Message from the District Executive

current calendar

District Personnel

Reports

Florida Congregations and links

Sermons

Speaker Database

Consultation on Youth Task Force

Home

by Bob Reed, bbsbob@earthlink.net

In his panoramic and polemical and profound book And The Band Played On, the journalist Randy Shilts documents the lives of those people first affected in the AIDS epidemic: The first to become sick, the first to speak out, the first offer help. For each of the people he profiles, Shilts mentions that there was one moment for each of the individuals when they knew that life had irrevocably, unbelievably changed. The moment when the realization hits and they are confronted with the fact that can only be captured in these words, "My God, life will never be the same." Beyond that point, life is cleaved into two separate categories, two distinct ways of knowing oneself in time---- Before and After.

This morning, welcome to After.

Before… we were a nation, at least since last November we were told, of red and blue, of heartland and coastland, of liberal and conservative voters. Now we all fly the same colors, colors streaked with the common human elements of our tears.

Before… Manhattan, often referred to by both detractors and devotees alike as an "island off the coast of America", somehow alone, isolated but not much bothered by its ability to stand out. The island is tied now in collective memory and tragedy and evil and heroism with far off places such as Pearl Harbor and Oklahoma City. New York is now where the American heart beats and in the blood spilled there is also where our American heart has come to know what it means to be attacked.

Before… the Twin Towers stood tall, slightly scraped around the edges, bloodied but not at all bowed, singed but not torched. Seeming to mock the attempt eight years ago to bring them down, they continued to stand, impervious, majestic, announcing themselves before all other buildings, in a skyline where so many buildings seem to reach heavenward. Before, a rental truck carrying a bomb, parked underneath, out of sight. Before, the numbers were horrible, but were still accountable, if not acceptable, to our reason. 6 dead, a thousand injured. We could get our minds around that. Now, thousands missing, feared dead, thousands more injured. Now, death in broad daylight, terror descended from the sky. Now, the skyscrapers ground into the dust, a collapsed tomb for the masses contained within its remains.

Before… we remember the sight of the hull of a ship, a ship from many years ago, brought back to life with our own forms of wizardry, and that ship groaning and wailing, splitting in half and sinking downward into the ocean with its human cargo, at least on the big screen. Now, we see two giants fall in upon themselves: The antenna of World Trade Center Number One, the first hit and the second to fall, we witness that antenna falling, and we think of those inside and on the ground, and we keep seeing it over and over and over and we hope that maybe this time it won't collapse, but we know this is no movie, and we see the whiteness of the transmitter being devoured in the dark cover of smoke and exploding concrete and then it is gone from view forever. And so now we say: bring us no more digitally enhanced images, bring us no more special effects. We have seen reality and it is horrific enough. The house lights won't come up and we don't get to leave the theater when this picture is over.

Before… we were innocent, maybe even ignorant, of that which threatened us. Before, we thought mostly of lost luggage, and perhaps of averages of plane failures ranked along with the odds of shark attacks and chances of lightning strikes. Now we wonder how four flights so easily could be taken, how vulnerable are the symbols of our nation, how little security we have, how fragile are our very lives.

Welcome to the After.

What has happened to us, whether you are close by or over a thousand miles, with intimates or friends involved in the attack who might be lost or missing or dead, or maybe the closest you are to those affected is on a TV screen, wherever we might be, the attack of this past Tuesday, September 11th is unprecedented. Because of its very singularity, because it stands out from our national and collective experience, we don't know how exactly to make sense of our pain, our anger, our sorrow, our deep sense of violation, we don't where to put these things. Especially now, less than a week removed, just at the very outset of life in the After.

The names and places invoked that have been placed side by side with the attacks of the past week: Pearl Harbor and Oklahoma City, really don't apply. The destruction of the Twin Towers, the assault on the Pentagon and the downing of the plane outside of Pittsburgh, have a scope and magnitude, in both the level of coordination of the terror planned and in the number of lives lost, that overwhelms even the horrendous and demonic leveling of Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. To say this is not to diminish the sorrow and anguish of what Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols wrought, however, the past week was different in degree and in quantity.

There is even less comparison to be made between Pearl Harbor, and the bombing of the USS Cole last year, which were both unprovoked, undeclared acts of war, but with this major distinction from what we have just witnessed: Pearl Harbor was a military installation, and while military lives are just as valuable and as sacred as civilian lives, at least there's a sort of protocol involved in an offensive against a country's military. This past week we were witness to an enemy that erases any line between combatant and non-combatant, and who additionally and simultaneously made the lives of innocent men and women and children both the means and the target of their cruel wrath. How do we put into words, much less hold in our heads in our tortured imaginings, of the moment when the people aboard those planes realized that their deaths would be only the beginning of the carnage, that their final moments of their lives on this earth had been transformed into an arrow directed by the hands of the hateful and the cruel against the lives of thousands. Such a realization on our parts is the stuff of nightmares, or at least a cause to not be able to close our eyes, knowing the truth of what Shakespeare wrote, that such things, "hath murdered sleep." We don't know where to put all these thoughts. I don't know where to put these thoughts.

