EXODUS 14:19-31
Who of us can ever forget it? A crystalline morning, the sky a cobalt blue, the day itself a perfect late summer benediction. And then it was all shattered. The staff at the church I served in Barrington, RI, went immediately to the church library where, for several hours, we sat transfixed, watching it all unfold on TV. As we stared slack-jawed, the news just kept getting worse. At first we thought it was a small plane that had accidentally flown into the North Tower. Then a second plane hit the South Tower. Then one building collapsed. Then the other. And then, as a final exclamation point, we came to realize it was all intentional, perpetrated by someone who wished us incalculable harm.
Several months later, Mary and I had a chance to visit Ground Zero. What is still vivid to me is the image of a storefront in that same block. Covered in ash, nothing in the store had been touched. Inside the door was a woman’s white shoe lying on its side. And at the checkout counter, the scanner was still blinking—in December. It was as if everything had been frozen in time.
And in a way it had. In one way or another, we have, ever since then, lived with the aftershocks and tried to figure it all out. We have grieved for those who died, we have wondered about our place in the world, and we have asked ourselves a thousand questions. Why would someone do something so monstrous and hideous? What does it say about their religion? How are we supposed to treat the perpetrators? What, as a nation, should be our response?
I confess that the intensity of our shared memory has surprised me this week. Federated’s staff made initial plans for this service back in the late spring, and we anticipated focusing primarily on Rally Day, with a nod to 9/11. In recent weeks, though, it has become abundantly clear that the wound from that day ten years ago is still raw. Some of us lost relatives and friends in that four-pronged attack. Some of us had our basic view of the world altered drastically. And all of us have lived with a low-level fear, along with notably more rigorous security measures. Summing it up concisely, Krista Tippett, who hosts a radio show on matters of faith, says that 9/11 was “an experience of mortality and frailty and vulnerability.” And the strange truth of the matter, and what makes today a still raw experience, is that, as Serene Jones, the president of New York’s Union Theological Seminary, says, all of the wounds of that day have not yet been healed. How, she asks, can we memorialize something that’s still happening? (
http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media_player/popup.php?name=being/programs/2011/09/08/20110908_remembering_forward_ccp_911_128).
So this morning we pause, as we did at the beginning of today’s service, in silence. We pause to remember. We pause to mourn. And we pause, not just to look backward—which is crucial—but to look ahead.
One of the stranger characteristics of human life is that, in order to make sense of it, we tell stories. And what may be stranger still is that those stories we tell are always up for grabs. We can tell them from any number of angles. One person fails a class in college and feels forever guilty and inadequate. Another person fails the same class and uses it as an incentive to succeed and prosper. And we ourselves can take that same event and cast it in a different light as time goes on: at first it may have been a failure; now it’s motivation. Same event, different stories.
Now we dare never be so naïve as to assume a new story can be told at will and that we can easily make it mean what we want it to mean. Life isn’t that easy to manipulate. But neither is the opposite true, that an event’s meaning is cast in stone. We have the ability to reframe life’s central events. It’s in the story we tell.
Many of you have seen the recently released movie version of “The Help.” One of its striking scenes is of Aibilene, an African-American servant and the story’s heart and soul, telling the little white girl she essentially raises, a girl who doesn’t get anywhere near the kind of care from her own parents that she ought to get, “You is kind. You is smart. You is important.” The message the girl gets from her parents is that she’s worthy only of being ignored and teased and dismissed. Aibilene has a radically different take on it. No, she says, you’re the kind of girl who is kind and smart and important. Which story the girl hears is vitally important. It makes all the difference in the world.
The ancient Israelites knew that, too. As a small, insignificant Middle Eastern country, they could have assumed they were totally irrelevant on the world stage. They could have thought of themselves as bereft and victimized and worthless. The story they could have told themselves was that they were a tiny band of nobodies, held in captivity by a world power, with nothing to redeem them or give them hope. But that’s not the story they told. Instead, they constantly trumpeted an entirely different message: God had brought them out of captivity in Egypt, and they had a distinct and holy purpose. The story they told was that though they might have appeared to be locked in, they nevertheless found a way through the waters, a way into the wilderness, a way to be on the journey toward a promised land. The story they told about themselves, in other words, was that they were a people on the move; they were a people who were special; they were a people who had a distinct and crucial mission in life—their own version of kind and smart and important. And all of this was possible because they had been created by, and were being led by, a grand and glorious God.
So what’s the story we’re telling about ourselves in the wake of the terror of 9/11? Certainly it’s a story of grief for the losses we still feel. Certainly it’s the story of a vulnerability that continues. Certainly it’s a story of enemies who could hurt us deeply, enemies who still wish us ill. But here’s the question: are we simply a people who grieve and cower and edgily defend ourselves? Is that the whole story? Or are we instead much more than that? Are we a people who find grace in the wilderness? Are we a people who find meaning in fighting the world’s poverty and enmity? Are we a people who still see the presence of God all around us? What’s the story we tell ourselves?
