The first anniversary of the horrific events of September 11, 2001 is upon us. As with death of a family member, it is important for preacher and congregation to mark this date in a public way. Not only is the first anniversary of a major loss is a significant symbol, but it is also an excellent occasion to summarize and evaluate the changes in our common life (and in our individual lives) since 9/11, and to think critically about the kind of future we think God wants for us and for the world.
Some congregations will devote the whole Sunday service on September 8, 2002 (the Sunday immediately preceding September 11) to this task. Others will have special moments of acknowledgement within a larger service. Ecumenical and interfaith assemblies will take place on September 8 and on September 11 itself.
In these few paragraphs, I offer some general theological thoughts for preaching in connection with marking September 11. In other entries on this site, I suggest books that a preacher might examine, and I make some cursory remarks on the readings from the Revised Common Lectionary for September 8.
No matter how helpful resources on this website may appear to be, there is no substitute for the local preacher listening in a pastoral way to the congregation. From such listening, sensitive pastors try to discern an interpretation of the gospel that is most appropriate for a particular congregation at a particular time.
As a teacher of preaching, I experience quite a few sermons at the seminary and in my local congregation. I also read a lot of sermons, hear about quite a few sermons from ministers and laity, and I hear some on audio and video tapes. I do not hear a sample of sermons selected by criteria that would satisfy a social scientist. However, my impression is that the sermons I hear are consistent with trends in preaching in central Indiana.
Keeping that qualification in mind, I report the following recollections of sermons that I heard or heard about in the immediate wake of 9/11/01. These reflections also point the preacher toward important agenda items for the first anniversary sermon.
Many of the messages that I heard: led the congregation in recognizing the feelings prompted by the event, set out about as much direct theological interpretation of the event as the congregation was able to hear in those strained times, and offered realistic hope for the future. I was particularly struck by the number of sermons that made direct use of the biblical form and function of lament. I was also encouraged by the number of preachers who tried to respect our national identity as a community (the United States as a community in severe pain) while not succumbing to blind patriotism or national idolatry. Such preachers recognized that our particular community was wounded and needed care while they also stressed that as children of God we are part of the human community whose boundaries and identity far transcend our national ones. A lot of pastors appeared to benefit from Joseph R. Jeter, Crisis Preaching: Public and Private (Abingdon Press, 1998). Nonetheless, I notice four difficulties that crop up in several sermons.
(1) Disproportionate time on psychological analysis. Some preachers so focused upon the psychological dynamics of the congregation's reaction to the event that they did not offer enough theological interpretation. While helping the congregation process feelings (especially fear and anger) is an important pastoral task, the preacher is further called to help the community place its emotions in a psychological frame of reference. Certainly the preacher in September 2002 needs to major in helping the congregation names its feelings but also theologically to understand and respond to them.
(2) Untimely prophetism. Other preachers noted that the attacks on the Trade Center and the Pentagon were prompted, at least in part, by the fact that many people in the developing world perceive the U.S. as pernicious, unjust, exploitative, and repressive. These preachers immediately called for the U.S. to face its guilt in these regards, to confess its sin, and to take steps to rectify its relationship with the developing world. While I am sympathetic to such a prophetic analysis, few congregations were ready to hear this line of thought when the rescue units were still arriving at smoking Ground Zero. I heard parishioners from such churches complain that they felt "battered" from the pulpit. They needed more time to process the emotions and other reactions prompted by the event. The prophetic effect of the message was lost. By now, however, many congregations can entertain such an interpretation of our situation and can recognize its difference from prevailing public attitudes and government policy.
(3) Theological obscuratinism. A few preachers, wanting to be faithful to the primary work of the pulpit (theological interpretation) offered such hyper-technical theological jargon that few in the congregation were able to follow it. Some congregations were so emotionally wrenched that they could not concentrate on detailed arguments. A preacher needs both to gauge the capacity of the congregation to receive the message, and to speak the message clearly enough that people can easily follow it. Often, a congregation is so numb in the immediate presence of tragedy that they can process only basic theological affirmations (especially assurance that God is with us). More detailed analysis usually needs to wait until the congregation can receive it. I imagine that such a time is now ripe for many congregations.
