistan, where the effects of 9/11 would take a while to be fully felt).

There are many different experiences of the day and what it meant. Recognizing that, here is one. Here's my own story - what happened, what it felt like, and the claim it made on my life:

I was in New York City, but far away from the Trade Center, 3 miles up the Hudson River. When I heard, I was doing my job: I was in my first theology class at Union Seminary. The class was taught by Jim Cone, who would remind us often about how “all theology begins in suffering." Someone ran in the door to tell us what was happening downtown.

We went to the student lounge to watch tv. I watched for 5 minutes, but couldn’t handle it. As the media does, they were already talking about what it meant when we didn't yet know what happened or what we were feeling. How can you know what it means, if you don't know what happened and you don't know what you are feeling? I didn’t watch tv again for months and that was one of many, many blessings upon my remembering. My experience of the day - and the days afterward - was immediate, not mediated.

I walked to my room and wrote for 30 minutes. Then I walked outside. On Broadway, people were walking uptown in two and threes, carrying each others' things, carrying shoes - to avoid blisters (or had the city's sidewalks just become holy ground)? People shared phones to call loved ones. They kept donating blood far after it was clear that little would be needed. In the evening, they kept vigil with one another - who did we know? We held each other; cried together.

The level of compassion in New York City in those days was lovely. Maybe the closest I will ever get to being in the Kingdom of Heaven. It was a kinship of the suffering.

It was a gift to be there, to see and feel all of this in person. The seminary family was a profound blessing. I was able to process the experience as a part of an authentic communal response to suffering with theologians and ethicists and pastors - with people who know how to wrestle with the cross and with pain and violence and forgiveness.

The Seminary organized volunteer opportunities - anyone with pastoral care skills was suddenly needed. A friend staffed a phone bank for people to call when a loved one had gone missing. I was part of the Seminary choir, and we set up on the streetcorner at 14th street by the police barricades and sang "The Storm is Passing Over," again and again and again until some believed it.

One night, about a week in, I volunteered to serve in the food line for rescue workers (which was the best food line the world ever seen - the city’s master chefs had all donated their services). Volunteers were given access to the site; once you were allowed past the perimeter, you were free to walk around wherever you wanted. I walked down to the edge of the Pit.

It was night - huge banks of flood lights cast shadows across the grotesque ruins. There was the smell - burning, an acrid smoke. I was conscious that there were few bodies found. Most had been turned to ash. Ash was everywhere underfoot. This was a crematorium. A burial site. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

I did not understand then and do not understand now what possess a human being to destroy other human beings in this way. I am unable to understand the anger and sickness that compels a human being to murder innocents. I am especially bewildered that a person could do this in the name of some kind of God.

But my overwhelming feeling that night and what I feel whenever I think back on those images is a deep sadness. I felt so deeply sad. The destruction was not the buildings. The buildings themselves were human folly. The grandeur and the beauty that were destroyed were the people, all of the relationships that made them who they were. What is valuable - what was lost - is not the things we create; it’s the things that God creates. We bear God's image, yet human beings are callous enough to destroy that image, through direct violence, or through the shadow violence of neglect and indifference.

I saw that night what is not God. God is not death; God is not destruction; God is not anger. Sometimes we know God best in God’s absence. What was the negative image of God that appeared in the shadows that night? A God who nurtures. Heals. Welcomes the stranger. Meets hatred with love. A God who makes wars cease to the ends of the earth. A God who is in the midst of the city, our refuge and strength and a very present help in trouble. A God who will not be moved.

The night I spent walking around those buildings will always trouble me. I do not think about it. As I said, it makes me too sad.

But I never want to forget it. It was the place, in God’s absence, that I saw God’s presence. In a Godforesaken time, in a Godforsaken place, I came to believe again in a God who does beautiful and extraordinary things in exactly such places. If I did not believe that, I would not be part of a tradition that keeps the cross at its very center. Where the world sees an instrument of violence and death, a follower of Jesus sees the merciful power of God, whose love will stop at nothing to redeem life - who will stop at nothing to restore peace to the creation and to the creatures - to you, me, and the "enemy" - whom God loves most of all.