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February 20, 2002

Where Do We Go From Here?
The Rev. Dr. Daniel P. Matthews

Rector, Trinity Church, Wall Street
New York, New York


This sermon is also available in audio

This has been a strange time for all of us since I was here last year. The dust that fell on lower Manhattan on September 11 is still falling on you and me, no matter where we live. At 8:30 a.m. that morning I was in a little room one floor below my office. We have offices in a twenty-five-story office building across the street from the back of the church; which means we were very close to the World Trade Center.

About four of us were sitting in this small room, when suddenly we heard something that sounded like a big gas main blowing. (For those of you who have lived in New York, you know there are sounds all the time. The first six months we lived in New York, I jumped out of bed every time I heard a sound. I would run to the window and look out, and nobody would be doing anything unusual. It was just another big bang. I didn’t know where it came from. It’s just a noisy place to live.) So on September 11 when we heard this huge noise, we literally turned back to the agenda we were working on.

Five to ten seconds after the explosion, the head of the real estate department, who had an office down the hall, opened our door and said, "A private plane has hit the World Trade Center." We all jumped up and ran down the hall into his office to take a look. We saw the smoke and we began saying, "Oh, isn’t it awful. He must have had a stroke." Everybody remembered the same thing had happened to the Empire State Building fifty or so years ago. We kept looking at the smoke, talking about the Empire State Building.

We were looking towards the Empire State Building when suddenly, out of the corner of our eye, we saw the second plane fly into the South Tower. This time the explosion was so loud that the building shook, and we were afraid the windows were going to break. The woman who was running the meeting dove under a table screaming, "War. War. War." With that, we didn’t know whether there would be ten planes or twenty planes or whether the whole city would burn down.

We ran for the stairwells. Everybody in the building was in the stairwells. You don’t use the elevators, you know, in a time of fire, time of disaster, so we were all running down the stairs. Some of our older staff members could barely get down. We were all almost tumbling over each other trying to get down the steps.

Finally we got down to the lobby, and then we remembered the children. We have a hundred and forty kids in the day care; many of them just babies in cribs. We have a rule that every single person who wants to, is to take charge of one child in case of an emergency. We'd never had an emergency before. Suddenly, everybody begins to head for the school. Get the kids and bring them down to the basement—the basement seemed to be a safe place. What to do? We decided to stay in the building.

Inside our office building, as was true with most people in Lower Manhattan, when the first building fell and then the second, we thought we’d been hit again. We didn’t distinguish that two buildings had fallen. As a matter of fact, nobody imagined that the Trade Towers would ever fall. People were screaming, "The American Stock Exchange has been hit." (Our office building shares a common wall with the American Stock Exchange.) And across the street from the church is the New York Stock Exchange, and of course, we thought they were being attacked.

We finally began to realize that we had to get out of the building. It started filling with smoke almost immediately. We thought our building was on fire. Our office building has a wonderful air system that sucks in fresh air, not from the street, but from the top of the building. Of course, it was sucking in the dust and the debris from the Twin Towers right into the building. Probably ten seconds after the first building fell, every hall in the building and office was filled with smoke and dust and debris of all sorts. So we said, "What do we do? Do we go outside and put the children at risk, or do we stay inside and have them die in here with us?"

We decided to go outside. Some of us went down a corridor to get out the back way, and a metal door locked on us. The metal doors open with electronic cards. We have a nice pecking order; you have a card for your door, but nobody else’s. Because I'm the Rector, my card is supposed to work on everybody’s door. I took my card out and I flashed it, and it didn’t work. Flashed it again. And of course, everybody said, "Let me try it. Let me try it." As if to say, the stupid Rector doesn’t know how to run the card, you see. We finally took a fire extinguisher and forced the door open. It was a dark hallway, full of smoke.

Two of the women on the staff came up to me independently and whispered in my ear, "Dr. Matthews, if you live, and I don’t, please tell my husband I love him very much." Another woman came up and said almost the same thing. "I might not live, and you might. Tell my husband I love him." Our CFO who heads the finances of all of Trinity, real estate included—a devout Roman Catholic with two sons at Notre Dame—leaned over to me and said, "I’ve just made my confession, but I think I’m going to do it again." And I said, "Why?" And he said, "The Lord must be very busy right now."

