Sermons from the Pulpit

Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor on Sunday, September 16, 2001; the Sunday after the terrorist attack of September 11.

Psalm 27:1-6, 11-14; Romans 8:31-35, 37-39; Matthew 5:38-45

I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
    -Psalm 27:13

     You must be sick of all the pronouncements and reflections and moralizings you've heard and read since Tuesday. I know I am, and so I wonder, not for the first time, if I should just shut up and sit down right now.

     The thing is, I have no right to sit down now, not after reading those outrageous, provocative verses from the Sermon on the Mount. I doubt that there's anyone in this church, including me, who has much enthusiasm this week for turning the other cheek, loving our enemy, praying for those who persecute us, or least of all for nonresistance to an evildoer. To make that proclamation on this day is to ask for trouble, or at least for dismissiveness and ridicule.

     But I have to ask you and myself: Is the Sermon on the Mount deserving of our attention and respect and obedience only when we have no enemies, no one is persecuting us, no one is attacking us? Or only when the enemy is a Massachusetts driver, a sociopathic in-law, or an HMO?

     The most important time to listen to these words is precisely when they are hardest to hear We may not do as Jesus says we should do. We may not even wish we would! Our country's national policy in response to this horrible business will certainly not be based on the Sermon on the Mount. And maybe all that we can accomplish by listening to the Sermon on the Mount is to remind ourselves that we and our country are not likely, not willing, not even able, to live up to the standards of conduct that God set for humanity. But that may be one of the things we need most today: to be fully aware of our own failures and inadequacies before God.

     If we can't see ourselves with clear eyes at a time like this, if we can't get a glimpse of our gritty selves through God's eyes, we're bound to get self-righteous. We're bound to get all wrapped up in our own innocence and virtue and our country's superior national values. We're bound to go on a witch-hunt and find some scapegoats — how's that for a mixed metaphor? And we're bound to start relishing the prospect of dealing out justice to the perpetrators.

     It's the burden of all who would exact justice against evil that if they truly love justice, then the doing of it will be painful to them and their hearts will be heavy as they go about the task. They will weep, as God surely weeps, at the waste and the tragedy visited upon both victims and perpetrators, both in the doing of evil and in the overcoming of evil. If they do not weep for evildoers, they become just like them.

     Case in point of the foregoing: my brother in Christ and in the cloth, Jerry Falwell, said this week on TV that this attack is God's punishment on our country for tolerating abortion, feminism, homosexuality, the ACLU, and People for the American Way. He really did. He said God is lifting the curtain and allowing the enemies of America to give us what we deserve, and he said God is just getting started, we ain't seen nuthin' yet.

     However we respond to these awful days, whatever we do as people, as a nation, as a superpower, as Christians, or any of the other possible ways we could identify and group ourselves, let humility and sadness be our watchwords, because humility and sadness in these circumstances are essential to our humanity.

     With that as our context, let me name a few of the most helpful thoughts that have come to my ears and eyes this week, embedded in all the heaps of blather. I hope I can do justice to the wisdom of those who authored them.

     First, this attack is increasingly being described as an act of war against America, but it's not. It's a crime, a crime not just against us but against humanity itself, or for people of faith, a crime against God. The choice of words is important because it gives shape to our response.

     It's obvious that virtually the whole world is as shocked, horrified, and grief-stricken as we are, and that the perpetrators, including the dead ones, will be pariahs and criminals forever. They have no claim to be thought of as warriors or soldiers. And we have every right to expect the world's response to be based not on the stuff of international relations, politics, blocs, alliances, and matters of state but on universal moral outrage . . . . assuming, of course, that we're willing to be judged by the same standards we invoke.

     As an aside, there are those, especially in communities of faith, who say that every act of war is a crime against humanity, in other words war is crime no matter who wages it, but that's another sermon for another occasion which I hope will not arise.

     Second, this is a crime against Islam, against Allah, against the Koran, against the prophet Muhammad, and against every Muslim on earth. One fifth of the human race is Muslim. Six million Americans are Muslims, and a lot of them have been lining up to give blood. It's a crime against Arabs and Palestinians and Afghans too. Having admitted how very, very hard it is for us to follow the teachings of Jesus and love our enemy, the least we can do is to be extremely clear about who is this enemy whom we cannot bring ourselves to love, and who is not. The worst irony in all of this hateful history is that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all children of father Abraham, all people of the Book, all worshippers of the one God.

     Third, we can't expect to overcome terrorism if we don't understand it, and we ought to admit that we mostly don't understand it and we're not even sure we want to. Monstrous deeds are deeds done by monsters, right? Or madmen or cowards or people without human feeling. I've heard all those descriptions this week. To attempt to understand the perpetrators is to grant them human feelings, human motivations, human intelligence, and of course we rebel at that.

     But I learned something this week about how the terrorist masterminds go about recruiting people to be suicide bombers and hijackers. They go out looking for young men who have suffered unspeakable things, men with childhood memories of watching their parents and siblings be tortured and starved and killed, men who have never been citizens of any country, men who have never had any human rights, men who have never been given any basis for hope, men who are already clinically suicidal. And they have no trouble finding them. I wonder what might have become of our own habitual decency if our young lives had resembled theirs.

     In fact, I begin to wonder what it means to be human. We know from the Scriptures what God means it to mean. But in a world that doesn't pay much attention to God, human nature can get boiled down and reduced by cruelty and pain to nothing but rage. Your rage is the only thing you have that tells you you're human, and then being human is being against humanity. That's where monsters come from. That doesn't make it any less monstrous, but it has implications for what can be done about it.

     In the Jewish calendar, tomorrow evening is the beginning of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which is the end of the ten-day interval known as the High Holy Days from Rosh Hashonah, the Jewish New Year, to Yom Kippur. During those ten days the tradition calls for people to imagine themselves as being put on trial in a court where good and evil are judged, and the judge is God, and the evidence for or against them is the all the stuff of their lives during the past year, and the judgment of the court can be for life or for death. It's the kind of spiritual experience that, to put it in evangelical Christian terms, could make a person get religion. That's why the High Holy Days are also called the Days of Awe.

     One rabbi pointed out that God already knows all the good and all the evil in us, so why have the High Holy Days? And his answer was, God gives us the Days of Awe so we'll have a chance to think it over and maybe repent before the verdict. To throw ourselves on the mercy of the court. To see ourselves with new eyes, through God's eyes.

     And that is a gift, though we may not always welcome it, because the capacity to see ourselves clearly may be the only thing that distinguishes us from those whom we think of as monsters.

     The terrorists have devastated us. For them that is a victory, regardless of the whole world's outrage. We can't deny them that victory by declaring a holy war against them. Even if we were to win such a war they would be the winners. In the words of a statement signed by most of the country's religious leaders a few days ago, "We can deny them their victory [only] by refusing to submit to a world created in their image." God help us to do that.

     Amen