EXODUS 32:1,7-14

PSALM 51:1-11

1TIMOTHY 1:12-17

LUKE 15:1-10

Sermon – 9/16/01

 

Life and Faith after September 11

 

      This has been an appalling and heart-wrenching week.  Let me start by sharing my own feelings, some of all of which may be shared by many of you.  I am, perhaps most of all, still in shock, still numb, still not quite believing that what has happened has happened.  I have not seen much TV this week – I’ve been too busy – but I’ve seen plenty, and yet not enough.

 

      I am scared.  To realize that this could happen – and to realize also that massive acts of terrorism are in all probability far from over – is truly frightening.  We realize our vulnerability as never before.  What brought this home to me was the news that a carrier task force was heading north to defend …New York.  Think about it.

 

      I am in anguish for the victims – those whose lives have been snuffed out, those who are still listed as missing, those who are injured, whether in body or emotionally or spiritually or all three.  We still have one member of the parish family missing: Stephen Joseph, husband of Gillian and father of their two-year old son, Tristan.  He worked on the 94^th floor of the South Tower.  He called his wife at 8:55 on Tuesday and has not been heard from since.  I am relieved beyond words for the safety of so many I know.  Elda’s elder son Bernie works at the Bank of New York, one block from the World Trade Center.  We could not reach him for several hours on Tuesday and were very anxious, but he and many others are safe – but not by any means unaffected.

 

      I am awesomely thankful to God for the heroic efforts of emergency personnel and many ordinary citizens to rescue and minister to people.  From the police, firefighters and ambulance workers who risked and in some cases gave their lives to try to save others to the thousands of volunteers and blood donors, I am moved to tears by the courage and commitment of so many of my fellow Americans.

 

      I am angry and frustrated that our hundreds of billions of dollars spent in “defense” bought us no defense at all last week against this kind of enemy, a kind which caused more American civilian causalities in one day than ever before in history, more, perhaps than in any entire war in America at least since the Civil War.  Was no one thinking of how to protect us from this century’s enemy: terrorism?

 

      And of course I am angry at the mass murderers who did this despicable, coordinated collection of crimes.  Angry, but as I think about it, less and less surprised except at their audacity.  Many other countries have been victimized by terrorists – some of whom ran governments – and now we join the list of victims.  As many leaders of Anglican Churches around the world e-mailed our Presiding Bishop this week, “We know what you’re going through.”

 

If anyone was living in a Pollyanna world a week ago and thought that sin did not exist, I think everyone realizes now that it does.  God did not make human beings to be God’s puppets: God gave us Free Will, which means the freedom to do good and obey God – or the freedom to do evil.

 

      And when human beings sin, there are always victims, and not always the ones who commit the sin.

 

      So we live in a world where Sin is always tempting all people and often kills.  As it did last Tuesday.  And will again.  And, in one way or another, we are all vulnerable – as vulnerable as Jesus Christ chose to become, so that through his vulnerable love he could win the decisive battle against Sin by refusing to hate, no matter what.

 

      The decisive battle against Sin has been won on the cross, but Oh, Lord; the “mopping up operation” is so long and painful!

 

      And we are now at an hour of great temptation.  I realized that most of what was the spiritual low point for me of the last week: when I found myself thinking, "Afghanistan wouldn't really be missed very much if it was wiped off the map..." That's when I realized that I was thinking like them.

 

      People who did what they did are so consumed by hate that their humanity is barely detectable.  If we allow ourselves to blame an entire nation, or ethnicity, or faith they will have won another victory.

 

      Let’s face it: Osama bin Laden and his odious accomplices are as representative of Islam as the I.R.A. is representative of Christianity.  Do both exist?  Yes.  Do both have sympathizers beyond their active members?  Yes.  Would both be condemned overwhelmingly by the majority of their co-religionists?  Yes.

 

      So my point is that we, as Christians, must remember that the enemy is Sin, and Sin does not have a skin color, or a nationality, or a faith.  The enemy is not Arabs, the enemy is not Muslims, the enemy is wickedness itself, which infects all kinds of different people.  Anyone who becomes a vigilante or a bigot “in the name of protecting America” becomes one step closer to thinking like the terrorists.

 

      And if we know history, we know that terror takes many forms, and wickedness converts people of all kinds of faiths.  Including Christians.