It was dark outside, like the middle of the night from all the dust, smoke and debris. We got the kids out and began running down the street. By then the dust and debris was four or five inches deep. I noticed a strange thing as I was looking down. I saw shoes everywhere, especially women's clogs, the thick-soled ones. We didn’t know if there would be a body beside the shoes. We discovered later that the women had left their shoes behind because they could run much faster without them.

We finally made it down to the ferry. Some of us got the children on buses up to another day care. By six o’clock that night, every child in our day care had been reunited with his/her parent. We began using the word miracle a lot in New York. Miracle! Miracle that we got out! Miracle that no parent had been killed, and many of them worked in the Trade Center.

We felt so blessed. We thought we were all going to die. It does something to you when you are in a situation where you are just certain you are going to die. It kind of puts perspective on all of the life that you have ever lived before. And of course, three thousand or so did die, and prayers have been offered for them here and all over the world ever since.

We have two churches in Trinity. I am the Rector of what is called Trinity Wall Street and an old church about four blocks away called St. Paul’s Chapel—primarily a museum. It’s where George Washington said his prayers after he was inaugurated. St. Paul’s is right across the street from the World Trade Center. We knew it had been destroyed. But lo and behold, not one window was broken. Another use of that word, Miracle! Rudolf Guilliani later remarked, "It’s a miracle that St. Paul’s remains standing!" It is where the ministry is going on right now as we speak, twenty-four hours a day--fifteen hundred police and fire fighters are fed every day in that space.

The following Friday after September 11, a huge memorial service was held in Washington at the National Cathedral; the President of the United States asked everybody in America to ring their church bells in solidarity at twelve noon. I got my little cell phone, because none of the phones were working, and called one of the engineers who I knew was down around St. Paul’s. I said, "Mike, the President has asked for the bells to be rung at twelve noon." I could just see and hear him, "Oh, you don’t know what it’s like down here. We can’t possibly. Those bells are rung with solenoids, and the solenoids have to have electricity, and the electricity is off—there’s nothing. That church tower is pitch black. I could never get up there." Almost saying, "Don’t ask me to do that." So I said, "Okay. Okay. I just wanted to remind you if you could."

At about 12:30 p.m., my cell phone rang. "This is Mike. Guess what? I crawled up the tower. I found an iron pipe half-way up. I crawled up and got on top of that big bell, and I beat the hell out of that bell!" And I said, "Praise the Lord." And he said, "You haven’t heard the best part." I said, "What’s the best part?" He said, "The best part is when I came back down. I looked out the back door, and all the firemen and the police officers and the rescue workers had taken off their hats during that bell ringing and placed them over their hearts, as if to say, ‘Amidst all of this hell, God reigns.’"

God reigns even in this hell. It’s very hard for us, isn’t it, because so many things have happened as a result of this. We’ve just discovered for most of us a brand-new religion we barely knew anything about. Most of us had never even heard the word iman. Didn’t know the difference between Muslim and Moslem. Didn’t really know what Islam was all about. Now we are beginning to learn, aren’t we? We’re beginning to listen and pay attention. We’re beginning to sense something is going on with that religious group that we knew nothing about, and it is almost as if God is calling you and me to pay attention to something that wasn’t even on our screen.

One of the wonderful stories in the Old Testament is the one we usually think of as a children’s story—the story of Jonah and the whale. It isn’t a children’s story, but we think of it that way because it is always told to children, and it’s kind of a fun story. Just in case you’ve forgotten it, let me just tell it briefly to you:

Jonah was told by God to go to Ninevah—a great, huge, very corrupt city. The Jews hated Ninevah. Wasn’t anything good about Ninevah. And God said, "Jonah, you go to Ninevah and tell the people in Ninevah, even though they are very corrupt, that if they will repent, I’ll give them my blessing." Well, Jonah said to himself, "Those people are trashy people. They’re not worth it. Why would I want to give the blessing of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to those trashy people in Ninevah?" So what he did was run away in the other direction. He went down to the water, got on a ship, and went the opposite direction. Remember the storm came, and everybody on the ship thought they were going to drown? So they said, "What’s this storm all about? This is just terrible." And somebody found Jonah sleeping down below. "What are you doing?" "I’m trying to run away from my God." "You’re the problem," so they threw him overboard. Then the big fish (It doesn’t say whale in the scripture, by the way; it says big fish.) swallowed him. Three days later, it spewed him out onto dry land. Just at the time he hit that dry beach, God said, "I thought I told you to go to Ninevah."

