Last week, I wrote about the speed at which the years seem to pass when it comes to raising children and serving in the church. It does seem just like yesterday when we took our now-4th-Grader to daycare for the first time. And, it seems like yesterday when I began my first official “church job” on August 22, 2001.
Twenty-five years ago, today – just a few weeks after I started working at Amity Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina – I arrived in the office on a Tuesday morning. The pastor was out of town – actually on a cruise with a large group of church members – and I settled in to begin my day. It was September 11 – a date that had never had a significant meaning to me. At one point, around 9 AM that morning, the phone rang, I heard the church secretary’s voice answer it, and then she came and knocked on my door. Someone had called to say that something terrible had happened in New York City. We wheeled the television into the office, turned on the local Charlotte station and saw smoke billowing from one of the World Trade Center towers. A plane had hit the building. Over the next few hours, we watched and heard the horrific scene get worse and worse, in New York, and in Washington DC, and in a field in Pennsylvania.
A recent article from The Atlantic magazine marks the 25th Anniversary of the September 11th attacks and describes the scene that met first-responders who arrived on site in lower Manhattan, minutes after the first plane crashed. The description was so ghastly that I both wanted to throw the magazine across the room in revulsion and I couldn’t stop reading it. The attackers killed 3,000 people – many in horrific ways – from every walk of life. Some of the members of our church lost friends and colleagues on that day. Our own Bev Hoover worked for the American Red Cross and helped to oversee disaster relief efforts. That day changed the course of history (some of us, quite personally) and changed who we are, collectively, as a nation.
You know, it is one thing to think and write about the day, itself – September 11, 2001. And it is another thing to think and write about all that has happened since in our own nation and around the world. The actions of just a few fanatical people destroyed the lives of thousands of people in our own nation on the day, itself. But, it sparked wars on the other side of the world that have lasted decades, destroying whole countries and killing thousands upon thousands (including over 6,000 Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus tens of thousands of injured bodies and spirits of our young military personnel). In our own nation, we saw a coming-together in the days following the attacks (especially in support of first-responders and the military), but have also seen an increase in the quelling of dissenting views and voices, intolerance of neighbors who might not look or pray or speak differently from the majority of people around them, an increase in surveillance, and an increase in unchecked power by people in power – all in the name of keeping us safe. . . but has it? In some ways, yes, but at what cost to our humanity?
The writer Wendell Berry, who died a week ago, was a fierce proponent of the dignity of human life. . . all human life. In reflecting on who we had become since the start of the so-called “War on Terror” (the latest in a very long list of human conflicts) Berry did not mince words:
To know that people would run to help [after a terror attack], perhaps at the risk of their lives, is consoling and reassuring. But we have got to acknowledge that the help that comes after violence has been done, though it undeniably helps, is not a solution to violence.
The solution, many times more complex and difficult, would be to go beyond our ideas, obviously insane, of war as the way to peace and of permanent damage to the ecosphere as the way to wealth. Actually to help our suffering of one man-made horror after another, we would have to revise radically our understanding of economic life, of community life, of work, and of pleasure. . .
To learn to meet our needs without continuous violence against one another and our only world would require an immense intellectiual and practical effort, requiring the help of every human begin perhaps to the end of human time.
This would be worthy of the name “human.” It would be fascinating and lovely. – Wendell Berry, “The Commerce of Violence,” 2013.
Over the past 25 years, what have we truly learned about what it means to be better human beings? The answer, as Berry writes, is “complex and difficult.” How much of what we are seeking to do as human beings – and as followers of Jesus – gets to the root causes of why there is so much violence in the world, in our own nation, and in our own communities? To what extent are we even capable of the “immense intellectual and practical effort” of trying to be better people and build a world that is fascinating and lovely. . . a little more “. . . on earth as it is in heaven.”
Friends, the years are short and we have work to do. . . God has work to do. . . on us, and in us, and through us. . . for peace, for wholeness, for a better and more Holy way to live. May it be so. . .
Grace and Peace,
John
PS – Even though we are marking the anniversary of the September 11th attacks, this weekend we are also marking our FALL Welcome Sunday. Worship is at 10 AM and a special BBQ lunch and time of fellowship and fun starts at 11 AM. We’ll look forward to seeing you in church!
Prepare for Worship
This Week: “You Owe Me. . .” (Paid in Fullness)
Read Psalm 103
Read Genesis 50:15-21
Read Matthew 18:21-35
Read or sing Hymn # 456 – “Listen, God is Calling”
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