I remember September 11, 2001. That Tuesday, at 8.45am, I was standing in line in an airport. I, along with countless others, watched in horror as acts of murder were committed in front of us, on television screens. Because I was traveling, I was wearing a clergy collar. Within minutes, strangers began asking questions. I was called upon for answers on God's behalf.
So I don't minimize the grief.
But I do disagree with the national myth that pervades around this day. There was nothing unique about September 11th. The world didn't fundamentally change. It was business -- violent business -- as usual.
In the hours and days that followed that followed 9am, Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I was called upon again and again for a dabar Yahweh -- the word of The Lord.
The following Sunday, the Lectionary Gospel text was from Luke 15. Jesus' story of the Lost Sheep. Many pastors stuck with the assigned text, speaking about God's amazing grace and expansive love, many of them mentioning God's love for people of all faiths and nationalities, for those who perished. Some of this seemed sentimental, but still, comforting. Many preachers, including me, decided that what grieving people need most is reassurance and comfort and forsook the lectionary in order to find a consoling text. I chose Genesis 1.1-5.
It seems odd, at first, until you realize a few things about that text.
Scholars believe these verses originated in the heart of Israel's Exile.
Think about that. Your country pillaged, your greatest building (the Temple itself) destroyed, your cities wrecked, your people dead or carted off to a foreign land. In other words, these words were first proclaimed amidst national desolation. In listening for the word of The Lord for September 11th, I heard Genesis 1.
All the chatter on tv said "America under attack". I couldn't count the number of times I'd heard "nation at peril". But I knew the biblical language was more honest: We were "a formless void".
By that Sunday, only five days after the mass-murderous tragedy, we'd learnt our lessons (or at least we thought we'd learnt our lessons): The CIA was clueless, national security was an oxymoron and innocent people, just doing their jobs, were dead in order for other murderers to teach us other political lessons. I looked into the faces of perpetrators that flashed on our screens, hoping to find at least shadows of a shared humanity, some kind of explanation for such violence. I wished there had only been one -- that would have made it easier. Even now, thirteen years later, I'm still looking at those faces, desperate for the Light to shine on them.
Thing is, the feelings of vulnerability and fragility that we felt in those hours -- those are the closest America came to rationality. We have always been more exposed than we thought. There was nothing special about the violence that day. September 11th happens everyday, somewhere, for someone. That Tuesday, it happened to be us.
It's madness to give guns to others, expecting those guns are never turned on us. It's madness to expect decades of injustice and poverty, of escalating violence, could be kept over there and never here. Jesus has always been right in his prediction about what happens when we humans take up swords.
I'm sure that, in ancient Israel, there were folks who sincerely believed that the thick walls around Jerusalem couldn't be breached, that the vast Temple would stand forever. And when this crumbled in a weekend, dark despair went with them into exile. It was night, like that cloud covering the sun on a once perfect Manhattan September Tuesday.
And what then? In the darkest days of their exile, isn't it amazing that Israel risked some of its most pushy, strong poetry like Genesis 1? Declaring in full throated joy, "In the beginning, when there was nothing but formless void, then God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was".
Contrast that with our American first word. With every American word since. Vengeance! A cowering fear that erupts in bitterness. That's what I'd expect from Israel. But no. These exiles heard God say to their formless void: "Light!"
And this is where we Americans mess up. Every time.
Light isn't a word we can speak. It must be spoken over us, for us. It's an overheard word, in the conversation between God and the formless void. All this to say, the word of the Lord here is a graced word.
No word we speak -- not mine, not the President's, not a counselor's -- can raise up mountains when everything lies in darkness. This is a sovereign act, a divine command, a creative promise: "Light!"
That's because the trouble, this "formless void", is always serious business. I'm not dismissing what happened that Tuesday, 13 years ago today. I'm calling it what it is. It's not a changed world, or an act of war. It's a desperate darkness, a void, formless and unnamed. And in that darkness, a divine act: "Light!"
If there's not a God who delights at bringing light out of night, who likes nothing better than to go one-on-one with the void, then we are -- quite frankly -- without hope and my little words of comfort in the face of our shared despair are pointless.
This. This is the Good News about which we preachers speak. It isn't about armies or bring justice to enemies. No, that's just more bad news.
The Good News: God's will for the world will not be stumped. You were right to look for clues in the faces of heroic firefighters and heroic mothers who, even with the one most dear to them ripped from them in death, are heroically not bitter, not hate-filled. The creative lover that had the first word shall also have the last. All evidence to the contrary, God's love is stronger than human hate because that's the way God has set up the world.
In life and death, in life beyond death, there is only one word. At the end, it's the same word as at the beginning, that by God: A light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.