 

      We here remember 1492 as the year Columbus came from Spain to “discover” America, or to invade America, really.  That was the same year that Spain conquered Grenada, the last Muslim kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula – and banned Islam.  Ferdinand and Isabella also announced that all Jews – 10% of the population – also were to be expelled from Spain or forcibly converted to Christianity.  And it was to “investigate” the faith of the forced converts that the Spanish Inquisition was later invented.  Ferdinand and Isabella were the 15^th Century Christian equivalent of today’s Taliban, the fanatics that rule most of Afghanistan.  And there are plenty of other eras and places in which Christians have not covered themselves with glory; after all, most of the soldiers in the Nazi army were baptized Christians.

 

      So first let us never think that the enemy of peace and freedom has only one face.  Satan is a chameleon, can change guises easily, and his greatest trick is to get us to see evil only as something “out there” and not as something attacking our own souls.  If we forget that danger we would be as vulnerable to Satan (without God’s

 

help) as … the World Trade Center was to terrorists piloting the world’s largest “Molotov Cocktails”.

 

      Second, let us have our terrible swift sword be focussed on terrorists and their supporters not on people who happen to look like them or carry the same scriptures as they do.  Americans have leapt into that sin before, notably with the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, many of whom were about as dangerous as the artist Grandma Moses.  Isn’t it interesting that the US Government never interned German-Americans or Italian-Americans, even though we were also at war with those countries.  After all, whom would we have interned: General Dwight D. Eisenhower?  Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia?  No, it was a small, noticeably “different” and vulnerable minority which was singled out as “the enemy”.

 

      In other eras, other ethnic groups have been labeled “un-American”, of course including those who have lived here longer than anyone else, the so-called “Indians”. And other religious groups have been labeled “suspicious” by some Americans, including at various times Jews, Catholics … and Episcopalians.  Remember, our church is descended from the Church of England, and in 1776 England was the enemy, so Anglicans – especially in the northeast – were considered suspect.  Christ Church, Cambridge, MA was “captured” by Patriot forces and used as a horse barn during the War of Independence.  Never mind that the sexton of Old North Church, Boston, was the one whose lanterns had signaled Paul Revere that the British were coming… and never mind that an Episcopal Church in Virginia counted a man named George Washington among its members. “Why let facts get in the way of a good prejudice?”  That’s happened before; let’s not let it happen again.

 

      Let us, by contrast, embrace the friendship that we have with people of different races, nationalities and faiths.  This is one thing that bigots and fanatics hate about us – that America is so diverse and relatively welcoming to new and different people, especially here in this area, so we must be onto something good.  LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR; it will amaze some, delight many and tell the guilty that they have not won.

 

     

 

 

 

 

 

Last Tuesday morning, I answered the call for an emergency meeting of South Brunswick’s Community response team, a task force which responds to emergencies and also works pro-actively to improve our community.  I am a charter member of this group, which includes the Superintendent of Schools, the Township Manager, the Chief of Police, several members of their respective staffs, and some clergy.

 

We took a moment in the midst of the crisis to share personal concerns for the safety of our own loved ones as we developed the community’s response to the crisis.  I shared my anxiety for my stepson, Bernie.  A Board of Education employee ran out, and rushed back to tell me he had reached a friend who worked in the same building as Bernie, and he was O.K.  And the next morning, almost the first thing Imam Hamad Chebli said to me was "How is your stepson?"

 

We have a community.  Let us thank God for it, preserve it and strengthen it.  And to that end, my third point: please join me this coming Thursday evening, September 20^th, at 7:30p.m. at St. Augustine’s Roman Catholic Church on Henderson Road, Kendall Park.  We will have an Interfaith Prayer Service involving Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus, all “on the same page” and on the same stage.  It will be memorable.  And we can help make it the best-attended service of worship in the history of South Brunswick.  And wouldn’t that send a message.

 

We may ask at this, the beginning of what promises to be a long struggle, what will constitute “victory”.

 

Let me identify some victories we can achieve here and now which will make possible real victory.

 

If we can hate evil, and not brand an entire people or faith evil, then we will have won a victory.

 

If we can root out bigotry from our souls, then we will have won a victory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If we can convert one bigot to “judging people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”, then a lost sheep will have been found, and as today’s Gospel says, then there will be joy in heaven.

 

This is a grim hour.  It can also be our finest.

 

 

 

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

 

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church