For much of the past week, as it has been for you as well who have also called New York home at some point in your lives, I have had a profound sense of dislocation from the city I once knew. The city where I took my first breath and where my mother took her last. I have yearned to be there, to see friends and family and, even though I know my loved ones are all okay from a distance, to be with them and weep with them and to begin getting back to life with them.

But we all know that the limits of identification with the sorrow and the pain of New Yorkers are not defined by geography, just as those of us who have not served in the military also weep for the dead at the Pentagon. We all live within concentric circles of belonging, each one slightly larger than the other, and finally the only price of admission is the pain we feel for human innocent life lost and the sorrow and shock and anger we have, all mixed together and which will not dissipate anytime soon.

In the closest, tiniest circle exists those whose loved ones went down on planes or were exploding in collapsed frail buildings that contained even frailer human lives, or those who hang in limbo, neither able to start their grieving nor able to the know the joy and relief that comes with reunion, as hope diminishes, as the days drag on. In the circle beyond that, those who are closest to the disasters, the survivors, who ask the unanswerable questions, "Why me? Why was I spared?" and who feel both the unalleviated guilt, and also the unmerited grace, of being alive.

Enclosing these people: the circle of those who feel a particular connection with a place or person affected by the tragedy. Then, the circle that contains all American citizens, all of us who were the targets of those who hate us indiscriminately for the happy accidents of our birth and national identity. And then, finally, the largest circle, the most important one, the one that holds and contains those of us who wish to exist within its borders: the common circle of our decent humanity, the ones who regardless of race or faith or place or politics, hold human life as sacred, who disavow the intentionally monstrous cruelty we have seen and embrace and cherish the bonds of kinship upheld and nurtured by kindness and love.

For those of us within that final, and really the only morally relevant, circle, the only one that ultimately matters before God or each other, we now know that life has altered. In so many big ways, yes, but in as yet unrecognized small ways, too. One tiny, not terribly significant, but still telling example is that I had planned to deliver a sermon later this congregational year, the bulk of which concerned a glorious day I spent in the company of a young pair of siblings, a brother and a sister, on a trip from Washington, DC to Fort Lauderdale----- aboard a plane. I'll still deliver the sermon, but I won't be able to speak it to you and you won't be able to hear it in the way that it was originally intended, especially as it was about all the wonders of childhood innocence. Nothing involving a plane or air travel will exist outside the shadow of what just happened, not for a long time, not if we remember----- How could we forget?----- the images of what we have witnessed. The echoes from this will resound in ways we don't yet know, into our future together.

By now we've all heard the stories of those who made their final declarations of love and devotion from the planes and from the triple digit floors: testaments of lives about to cease but still reaching for a final moment of human connection. One more "I love you" before the end. We've also heard those stories as well of the sick or the late, who on that fateful morning, were blessed enough to not be where they were supposed to be. To be lost and then to be strangely, miraculously found: An exit from the office that meant an entrance back into life. We are thankful for these people, thankful to chance or fate or the slowness of the subway system or the traffic jam, for inadvertent angels in common disguise, for the lives spared. Thankful to God. But we must take care with the thanks we offer, because the minute we offer thanks for removing death from one life, we must ask where were the angels for the thousands of others? So let us offer our thanks with humility before the mystery of our fates, not pretending to be party to the reasons that God or the universe might have for why one lives and why one dies. If the terrorists are possessed of an original sin, among all their other various evils, it must be this: that they would have the arrogance of seeing themselves as agents of a divine plan that includes the slaughter of the innocent. That indeed their God would demand such slaughter and approve of it.

But it seems as if God's name will not get through this tragedy unsullied. Many of you know by now the remarks shared with us by the Reverend Jerry Falwell. Terrorism, he said this past week, "is happening because God Almighty is lifting his protection from us.'' He blames the attacks on pagans, the prochoice, feminists, homosexuals, the American Civil Liberties Union and the People For the American Way. He said, "All of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'' He added later, "God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.''

In a week in which the Republican and very conservative Governor Frank Keating of Oklahoma offered effusive, and authentically heartfelt praise for the people of the city of New York, which has one of the most liberal congressional delegations in the country, Reverend Falwell felt the need to assign to blame, to single out various people when the nation seems to know more than ever that we need to be united. Reverend Falwell actually has company for his theological position: 19 of them perished as hijackers last Tuesday. Not that Reverend Falwell desired the deaths of thousands. Same logic, though, even regardless of the different endpoints, different conclusions, different traditions, but just different sides of the same shameless coin: the same view of a God who punishes indiscriminately, who either causes or permits the suffering of the innocent to get the divine point across. Reverend Falwell's comments were not only cruel and theologically suspect, they are the words of one who sits in judgment from the sidelines, the musings of moral cowardice. Beware the words of those who tell you that shared sacrifice is needed from all of us and then ask you to hold out your own wrists while they draw their knife.

