| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|||||
| |
|
|
|
|||
|
This past week I spoke at chapel services at St. Andrew's Episcopal School. It was exhilarating to be with so many youngsters and I loved being there. But the topics were very sober and somber: Yom Kippur - the Jewish Day of Atonement, which fell that day - confession, reconciliation, forgiving others, and ourselves and asking God for forgiveness. We also talked some about the Trade Center attacks and their effects on parents and the students. They confirmed that their parents seemed scared, angry and sad. I asked what that made them feel like, and one 11th grader raised her hand and said, "It makes me feel very scared to see my parents like that." What a terrible legacy to give our children: fear. It has been called the day the world went numb; it was the day of the shock of our lives and the heartbreak of our lives. We have been savaged. We have experienced and are experiencing a big death, which has many deaths for us: the death of our sense of immunity…forced to face our vulnerability and fragility. Do you know that one Wall Street firm in the Twin Towers lost 700 of 1000 employees?; as a result, 1,500 children lost a parent. There is no end to the suffering - emotional, physical, financial and spiritual that this unthinkable attack on us has caused. Not just to the immediate victims and their survivors; somehow, an attack on New York City or the Pentagon is like an attack on Jackson Mississippi. Many throughout our nation are suffering from depression, lack of sleep, increased irritability and difficulty in concentrating; people thousands of miles away from the attacks. Some believe that the issue here is money - we in the U.S. are wealthy, and those in the Arabic world, as well as those in other parts of the Third World, are poor, hungry and angry. Wealth and riches are also a part of this morning's readings. The prophecy of Amos and the story of Lazarus point to God's displeasure with us if we live a life of wealth, while ignoring and not caring about those around us who live in poverty. But note, that the Gospel reading is NOT about the rich man being in hell because he was rich; rather, it is because money had become his god, and had made him unconscious to his need for the real God. The message is not about wealth, but about unbelief. The rich man has lost his sense of dependence on God. Be assured that the September 11th savagery is not about money --- No, the fact that we have great resources as a country and that most of us have a wonderful standard of living - that makes us the IDEAL of what God wants for everyone in the world. And we share it with others. No country in the world has been more sharing when others are in need. I cannot think of another country that has done what we did just after WWII, when we went in with mercy and pity to resurrect the infrastructure and the very life of Japan and Germany, with our American dollars. To this day, we are there when there is a disaster. We are not the only ones, by any means, but we are one of the ones who are always there. So we didn't "have it coming." We are not paying the price of our luxury. But poverty and suffering are not God's will for anyone or for any nation. Nor does God rain terror down on anybody - for any reason. Nor must we. Our collect this morning reminds us that our God shows His power by showing mercy and pity. So must we. The suffering of the people of Afghanistan and the suffering of the people of lower Manhattan are, in God's eyes, one and the same. What shall we do? Shall we wage war? Or shall we, in the words of the House of Bishops meeting last week in Vermont, "wage reconciliation"? Perhaps we need to "sit Shiva" - a Jewish custom carried out when someone dies. A minyan (that is, a minimum of ten worshippers) gathers, often in the home of the deceased, and these folks grieve. They sit for many hours, just praying and pondering and honoring the dead. This "time out," as it were, is what perhaps we should do as a nation; it is perhaps what we are doing. We need to absorb what has happened and act with God's Spirit guiding us. Taking our time, being quiet within ourselves, and living with this reality, is the way to allow God to have His input into all this. On my favorite sermon help web site, the Desperate Preachers' Site, I read this yesterday: "I know folks I've talked with feel both more compassionate and more short-tempered and impatient. Maybe we've forgotten how to breathe with the sadness and anger and fear in the air. Maybe we just need to take in the life-giving Spirit right now, to be still and listen for God to speak instead of us." In this "sitting Shiva" time, Bishop Mark Sisk of the Diocese of New York spoke of the "eerie experience" of being there in the wake of these horrific events. At Roosevelt Hospital he expected to see an influx of survivors, and realized it was a bad sign when none arrived. As he visited the rubble of what had been the WTC, he said, "We realized we were standing at the grave of thousands of people." Jane Holmes Dixon, Bishop of the Diocese of Washington, D.C., said that the diocese had had to decide if the cathedral might be a target, and ended up closing the cathedral and worshipping outside the buildings. With planes back in the air, many of them military jets, "people are now more afraid than before," she said. Bishop Dixon said that for her personally, "the trauma is still with me and I haven't been able to cry yet," trying to deal with "much fear of the unknown." I can identify with that. And I have a great sadness about it all. As an American and as a New Yorker, I feel that something just horrible has happened, something I can't really get my mind around, and there is no way to undo it. And I have some fear that capturing one particular man, or even all those presently in terrorist cells, won't do it. A fear that as long as there is hunger and anger in some countries, this horror of terrorism won't go away. A few days
ago, Queen Ronia of Jordan, a staunch ally of the US, was in N.Y.C. to
express her horror at the dreadful acts of the terrorists. In her interview,
she said something that we have not heard from many: She said, our nation
too often has, as she put it, "turned a blind eye" to serious
problems in other lands. She encouraged us to reach out now to try to
understand how others feel, and what causes a few within a nation to carry
out insane actions of terror. On the other
hand, I see there has been growth in us as a people, since earlier wars.
As a child I saw the demonizing of Japanese and Germans; now I hear the
call to pity for Afghans. And we see daily the outpouring of compassion
and material support from Americans everywhere. Another good
sign, this time from our Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, is a statement
he recently made, "…it is a thin place in which we find ourselves;
many are expressing "a need to be in sacred space…they are open
in deeper ways to the mysteries of God…I will say that I have found
that worship services are much more deeply moving for me than before September
11th…" And I have
a new appreciation for scripture: on that incredible dark day of September
11th, as I tried to know what to say at a special prayer service, I realized
that I simply didn't have words adequate to all the death and suffering
going on --- and dug deep into scripture, recalling that the Old Testament
people had experienced similar death and destruction at various times
and had written psalms and scripture in their cries to God. I experienced
the living water of inspired writings. I found readings that were as up-to-the-minute
and as relevant to our situation as the writings that we will see issuing
from contemporary writers - as if the writers of scripture had been there
when all this happened. On top of
all the agony inflicted upon us, there is the bigotry and ignorance of
those who persecute Muslims and anyone who looks anything like a Muslim.
We abhor that, and we cry out for justice for them. As we "sit Shiva" through these weeks, maybe months, we may find that there may be no solution, no answer, no satisfaction in the sense of capturing the mastermind of all this and getting them who helped plan and carry out this atrocity. As we "sit Shiva" we may be led by the Spirit of God to find peace the only way we can - with God and by following God in this situation. It may be that this earth-shaking event will cause us to be more aware of our dependence on God. It may cause many of us to deepen our dependence on God. Hear the collect for the 14th Sunday after Pentecost and for the week that followed, including September 11th:
Yes, this time of "sitting Shiva" may be a time for us to find out what God wants of us and to try to do it, with God's help. I suspect that whatever it is, it has to do with mercy and pity, with hunger and anger, as well as with justice, and nothing whatsoever to do with revenge. Amen. Copyright 2001 The Rev. William A. Kolb Gospel:
Luke
16:19-31 |
||
 |
|||||
|
|||||
