On September 11, 2001, I had begun my day at North East Middle School. I don't remember exactly what I was told when someone came to the classroom around 9:45, except that there was a crisis and I needed to return to my home school, Cherry Hill Middle, without delay.
As I drove quickly over the back roads between the two schools, I listened to my car radio and heard the tragic news. By the time I arrived, the decision had been made by the school system to send students and then staff home. After I arrived home, I finally saw the pictures of what had happened in Manhattan on our television. I watched for a long time trying to comprehend what had happened. It seemed so unreal. But, of course, it was very real.
I'm sure all of us here today can recall that morning in their lives with the same clarity I do. What would be somewhat different, I think, if we compared notes, were our emotional reactions. What might even more divergent, I'm sure, would be our opinions concerning all the decisions made and actions taken by our government on our behalf in response to the 9-11 attacks.
As we remember our feelings and reflect on our opinions about this attack on our country and our country's response, we supply the context in which we hear our scripture readings this morning. Although the usual ways I interpret scripture in my sermons would be valid to use today, I can't imagine doing so. Rather, the 10th anniversary of the four airliners being hijacked and used as weapons against thousands of ordinary people, must be the interpretive context used.
The themes of our three scriptures are these: judgment, mercy and forgiveness. Choosing to act with mercy or to forgive helps us restrain our very human need to retaliate or take control of a situation through violence. All the scriptures refer to situations in which individuals have made or will make choices about how to respond to injury or offense by another. In them, judgment—and action based on that judgment—are reserved for God. In addition, the reading from Genesis claims that God can bring good out of the worst of situations.
Our readings make strong claims about judgment being God's and about Jesus' teaching that his followers should practice mercy and forgiveness when they have been wronged. Do these hold up in the context of September 11, 2001?
To answer this question, I want to offer the testimony of two people. The first comes from a military chaplain who was working at the Pentagon the morning 9-11; the second, from a 17 year-old young man whose mother died that morning in the Twin Towers. When she died, he was just 7 years-old.
Navy Chaplain James Magness and other senior Armed Services chaplains were attending their annual meeting at the Pentagon. After the plane struck the Pentagon, they all assisted with rescue efforts. Chaplain Magness experienced very strong anti-Muslim feelings as a result.
He recounted his feelings and how he dealt with them: “For days on end I contemplated how people of faith, people who affirmed the Abrahamic faith that Jews, Christians and Muslims embrace, could do such a horrible thing. I'm not necessarily naive about people who do bad things. After all, when I was younger I spent the better part of a year in Vietnam being best friends with an M-16 rifle and a 50 caliber machine gun. I learned plenty about the bad things people, me included, can and will do.
But somehow this was different. I wondered if maybe President Bush could be wrong, and we were in a religious war.
Something was happening in my psyche and in my soul. It was as though I was two persons: light and darkness. I was trapped in my own dualism where two competing opposites held me in tension. This was a type of dualism that had captured many Americans. Back in those days right after 9/11 the smart money was for the darkness to win.
Out of my darkness I wanted to get even. I wanted to make ‘those persons’ pay for the pain they had caused us. . . Instinctively, I knew that I had to break out of this dark funk. But how? I prayed the Daily Office of Morning Prayer from my Episcopal prayer book each morning. That didn't do it. I led and attended public worship services. That didn't do it. I talked with a therapist and with my closest friends. Even that didn't do it. What could I do?
Desperately, I needed a change of heart. Yet, I found that the change would not come easily or quickly. For months I grappled with what had by then become a spiritual dilemma in my life. Then, without warning, I got a jolt to my soul that awakened me to a new vista, a new way to move into a greater understanding and grasp of God.
In my role as a leader of Navy chaplains, I visited the military chaplains assigned to our new Joint Task Force detention facility at the Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ever since the facility opened, we had assigned a Muslim military chaplain to be on staff and work with the detainees, suspected terrorists whom almost all embraced the Muslim faith. Upon arrival I was told that there was significant conflict between the commander of the detention facility and my Muslim chaplain. Though to this day I am still not clear about precisely what caused the conflict, I was very aware that in the end a significant part of the problem was based in the commander's distrust of a Muslim chaplain. On my second day I ended up standing between, quite literally, the commander and my chaplain. Instinctively, I knew that as a leader I had to stand up for the person for whom I was responsible. Well, that was it! At that moment the darkness in my life began to ebb away, the light began to shine.
But why? How? The change began when I was able and willing to sacrifice some of my own safety and security and stand up for a chaplain for whom I was responsible but with whom I had religious differences. That day God had led me to the point at which I had the opportunity to sacrifice my comfortable, condescending and divisive views about all Muslims. I learned that day that once I could affirm my chaplain, my Muslim chaplain, that I could begin to be transformed so that in my soul I could see more light than darkness.”
Seven year-old Nicolas Lanza had lived with his mother in New York when she was killed on 9-11. Then he went to live with his father in Virginia. As you might imagine, he had significant adjustment problems. Here is what he wrote: “I can recall days then the sun would be up but all I could see was darkness. . . I thought for the longest time what happened on 9/11 was my fault. I could not forgive myself. I could not forgive the man who caused me the most harm: Osama bin Laden. I didn't know how to handle the burden of being a 9/11 victim. I told some people who I was, they told others, and pretty soon everybody at my school . . . found out, as did members of the church I attended. But my issues still didn't change. My inner demons kept on attacking. The summer before high school, I went to a church camp. It turns out that it was the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. You see I was still carrying the one thing that was wearing me down and leaving me broken. I was still carrying my mother. . . But then during one service, one of my good preacher friends and a few other ministers gathered around me, and they began to pray for me.
My preacher friend told me that it was time to let everything go. . . For a moment . . .all I could see was this blinding white light. A voice began to say, 'You belong to me my child. You shall no longer be burdened with these chains that you wear about you. You are free.'
It was then that I realized I was . . . bound by the thick iron chains of depression, wrath, unforgiveness, and—the thickest and strongest of all chains—my own mother. . . Then words came into my head. . . as though they had been there all this time: I love you. Now go and tell others the same.”
Nicholas said he had a strong desire to tell Osama bin Laden that he forgave him for “the hideous crime he committed again me. He reflected on his new understanding: “Forgiveness is essential to really moving on from any tragic happening. I came to learn this through studying the word of God, prayer and real-life experience.”
An awareness of the importance of forgiveness came for both Chaplain Magness and Nicholas Lanza came as a sudden burst of insight. It can come more gradually as well. It comes, I believe, when we accept the connection we share with ALL people through God, our creator. St. Paul explained this connection with these words: “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then whether we live or we die, we are the Lord's.” And in the end, God will both judge all humankind and show mercy as God sees fit.
“Sprituality forged in smoke and fire,” by James Magness, Episcopal News Service Online, September 7, 2011. OR http://www.episcopalchurch.org/80050_129692_ENG_HTM.htm
“Finding Nicholas” by Nicholas Lanza, Newsweek, September 12, 2011, pp. 32-33.
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