How, and to what extent, and by whom, the sacrifices will be made in this country will determine in large part the greatness and goodness of our nation in the months, maybe even years, ahead as we prepare to battle these terrorist threats. We should be troubled by the words of Senator Trent Lott when he said that the debate over civil liberties versus security needs was only academic. Truly, there could not be a more real world, necessary conversation for us to have? What individual freedoms are we willing to compromise in order for the security of the country to be assured? Certainly the bywords of ease and expediency are banished from our language of plane travel, and rightly so. Patience, in so many ways, will have to become our singular national virtue.

Are we also willing to pay the increase in the price of ticket fares in order for our nation to install the types of security procedures that might prevent such tragedies in the future? Which of our cherished individual freedoms might we have to balance against security concerns? Our leaders should engage us in a conversation about how our lives will be changed, instead of telling us just to go along for the ride while they make decisions that affect us all. What we need now in this new and frightening moment in our lives is not just our tears and our hearts, but sharp, critical minds that can ask difficult questions about where we go from here.

And also voices that assert where we are not willing to go from here. The stories are already known to us of Islamic people threatened, mosques with windows broken by rocks, Muslims who have been physically assaulted. There are voices, not many yet, and hopefully none too numerous in the coming time, that are saying we should wage totally indiscriminate war against a yet still unknown enemy. Our nation must not isolate itself morally or strategically from the community of nations, for, if we do, we will have given the terrorists their victory. We must not use force without recognizing that there are limits to what force can achieve and that even a just purpose cannot be fought by any means necessary. If we forget this, we will have become like the terrorists. We must recall that our American creed requires shared sacrifice and shared commitment and that scapegoating might sate the national ego but does injury to the national soul. Our own Universalism calls us to stand against the voices of extremism wherever they are heard. Our faith has good, powerful news that people need to hear, that the path to God can never be couched in language of crusade or holy war, and that the path to heaven is not made clear through the suffering of others.

Through our pain and our anger, we must not become a reverse Narcissus. In that ancient myth that young lad gazes without concern or care at himself alone, condemned to isolation because of his fascination with his own beauty. We must not become blinded to the world about us because our anger has turned to rage, and where eventually all we are able to see is the reflection of our own shattered and vengeful self-image.
And in our fear, in our anger, in our desire for justice, which is appropriate and necessary, let us never forget those who by accident or by choice of service had their lives ended this past Tuesday. Let us remember the brave people on United Flight 93, the plane that went down outside of Pittsburgh, who recall the Biblical blessing that "a greater love hath no one than to lay down their lives for their friends", except, we can add, those who lay down there lives for unknown strangers. Let us remember those who in doing their jobs performed more than mere employment requires and rose to the great calling to be savers of human life, and in so doing, laid down their own.

We should resist what will inevitably, and regrettably, be the commercialization and sentimentalizing of this tragedy. Resist the news stories with soundtracks that swell in the background, and seem to beg for our tears, for what we have experienced needs no embellishment; our weeping comes freely to us and is as close to us as our breath. There is enough humanity and pathos in what we already know. We shouldn't cheapen and trivialize the memory of the victims, the dignity of the survivors, and the trauma visited upon our nation.

Listen to the names of just a few of the dead and hear both the individual lives the terrorists killed and the idea that they tried to destroy but ultimately could not and will not---- Williams, LeBlanc, Abraham, Montoya, Rosenzweig, Suarez, McGuiness, Shuyin, Kahn, Ogonowski, Olson, Gamboa, Sammartino, Salie. Those names would not be gathered together in death, nor in life, in any other land in the world. We are a people, far from perfect, but often good, bound together not by tribe nor agreed upon doctrine or even shared ideology, but united with each other now more closely than ever in the very vulnerability that makes us human, joined to each other in our capacity to be wounded, and brought together by the promise that we might be healed.

Just beyond where the smoke still hangs from the remnants and the rubble of the Twin Towers, the fire still burns in the torch that Lady Liberty holds aloft in New York harbor. More than any other of our symbols, she is us right now. Eyes forward, feet set, looking out over a charred landscape but still offering welcome and solace and belonging to all who yearn and to all who prize not just their own freedom, but freedom for all people. She surveys the carnage before her, she does not blink, and neither should we. Her eyes and her clothing are discolored by the years, just as our eyes are made red from the running of our tears. But still she holds forth the promise; still she stands, but not in belligerence. Still she is proud. And so are we.

Amen. May you live in blessing.