Our friends in the Jewish tradition read that scripture on the holiest day of their year, Yom Kippur. Around the world they read that scripture. The reason they read that scripture is that they must remember, though they are the chosen people, they must know that the only reason for their being chosen is to give the blessing of God away. That’s what Jews do on Yom Kippur. You know what Yom Kippur is like? You’d have to take all the forty days of Lent, throw in Good Friday, and put them all into one day, in order for we Christians to grasp the powerful importance of Yom Kippur for a Jew.

It’s always true with tragedy, isn’t it? You have to say, "Is there anything that is good that can come out of this? Is there any message? Is there anything for me to learn from this?" Well, there are about a billion people who are children of God who believe things that are kind of unusual for us, and yet, this incident is calling us to pay attention to the folks in Ninevah. That’s the essence of what it is to be a follower of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and we’re right in there with the Jews. That’s part of our tradition, too. What’s the purpose of a blessing? Is it just for you? God forbid! It’s for you to share. It’s for you to—like we used to say as kids—"Pass it on. Pass it on."

We’re all wondering now where we go from here. It’s not just for America. The whole world is wondering, where do we go from here? Have we indulged long enough in the exclusivity of our religious theologies? That’s a very difficult question, isn’t it? It challenges us all, doesn’t it? Carl Sandburg was once asked, "What’s the worst word in the English language?" He replied, "Exclusivity." And that’s been a part of my religious tradition. I don’t know about yours. But I have certainly had a lot of that in my tradition. It feels like as a result of September 11, I am being challenged, challenged at the roots of the theology of our tradition. Challenged at the roots of our thinking of ourselves as better than everyone else. Challenged to go to Ninevah.

We have a savior that gives us permission to do that. The simple truth is Jesus died for us to do the same for others. You see, what we’re about is not just that Jesus died for me; I ought to be willing to die for somebody else. Somebody who maybe doesn’t even deserve it. Then we are getting close to the center of our faith.

In St. Paul’s Chapel, where we serve the firemen and the police officers and the rescue workers, the walls are just covered with banners and posters and colored things made by both children and adults. Oh, thousands of things all over the wall, high as you can reach. One little girl sent one in just the other day. It was going to go up on the wall, but it didn’t get to the wall because of its poignancy. She’s eleven years old; happens to live in Scarsdale, New York. Here’s the letter she wrote to put on the wall at St. Paul’s Chapel, to be seen by the fire fighters:

Dear Fire Fighters,
There are many deaths that I can die: cancer, heart attack, AIDS, hepatitis, sickle cell anemia, leukemia, natural causes, choking, being strangled, shot, or hanged.
[She’s got a pretty good imagination; doesn’t she? We’ve just begun.] I could get the death penalty or rabies or a snake bite or a wild animal could attack me. I could get run over by a car. I could be in a car crash. I could fall, slip, get a concussion, get small pox, or be stabbed, crack my skull, get poisoned, heart disease, get stung by too many bees, and many, many more. But I know that I will never, ever die in a fire because people like you, great people, would go into the flames to save an ordinary person like me, and that’s what makes you so great and courageous and brave and terrific and wonderful, special people.

Yours truly,
Claudia Fischer

It’s not a bad symbol for us, a fire fighter. Three hundred forty- three fire fighters died that day. More fire fighters died in that incident than have ever died in any single incident in the history of the world, and every one of them died knowing full well that his purpose was to go in and save somebody else. No wonder that hat has become a symbol for us. No wonder the power of that hat is almost like a new cross, isn’t it? It’s almost like somebody is willing to die that another person might live. What a symbol! Of course, we need to stop and say, "God, what—what does this mean to me? You died for me. Firemen died for hundreds and thousands of people at the Trade Center. Maybe you’re not asking me to die, but maybe you’re asking me to do something about a people in the world that hate us so much—that dislike us and dislike this place, and what we stand for and who we are, and the faith we have."

Maybe September 11 is a very important date for us to remember and for us to begin the process of turning toward those with love, with concern and compassion, and yes, even with God’s blessing through us, into their world."

Thank you God, for opening our eyes and using this tragedy that we might be more clearly your servants in this your world in need.
Amen.



© 2002 The Rev. Dr. Daniel P. Matthews


Preached at Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis, Tennessee as part of the
Lenten Noonday Preaching Series

 


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