World Trade Centre
Bombing
Lost and Found
Luke 15:1-10
1 Timothy 1:12-17
I am going to
preach this morning, but before I start, I want to express how I feel as
inadequate as anyone in trying to find the words to express how we as Christians
should respond to this tragedy. In
fact, to try and find words at all seems disrespectful. It's one of those occasions when to speak
makes us feel like Job's comforters, full of platitudes and empty advice, and
to shut up and just be silent seems the most faithful option. There may even be people here this morning
who have been directly affected by the disaster. What can we say to you?
If you are here, we can do no better than to offer you our love and our
tears, to mourn with those who mourn as the Scriptures command us. It would be
good to pray for Greg this morning.
If you are anything
like me you have probably been making a journey this week, a journey along the
way of trying to make sense out of this.
You won't be this morning where you were on Tuesday, but you still may
not be very sure where you are. We are
still at the stage when voices and thoughts are jumbling round our heads. When I was training to be a preacher my
college lecturer always told me that a good sermon had one big idea which you
keep on repeating, or working towards.
Well this week I have not been able to get my thoughts down to one big
idea. Because the event that dominates
all of our thinking this morning is one that reduces all our ideas to
fragments, to rubble around us.
Jesus referred to us as
lost sheep. All we like sheep have gone
astray. That sounds like a good
description of how we feel. So what is
it that we have lost this week?
We may feel so much
shock and grief for those in New York and Washington, but an equal shock and
grief has been placed in us over what these events say about the nature of our
world. Again we are faced with the two
sides of technological progress, the questions about how much the fruits of
modern development and research aid us or turn against us. We have lost again the sense that the world
we are creating is a safe place. It
could have been nerve gas, nuclear weapons.
It could have been us. We have
lost any sense of security and safety.
Tony Blair said that mass terrorism is now the new evil in our world
which we must come together to defeat and eradicate. The problem is, unlike the old days when the enemy was a country
which could be identified, the new threat to the very safety of this planet is
one which can rarely be spotted.
And while we can try
and find a particular scapegoat for this event, in a real way we have lost any
illusions we may have had about ourselves.
As Bishop Michael said at a service of remembrance in Regent Circus on Friday,
no one who has been whisked to the top of the World Trade Centre can fail to
marvel at human creativity and ingenuity.
But no one who saw the collapse of the twin towers can fail to be struck
dumb by the capacity for human evil, an evil which if we are honest lies in
each of our hearts. As the Pope said in his statement this week: “The human heart has depths from which
schemes of unheard-of ferocity sometimes emerge, capable of destroying in a
moment the normal daily life of a people.”
I'm wondering what your first reaction was, your first thought about
what we should do to those who had done this crime. Because our culture trains us for revenge. Hollywood has told us that anyone who takes
on America gets what they deserve.
Steve Dunleavy the in the New York Post wrote this the day after:
"The response to this unimaginable 21st century Pearl Harbour should be as
simple as it is swift-kill them. No, I
don't mean hound them, arrest them, extradite them. I mean a gunshot between the eyes, blow them to smithereens,
poison them if you have to.” I believe
if we are honest with ourselves such thoughts and feelings may have passed even
momentarily through our own minds and hearts.
Hatred and violent thoughts affect all of us in some way. We should not, especially after a week like
this, have illusions about ourselves as a race any more. The worst thing about the day for one
columnist was the struggle on the faces of the children who watched it, trying
to come to terms with a new kind of world where this thing could happen.
And as we watched
people fall from the building, one couple hand-in-hand, we may have again lost
any certainty about our own lives. We
have been reminded of our own fragility, the precarious nature of our existence. Many of those working in the World Trade
Centre or the Pentagon would have been the epitome of successful, achieving,
gifted folk. And now they are gone.
And even though we're
here this morning, we may have lost a sense of God. Where was he? Why did he
watch it happen? There are so many
points at which he could have intervened, changed the course of those terrible
events. We may have lost the ability to
pray, to think clearly about him. There
may be a cloud between us and him. We
may have come here with few words for him, only groans and silence. And yet this may be our deepest prayer. This morning, in our questions which lie
beyond words, we come to receive an answer beyond words, in bread and wine, the
body and blood of Jesus broken and crucified.
So we are aware of
their loss, and we are becoming aware of ours.
I pray that I may feel my lostness deeply, that we may know ours. Because it is only the lost who can be
found. It is only those who have been
brought low that can be lifted up. We
come here because we believe the shepherd is on the lookout for us, he is
searching for us in our lostness. We
can't hope to understand everything, but we can hope to be found. And we can pray that as an old way of seeing
our world collapses, new ways of seeing it may be found. We need to look forward now. Because as Soren Kierkegaard said, “Life can
only be understood backwards, but it can only be lived forwards."
So what can be found
out of the rubble of this disaster? We
can hope that events such as this create a new capacity within us for
compassion. When we are faced again
with the fragility of our own lives, the gift of those we know, then we may
begin to treat each other with new depths of appreciation, to harbour our
grudges more lightly, to initiate forgiveness more readily, to search for
Christ in each other more eagerly. The
horror stories are being supplemented now by stories of love and solidarity and
sacrifice. Ian McEwan wrote in the Guardian yesterday how many of the last
words of people trapped in the World Trade Centre were repeated again and again
"I love you". While the
terrorists attacked with hatred, he wrote, the victims’ last words were
love. May we find a new compassion.
