Reliving 9/11

Reliving 9/11

Luke 15:1-10
September 16, 2007

Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the
Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners
and eats with them.” So he told them this parable: “Which one of you, having a hundred
sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go
after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his
shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and
neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’
Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than
over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. “Or what woman having
ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and
search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends
and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ Just
so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who
repents.”

This morning I am going to do something I’ve never actually done before, which is
preach the exact same sermon I preached almost 6 years ago to the day. Now, over
the years, I’ve often review my previous sermons on certain passages, and sometimes I
take ideas from them, but mostly I start from scratch, mostly because what God was
saying to the congregation years ago is not what God is saying to us now. Sometimes,
however, you get a snapshot in time in your preaching and you get to hear what God
might be saying to us through what was said years earlier. The sermon you’re about to
hear was preached in Oklahoma City on September 16, 2001, days after 9/11. We
were in the midst of a, admittedly, cheesy sermon series based on Broadway musicals—
I will have you know that I didn’t plan the series—I just had to follow the structure
dictated by the sponsoring church in Dallas! I had been working with the congregation
on developing a completely new congregation for about a year at that point, and
thankfully, just this year, that congregation is now fully independent from its initial
church sponsor, and a member of the Kansas-Oklahoma Conference of the United
Church of Christ.   As I assume you all here were in Coloma, we too were reeling from
the experience, and as I have shared with you before, we had a previously scheduled
ecumenical service on September 13th that turned into a moment of remembrance and
prayer—the place was packed to the rafters with folks. This sermon was preached on
the Sunday following the events of 9/11, and some of it is particular to the moment,
though some of it is not—and its important to remember the context: Oklahoma City, a
city that before 9/11 had experienced the largest act of domestic terrorism in this
country’s history. I want us to think about what has happened since this sermon was
preached, Afghanistan, and then Iraq, and how we are still dealing with the events of
that day, however poorly and misguidely. I have not changed a word, and believe me, I
was tempted to, because the way I said something then was not the way I would say it
now. But I think its important to listen to this moment in time, maybe so that we reflect
who we have become in light of what happened during that horrific day and the many
days that followed.

The events of the last few days have been a horror show, events that I know most of us
thought could never happen has happened, haven’ it? I keep thinking that we as a
nation will never be the same, that life will never feel as secure for us as it once did,
though I think many of you here can relate to being robbed of your sense of security
when Timothy McVeigh walked away from a Ryder truck full of explosives in downtown
Oklahoma City some 6 years ago. I wasn’t here, of course, but I do remember watching
the events unfold on a television set one morning when I was a seminary student in
Atlanta. Moments like the bombing here 6 years ago and the horror of the past few
days have become etched in our minds as markers of time—there is a before and there
is an after. Time becomes divided from now on—Tuesday was one of those days for all
of us, I think. We will now forever trade stories of where we were and what we were
doing when we found out what had happened in New York, in Washington, D.C, and
Pennsylvania. And I think the question before us is not so much the question of “why,”
though I think that such a question is a very valid and worthwhile question, but rather
the question before us is the “what” question, the “what shall we do with this moment,
what can we learn about ourselves as humans in light of this madness, this
insanity?”

This week we had scheduled Beauty and the Beast as the musical that would tie into
our Scripture for this week, but week’s events have shifted the focus, though I think the
Scripture before us and the musical Beauty and the Beast still have something to tell
us, especially in light of what has happened. The Scripture especially reminds us that
we humans really are a mixture of incredible beauty, that we are so valuable to God
that God will take the chance of losing more sheep for our sake, that God will seek us
until we are found, until we are home. We are so valuable in God’s eyes that God
takes chances with us, that God takes chances in his pursuit of us. But the beginning
of this passage reminds us of the shadow side of human beings, the sinful side of
human beings, that side of us that wishes to so easily divide up the world between
sinners and saints, between those who are in and those who are out. And this desire
to divide up the world leads to the sin of self-righteousness, to this arrogance that says
that “I am in and you, you are out.” It is the sin of the Pharisees, who have so quickly
decided that the people Jesus was talking to were beasts of this world and they, they
were, in fact, the beauty of God’s creation, the righteous ones. But the harsh reality is
that we really are a mixture of beauty, of goodness, and beast, of shadows and
sometimes evil. The Pharisees didn’t get it—they thought they were beautiful—which,
in fact, they were, but where the Pharisees went wrong was to think they were ONLY
beautiful. They failed to recognize that they too were as ambiguous as the people they
condemned, that they too were a mixture, an ambiguous mixture of good and evil, light
and shadows, life and death. Self-righteousness, that arrogance that we are only light
and that we are free of shadows, that arrogance makes us into beasts, makes us into
Pharisees, makes us into ugliness itself.

You know, self-righteousness makes us do horrible, horrible things. It makes extremists
think that somehow, someway, it is justifiable to take planes full of people and plow
them into buildings full of yet more people. It makes extremists think that their cause is
so just and the need for attention so important that they are willing to kill mothers and
fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers, brothers and sisters, and children, our
children. Self-righteousness makes the Pharisees think that they are righteous and
these tax collectors are sinners, that these people, these nasty people, are not even
worth being welcomed by Jesus. Self-righteousness makes the physically beautiful
young prince in Beauty and the Beast sneer at the ugly woman at his door, only to find
that real beauty was within rather than without. Self-righteousness divides up the world
between good and evil and yet it fails to recognize that deep division within each of us.
Self-righteousness divides up the world between “us” and “them” and fails so miserably
to see that such division doesn’t exist, at least not in Jesus’ eyes.