As people of faith, a good part of the story has to be this: no matter what happens to us, God is with us. Just as with the Israelites incomprehensibly finding a way out of Egypt, the conviction we live with is that no matter how overwhelming the odds, the Spirit of God can bring about a new reality.
So our fundamental charge is to tell the story of God and the ways we have grown and been changed for the better. This week on Krista Tippett’s website, she talked about looking not just backward but also forward. And she wrote about some of the blessings of the 9/11 anniversary: “We are more aware of our global interconnectedness this decade on. [And how right she is: we’re much more aware of how intertwined the entire world is.] We are better equipped to understand that our dramatic moment of fear and grieving, of weakness in our strongest fortresses, is an experience many people across the world live with much of the time. [Difficult as it may be for us, can we see the blessing in realizing more acutely the sort of suffering so many of the world’s people go through every day?] We’ve realized that the Arab world we suddenly saw as full of enemies was also full of human beings who want the same dignity and democracy as [we do]” [a truth lived out vividly this year with the dramatic “Arab spring”](
http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2011/ccp-911/emailnewsletter.shtml).
Those are some of the macro blessings, blessings on a large scale.
And on a small scale, on the most intimate of levels, there are all the little ways life and hope have been restored. Local photographer Amy Sancetta was in New York that day and watched the towers fall. It was, of course, a devastating experience. Several weeks later, she found herself back in New York covering the Yankees in the World Series. “That turned out to be a healing experience,” she says. “I was able to shoot something good, happy and joyful. Who would have thought shooting a Yankee game would be a healing experience?” (Chagrin Valley Times, Sept. 8, 2011, p. 2).
And in one of the richest of blessings, who can forget the heroism and courage exhibited by countless angels of mercy on that awful day? The firefighters running up those stairs into a doomed building, doing everything they could to save lives. The man rapidly descending a staircase and seeing a group of women on the 68th floor not moving and wondering why, until he saw that they were with their friend in a wheelchair, and weren’t going to leave her; he carried the wheelchair-bound woman down, and they all made it to safety. Out of carnage such beauty. Out of devastation such hope.
“Can we fight through the miasma and find our way to some kind of light?” asks Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker. And the answer is an unabashed “yes.” Dorothy Day was a young girl when the San Francisco earthquake happened. In its wake she saw an incredible outpouring of compassion and care, and as an adult she asked the question, “Why can’t people live this way all the time?”
(http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media_player/popup.phpname=being/programs/2011/09/08/20110908_remembering_forward_ccp_911_128).
And we can live that way. We do live that way. And if we look for it, we will see it. Animosities are erased. Enemies are made into friends. Forgiveness is practiced. Listen to one man’s story: “Through an unlikely series of coincidences, a retired American pilot named Dan Cherry found the F-4 Phantom fighter jet that he had piloted decades ago when he served two tours of duty in Southeast Asia; it was sitting junked and neglected in a thicket of weeds outside a VFW club somewhere in the Midwest. The sight of the plane took him back to April 1972. In a dogfight with a North Vietnamese Russian-made MiG-21, he fired a heat-seeking rocket that blew the wing off of the enemy plane. Cherry recalled seeing the plane’s pilot with his arms broken, ejecting himself from the plane and parachuting to the ground 30 miles outside of Hanoi.
“Years later, the memory launched Cherry on a search for the North Vietnamese pilot, and in 2008 Cherry found him in Ho Chi Minh City. ‘Welcome to my country,’ Nguyen Hong My said. ‘Glad to see you are in good health. I hope we can be friends.’ Cherry went to the man’s house for dinner, met his family and held his one-year-old grandson. Later Hong My returned the favor and visited Cherry in the United States. Dying to their old selves, two former enemies were reborn as friends” (The Christian Century, Sept. 6, 2011, p. 18).
That’s the hopeful legacy of 9/11. And Rally Day is our reminder that it can and will happen. We will leave here today willing to support each other in our struggles. We will depart more prepared to forgive. We will go to our family and friends ready to hug them and listen to them and care for them. We will be more eager to serve homeless families here at Federated with Family Promise. We will identify our “Gifts, Passions and Skills” (GPS) in service to a God who has done wonders in our own lives. We will seek to serve the wider world. We will join the various ministries whose banners will be displayed in just a moment, and we will create our own new and vibrant ministries, and we will be a church of 2000 ministers. Because in the wake of that disaster of a decade ago, that’s the sort of warmth and care and passion for justice God wants from us. And it’s the very thing God makes possible. We have left Egypt. We have passed through the waters. Let’s move toward the promised land.