Speaking God’s Language: A Response to September 11

Preached September 23, 2001

Sometimes the words of scripture seem to be written just for us…just today…exactly where we are, here and now. When we hear the words of the prophet Amos…words about the sun going down at noon…words about the earth being darkened in broad daylight…words about feasts being turned into mourning and songs being turned into lamentation…we see the rubble In New York and in Washington, and we ask if perhaps these words were written just for us.

These words from the prophet Amos are full of God’s pain, and full of God’s lament for God’s people. Over the past days and weeks we have seen so much to grieve and lament about…It is, perhaps, a comfort to know that God’s grief is even greater than ours; and it is both sobering and, somehow, sustaining to discover how deeply God suffers when people make choices that are destructive for themselves, and for others.

There are many stories still coming to us from the dust and the ashes of the World Trade Center. Here is one more.

The Archbishop of Wales, Rowan Williams, had flown to New York a few days before the terrorist attack. He was at Trinity Church, Wall Street, when planes crashed into the towers only a few blocks away. In an interview with the Church Times, he talked about what happened next.

When the first plane hit, the people with him asked him to pray. So he did, and then he found a smoke mask, and his companions found smoke masks, and they all stumbled out into the hall. The hall was filled with smoke. The hall was also filled with preschool children from the Trinity Church daycare center. With his companions, the archbishop helped the children get outside. When they got to the street, the air was filled with stone dust and with more black smoke. It wasn’t daylight, and it wasn’t night. It was something ghastly in between. They all wandered in this half-light for awhile. They huddled in a Portakabin. They prayed. Eventually the archbishop and his companions found the police, and the police found busses, and the busses drove everyone to the east side of Manhattan, and to safety.

Rowan Williams is a great, bearded bear of a man who just happens to be a first-class theologian. So early in the morning, the morning of September 12, he went out walking, and thinking, and praying and having some serious conversations with God. Then, because he is a theologian, he wrote down what he had thought about and prayed about and talked to God about, and sent it to his friends, who put what he wrote on the internet…which is where I read it, and why you’re hearing it this morning.

What he says is this. He says he remembers the strong feeling, ‘Now I know a little about what it is like for so many human beings, Israelis and Palestinians now, and Iraquis a few years ago. He says he could only thank God for the opportunity to give room in his heart for the experience of those who live with the threat of terror and death every day.

Then he said something very important. Very theological, because he is a theologian, and very important. He reminded us that Jesus already knows everything there is to know about terror and death. Anyone’s terror. Anyone’s death. My death. Your terror. The death of a mail-clerk on the 93^rd floor of the World Trade Center. The terror of a family on a hijacked plane. All that terror, all that death, is terror and death that Jesus already knows about because Jesus has already experienced it in his own body, broken for us. So, when we talk to God about terror and death…or when we scream at God about terror and death, or when we simply stand is silence before God in the midst of terror and death, God knows what we are talking about.

When we talk to God about what happened on the morning of September 11, says the archbishop, we might say some nasty things. We might talk in terms of hatred and rejection, nails and spears, nail-bombs and air-strikes, more terror attacks, more bleeding bodies, more death, and more destruction. If we talk like that, God understands what we are saying, and forgives us for saying it before the words are out of our mouths. But God refuses to answer us in the same way. God’s word, which is Christ Jesus, has nothing to do with hatred or rejection, or nail bombs or air-strikes, or the bleeding bodies of children in New York or in Jerusalem or in Kabul. God does not answer terror and death with more terror and death. God speaks a different language. And God tries, over and over again, to teach us to speak the language God speaks. If we are going to show forth God’s glory in the world, we need to learn how to speak the way God does.

There are ways we can learn to speak God’s language better, even when so much of what we see and hear around us, and so much of what we feel inside ourselves, uses the language of retribution and revenge. Today I would like to suggest two ways we can learn to speak God’s language better.

The first suggestion comes from a rabbi named Michael Lerner. Rabbi Lerner asks us to stretch our imaginations, to remember and to recognize the sacred in all other human beings. This is harder than it sounds. Of course, it is no stretch to recognize and respond to the sacred quality of the lives of two little girls, one aged 2 and the other aged 7, who died on American Airlines Flight 77 with their parents. When we speak the language of God, we also say that the lives of children living in Afghanistan are sacred. We remember before God that parents and grandparents in Kabul will mourn for their own 2-year old daughters and 7 year old granddaughters and 20 year old sons as deeply as we mourn for ours, and we pray not only for our own families, but for families in Afghanistan as well. When we speak the language of God, we can even speak the truth that the lives of the men who hijacked four planes on the morning of Sept. 11…those lives, too, were sacred to God. God mourns with us over what those lives became, but it is still God’s will that they come to God’s mercy, and to God’s peace, if they will.

These are hard words to hear. They are hard words to say. But they are words that point us toward the language God would have us speak.

Remembering the sacred quality of every human life is a fine first way to begin speaking the language of God. A second way to speak the language of God comes when we are willing to hear the language of God. And in order to hear the voice of God speaking the language of God, we need to pray. As we heard in the second reading today, we are to offer supplications, prayers, and intercessions for all people in high position, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life. Let us pray, now, for them, and for our enemies (BCP # 19 p 820; BCP #6 p 816).