In fact, Jesus, I think, tells a little story of how God pursues the lost, how God will leave
the “righteous” to find the lost. This is a story of how much God loves us, but it also a
story told with the express purpose of slapping the face of the Pharisees, because I
think Jesus is being a little bit sarcastic here. I don’t think he really believes that the
world is divided up between righteous and unrighteous and that he thinks that the tax
collectors and sinners are the only ones who are lost and the Pharisees are really the
righteous ones. Rather, I think Jesus is being very sarcastic here so that he can point
to the fact that those who realize that they are in need of grace, that those who know of
their need to simply say, “I am sorry,” both to God and to others, that they are the ones
who really get it. Jesus knows that these Pharisees need to repent as well, especially
of their arrogance, but, because of their self-righteousness, they cannot recognize the
beast within, and so for them it is so easy to divide up the world between us and them,
and because the world is so easily divided up between us and them, they can do all
sorts of things to those they have decided who are evil, to those they have decided are
the “them” of this world. Certainly that is what the hijackers did on Tuesday—they did
not recognize the shadow side of themselves OR their cause, whatever it was, and so
they could find justification for erasing the lives of others for their own self-righteous
reasons.   They have failed to recognize their own need for grace, their own need for
healing, their own need for repentance, their own need for recognition that the beast
resides within each of us, and how it can make us do such horrible, horrible things to
each other. The truth is that the hands that shoveled the bodies into the ovens at
Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen during the Nazi Holocaust were the same hands that
tucked in their own children into their beds at night. It is a failure of self-recognition that
causes hijackers and Pharisees and even us, to do the horrible things that we do to
each other sometimes.

The scary thing for us right now is that we may, in our just outrage at this horrible,
horrible event, that we will fail to recognize that beast within and we too will be
overtaken by our own self-righteousness. I heard from the lips of Colin Powell this
week that it was time to do away with our policy of worrying about “collateral damage” in
our military retaliation to these terrorists—collateral damage, in military terms, is the
death and killing of men, women, and children who are accidentally killed in a military
action. Actually, that is the same mentality that justifies what those terrorists did on
Tuesday—their self-righteousness justified the “collateral damage” of those people in
the Pentagon and in the World Trade Center in the war they think they are fighting with
us. What has made this country great is that we do care about other people—that
“collateral damage” is not how we refer to other human beings—or should ever refer to
other human beings. We must seek justice, not revenge, no matter how instinctual that
desire for revenge is, no matter how the beast within us feels justified to treat our
enemies the same way that we have been treated by them. This past week an Islamic
mosque in Dallas was attacked, and one of the people who did this misguided act of
revenge towards a people who were not at fault, said that he hated Arabs and he
always had. Hate gathers a mob and attacks innocent people, saying self-righteously,
that whether or not they did it personally, they, they—remember how self-righteousness
divides up the world, us and them—they must pay for it. It sure sounds exactly like the
self-righteous justification of the terrorists who did these monstrous deeds on Tuesday
morning, doesn’t it? The question is whether or not we will decide to return beastly
behavior with beastly behavior or whether we will choose the path of Jesus and choose
what is most beautiful about us as God’s creation—which is that incredible capacity for
both justice and mercy at the same time.

I also want to say that I think that this is one of most difficult moments in the history of
this country, and I think it will show forth the kind of people we really are. We must
bring the people who did this to justice, no doubt—that is the righteous and just thing to
do. But let’s not become self-righteous, let’s not do what the Pharisees did in this
passage, when they failed to recognize the beast within, when they failed to recognize
their own capacity to do such horrible acts of hate and destruction. When we choose
to be a people of beauty, when we choose to be a people of love—yes, yes, an
incredible thing to say at this moment—we break that endless cycle of hate and
retribution, something the people of the Middle East have spent hundreds of years
experiencing and suffering from, when we choose love and not revenge, when we
choose justice and not vengeance, we can transform the world. And I also don’t want
us to ever forget that we are also good, that we as God’s creation are capable of
incredible, incredible beauty and goodness. You see that in the people’s reaction and
their willingness to help in anyway after this horrific series of events—and you saw that
goodness here 6 years ago during the aftermath of the Murrah bombing. You know,
Jesus in this passage reminds us that we are worth so much, even in our ambiguity,
even in our personal mixture of good and evil, and that we are worth taking a huge
chance on, both on a cross, and as a single sheep valuable enough to take the chance
of leaving 99 others unattended so that we can be found, so that we can come home
again to our tribe, to the other 99. If we want to be righteous, if we want to be truly
good people, we must recognize who we really are—our beauty, our incredible beauty,
and we must be able to recognize the shadows, the deep shadows within us, that make
us do horrible, brutal things to each other. The good news is that God has seen our
hearts, our ambiguous, tortured hearts and said that all of us, ALL of us, are worth
taking a chance on. Amen and amen.