by Peter Laarman
September 16, 2001
My problem, our problem this morning is that there is too much to say, too much to feel, too much to do. Karen and I decided early on to let silence do some of the speaking this morning, and we still think that's a wise choice. Nevertheless, you also expect your pastors to point some direction and offer some guidance.
The first word I want to offer today is a pastor's word. It is prompted by the overwhelming reality of this week, which is the reality of death: the sickening reality of so many gone, so many not accounted for, so many grieving and afraid.
In the catalogue of earthly horrors, fear and death are siblings. It is right and natural to be afraid, but it is extremely important in these terrible days to remember that love casts out fear and that we cannot defend the living and serve the interest of life -- as we must -- when we are too afraid of dying.
I like my life as much as anyone does. I like it even more than ever lately, since a precious new love entered it. And yet I also feel that there are more important things than the question of whether I will live or die. It's not the mystical part of faith that tells me this; it's just the faith part of faith, the basic information: God is good, the everlasting arms are real, and though it felt like the end of the world down here Tuesday morning, it sure didn't feel like the end of love. So my first pastor's word is to let your love help you get rid of your fear. That's why you are at church today: not to hear more of the ranting you hear on TV but to feel some of the love everlasting.
My second pastor's word is about compassion. The question has been asked over and over, Why does it take something like this to bring out the best in people -- the brother love and sister love, the courage, the sacrificial spirit? My answer is that it doesn't take something like this to bring it out. It's there all the time, but we haven't created good vehicles, good vessels, for bearing and sustaining this great treasure of human kindness. Collectively and individually we lack storage space. I'll speak a little later about the collective aspect. But right now let me ask you, as a child of God, what will you do and what will I do in terms of daily practice to strengthen compassion and sustain solidarity with everyone who suffers in this city and world? Our compassion doesn't have to be episodic and event-related, but it will be that if that's what we are willing to settle for.
Finally, let me speak as a pastor about the craving for justice. I've heard a lot of talk, some of it preacher talk and some of it good gray liberal talk, about containing the anger and avoiding the retaliation response to this crisis. And, of course, as a preacher and as a good gray liberal I agree with all of it. But I also think there is room for anger at this time, and that we deceive ourselves if we think we can move right away to just action without acknowledging our anger. Anger is usually regarded as the most dangerous of human emotions, but I believe there is also such a thing as righteous indignation. If we don't allow ourselves to feel any of that indignation, then we can't even be part of the national conversation at this time. Our challenge as people of faith is to help ourselves and others discern the difference between insisting that justice is done and seeking the kind of blind and destructive revenge that only escalates the cycle of violence.
This word about anger takes me to the heart of what I want to say this morning, not so much as a pastor so much but as a citizen and an ordinary Christian. I have spoken about the overwhelming reality of death. Now let me speak about the overwhelming yearning for transfiguration and the need for such transfiguration.
When I thought about a text for today, of course I turned over in my mind the many texts of consolation, especially those from familiar psalms and from Paul's letters to the Romans and Corinthians which have such wonderful passages about how nothing can separate us from the love of God.
But being me, I ended up dwelling instead in the strange and troubling oracles that form the prologue to the Book of Isaiah. I'm not going to read any of this material, but I urge you to read it, especially the oracles of chapters 1, 3, and 5. What is going on here is very different from the world of Psalm 46, where God is in the midst of the city and therefore the city shall not be moved. Here God is in the midst of a city whose walls are coming down and whose foundations are unstable and crumbling. God has ceased to hear the prayers of the Jerusalem priesthood and is abandoning the city to its ferocious Assyrian attackers. And why? Because the rich have despoiled the land. Because the rulers and the priests have conspired to grind the faces of the poor. Because the leaders have made ill-judged security alliances with foreign powers rather than basing their security on the creation of a just society.
As I read and pondered, the world of these oracles seemed eerily familiar. But the oracles of Isaiah couldn't give me a text I could preach this morning, because if I preached them I would sound just like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, attributing this horrible disaster to the hand of God, only doing it for a left wing rather than a right wing purpose. That is the last thing I want to do.
I don't know where God's hand is in this, or if God's hand is in it at all.
I do feel, however, that we need to be wary of false security schemes and be sensitive to the possibility--just the possibility--that massive injustice and massive insecurity could be related phenomena in our world today.