But may that compassion extend into new
areas of our world. Even at this early
stage some commentators have been saying that we need to ask ourselves this
tough question: "What is it in the way that we are living, organising our
societies, and treating each other that makes violence seem plausible to so
many people?" We may tell
ourselves that the current violence has "nothing to do" with the way
that we've learned to close our ears when told that one out of every three
people on this planet does not have enough food, and that one billion are
literally starving.
We may reassure ourselves that the
hoarding of the world's resources by the richest society in world history, and
our frantic attempts to accelerate globalization with its attendant
inequalities of wealth, has nothing to do with the resentment that others feel
toward us. We may tell ourselves that the suffering of refugees and the
oppressed have nothing to do with us--that's a different story that is going on
somewhere else. But we live in one world, increasingly interconnected with
everyone, and the forces that lead people to feel outrage, anger and
desperation eventually impact on our own daily lives.
So a truly brave response to this tragedy
will demand from us as Christians a capacity to look at the more difficult
areas of injustice in the world which we have so far been able to ignore, which
our hearts have not been moved by, and to ask ourselves whether these places
are those in which violence can be nurtured as the last resort of those who
have no real voice. We need to find a
determination that the future of this planet, though fragile, is precious and
worth fighting for. But we need to find
a sense that future solutions am not found just in our own societies, but in
those where poverty and injustice are found.
Perhaps here in Swindon it's an opportunity for us to look at our relationships
with those of other faiths. They are
under threat, they are feeling scared by what is going on. We have the opportunity to find and initiate
a new offer of friendship with them.
And in recognising this evil, may we find
a new sense of God's grace, a new sense that we are sheep who are truly lost
and the need to be carried home. The love of God is indescribable but a old
Jewish legend does a pretty good
job. It describes what happened when God created man. The legend says God
took into counsel the Angels that stood about his throne. The Angel of
Justice said; 'Create him not, for if you do he will commit all kinds of
wickedness against his fellow man; he will be hard and cruel and dishonest
and unrighteous.' The Angel of Truth
said, 'Create him not, for he will be
false and deceitful to his brother and even to Thee.' The Angel of Holiness
stood and said; 'Create him not, he will follow that which is impure in
your sight, and dishonor you to your face.'
Then stepped forward the Angel of Mercy, God's most beloved, angel, and
said; 'Create him, our Heavenly Father, for when he sins and turns from the
path of right and truth and holiness I will take him tenderly by the hand,
and speak loving words to him, and then lead him back to you.'
Paul knew that despite being a murderer, a persecutor, the grace of God
had made an example of him in rescuing him.
If we didn't know before this week that we need to be rescued, we know
it now. We can’t do it on our own. A minister at the Riverside Church in New
York City preached a sermon titled
"Why Is God Silent While Evil Rages?" during World War
II. He said: "God does not sit in heaven and do nothing. We frail human beings are not alone the
originators, improvisers, and backers of goodness in this world. There is a power, not ourselves, which makes
for righteousness." We need the
to find again the power for good, the grace to live in an evil world.
And perhaps the
Christian Church may find more strongly now it's vocation to be a
peacemaker. The call for revenge is
strong and persuasive and dominates our culture. Take this editorial from the Philadelphia Daily News from
Wednesday: "Revenge. Hold onto
it. Go to bed thinking it. Wake up chanting it. Because nothing less than revenge is called
for today. The grief for our dead will
be deep and enduring. In the days that
are coming, as the dead are finally counted, our rage will only build. And every time we look at the skyline of New
York City, or step into an aeroplane, or turn our calendars to nine, 1-1, we
will remember your actions, and crave only one thing: blood for blood."
We are not surprised by
these feelings. But we know they are
not our vocation. Because we can only
deny the terrorists their victory by refusing to submit to a world created in
their image. We are called to be those
who love our enemies, who rise above the violence. As the Chinese proverb puts it, “Just because the dog bites you,
it doesn't mean that you bite the dog.”
Henri Nouwen told a parable about an old man who used to meditate each
day
be the Ganges River in India.
One morning he saw a scorpion floating on the water. When the scorpion
drifted near the old man he reached to rescue it but was stung by the
scorpion. A bit later he tried again
and was stung again, the bite swelling
his hand painfully and giving him much pain.
Another man passing by saw
what was happening and yelled at the mediator, "Hey, stupid old man,
what's
wrong with you? Only a fool would risk
his life for sake of an ugly, evil
creature. Don't you know you could kill
yourself trying to save that
ungrateful scorpion?"
The old man calmly replied, "My friend, just because it is in the
scorpion's
nature to sting, does not change my nature to save."
The test of our faith,
where we find it best, is in our response to evil. In our lostness, may we find new depths to our faith, to God's
grace and to our calling to be those who bring peace. May we find God as we pray without words, with groans, and in the
Spirit. I would like to conclude with
some words from Rev Doctor Riad Jarjour, General Secretary of the Middle East
Council of Churches in a message he sent to the American people. “We break one bread and are one body. Holding to that reality with a firm grip,
you will rise above this tragic moment and, with you, we too will rise. Let us together seek a healing of the
nations, and overcome this and all evil with good.”
In Christ's name and in
his peace that passes understanding.