I am going to read you just a little bit from Isaiah 28 in which the prophet asks the question, How will God even be able to teach a people who are so far from the right path? How will a deluded people even recognize a word from God in the context of panic and destruction?
The burden of this text is that the divine message will be lost on most people at a time like this--the message will be received by most as sheer terror -- but that it might be discerned by a saving remnant, by those who remain open to the idea that building a just community and restoring community with God are one and the same thing.
So let me conclude by posing this question: What would a saving remnant look like today, at a time when nothing less than a transfiguration of values will suffice? How will a faithful band of citizens and true patriots respond to a national emergency that is already sweeping everything before it and transforming society in deeply troubling ways?
First, we must resist a kind of false unity, the mindless "united we stand" sloganeering that blunts and diminishes people's capacity to render independent judgment and engage in critical thinking. Unity at what price? Unity achieved by demonizing others? Unity if there are calls for suspension of ordinary liberties? Unity if there is horrific new violence and terror inflicted this time by our country and in our name?
Second, we must absolutely resist calls for wholesale revenge. Revenge against whom? Against all who harbor even mild feelings of resentment against America and who question the American model of globalization? Let us try to remember that these external devils that so torment us -- from Noriega to Saddam Hussein, and yes, to Osama Bin Laden -- are all devils that our own CIA Cold War machinations helped to spawn. In other words, watch where you point that bony finger of accusation, Uncle Sam, because it's going to curl back and point right back to you.
Third, as citizens and as people of faith, we must be part of a new conversation about America and the world. I was struck by the force of a short e-mail I received this week from my brother, a scientist and development specialist whom no one would think of as especially "political." Yet he wrote of his strong feeling that this is the time for Americans to wake up to how extremely stingy and extremely isolationist we have become in the context of the wider world community.
Fourth, difficult as it is for Americans to do this, we need to think hard about the particular pain that America's radically one-sided Middle East policy creates within the Islamic world. We have never faced this honestly for obvious reasons. But American Jews have as much stake as anyone else has in facing it honestly now. It's not a discussion we can have apart from Jews, but by all means let us have it together.
Fifth, if we are ever to have a clue about where America really stands in relation to the rest of the world, we have to break out of the mind-numbing embrace of the corporate media. Everyone remarks how good the coverage has been. With respect to the details of a monumental disaster, yes, the coverage has been good. But analysis of the big picture has been terrible: xenophobic, sentimental, and blind to the extent to which this country is simply out of sync with the rest of the world and mistrusted for its arrogance.
Sixth, we must be much more alert to what my friend Jim Lawson calls the forces of spiritual wickedness in America. It's not just looters and credit card scammers who are exploiting the crisis for criminal purposes. It's also the pin-striped smoothies, the Trent Lotts, who are going to use this horrible occasion to push all kinds of unrelated schemes and scams. They are talking about rushing through a cut in the capital gains tax. Yeah, that'll really show those bastards we mean business, won't it?! In order to combat such wickedness on the part of patriotic scoundrels, we will have to create local and national networks, strong networks of conscience, that will have the capacity to keep the national response to tragedy from veering into the twilight zone of right-wing lunacy.
That's a long list of "musts" and "shoulds." And where will the strength and energy to do all of this come from? Friends, there is that cornerstone Isaiah speaks of, that precious cornerstone, the testament of the ages that God walks with us whenever we walk in the light, whenever we give rest to the weary, whenever we defend the widow and the orphan, and whenever we do the hard day-to-day work of building just community.
There is the abundant testimony that God will give us the words we need to speak when even speech has failed us. That God still makes a way where there is no way.
Moreover, we know deep down that God is in the midst of the city even when its walls are tumbling and fire is raining down from the sky.
Let us then free ourselves from paralyzing fear and from every other constraint that holds us back from the work we are called to do at this hour, and the work we are so privileged to be able to do, which is to bring forth a new world from the ashes of the old. Let this be a different kind of ground zero for us: a starting point for a humbler and more just America.
There is a beautiful city that no terror weapon can destroy or disfigure. You and I are part of that beautiful city. There are lots and lots more like us. We know that from the illuminated faces we have seen in the streets of New York this week. Let us seek each other out, grow stronger in the company of the saints of this hour, and together rebuild a city that has a firm foundation, a city whose ultimate builder and maker is God.
Rev. Peter Laarman is the senior minister of Judson Memorial Church in New York City. This sermon was delivered on 9/16/01.
[posted 12/3/01]
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