(4) Theological failure. In the immediate face of the tragedy, some communities were in such shock that preachers showed considerable pastoral wisdom by simply standing with the congregation in silence before the event. Sometimes silence is the most important first step. Eventually, however, a pastor must say something. A preacher does not want to rush too quickly to words, but sooner or later the preacher must come to them because that is what the preacher is called to do: to interpret the world theologically. Most of the sermons I heard articulated an essential theme: the assurance that God was present and feeling our pain. Further, a lot of preachers voiced theological questions that were on people's hearts and minds, e.g., "Where was God when these events happened? Why did God allow these things to take place? What are God's purposes in these events?" I am surprised, however, at the number of preachers who had a theological failure in the pulpit when it came time to speak. They could respond to such issues with no more than, "We don't know the answers to these questions. Who can know the mind of God? God's purposes are greater than our purposes. We can't really answer these questions." To be sure, as I indicated just above, the immediate moment of pain may not be the time for theological detail. Still, preachers need a clear and compelling systematic theology that allows them to say more than, "We don't know what to say about these events." Some preachers did not even raise the question of whether the popular questions are themselves theologically adequate. A preacher's systematic theology needs to be robust enough to allow the preacher to offer an interpretation of a tragic event that is appropriate to the conviction that God loves the world unconditionally and seeks right relationships for all. The homiletical reflection also needs to explains why some events in the world contradict those purposes, and the preacher needs to help us see how God relates to such events. Otherwise, the congregation is left with the impression that God is inscrutable, unpredictable, inconsistent, and even untrustworthy. We need to know what we can count on from God, and what can count on from us.
At the time of death, people need to tell the story of the death (and details of the relationship) over and over. The telling and retelling is therapeutic. Similarly, a national tragedy generates the need to tell and retell. We did a lot of that at the time of the event itself.
A year later, it might be good to retell the core events of 9/11-especially the images from the media that are so burned into our consciousness, and to name the feelings that were a part of those days. The pastor needs to help the congregation recognize as much as possible of the full gamut of emotion and thought that came forth in response to 9/11, e.g., helplessness anxiety, shock, numbness, fear, disbelief, paralysis, guilt, depression, anger, desire for revenge. The minister can remind people that such reactions are typical in the wake of abnormal events. A preacher may need to encourage the congregation to be completely honest in claiming their feelings and thoughts.
We need to own our feelings so that we can reflect on them. Otherwise, they may exert a long-lasting, controlling but unrecognized, power in determining our orientation to life and our actions. Some people need to learn that what we feel is simply what we feel; it is neither morally good nor morally bad. There is no reason to feel ashamed or proud of our feelings. However, our responses to our feelings-what we do with the energy and impulses they release-does have a moral dimension. Christians should want our responses to be consistent with the gospel. What has happened to these feelings over the last year?
.The preacher can also point out other normal responses to abnormal events that affected many people a year ago-phenomena such as tiredness, lethargy, difficulty with sleeping, bad dreams, or urge to get busier than usual. It is normal to become so absorbed by the abnormality that we can hardly focus on anything else. We can have difficulty concentrating, and can be forgetful. It can be hard to make decisions.
Beyond that, it might be helpful to review with the congregation changes that have taken place in local, national and global life in response to 9/11. What has happened? Where does the story appear to be heading now? What feelings do these things evoke in us today?
Such recollections have a certain therapeutic value in themselves. Even more, however, they provide the congregation with a moment to reflect on the degree to which our response to 9/11 coheres with the gospel. Do the things that have changed in our individual lives and our various social worlds cohere with God's purposes for human community? In specific, do they reflect the core conviction of the Christian community that God loves each and every person (and, indeed, all things) with unconditional love and that God wills for all people (and elements of creation) to live together in love, mutuality, and support?
If the aspects of the continuing story of 9/11 are unfolding in ways that are contrary to God's purposes for community, what are some practical steps the congregation can take to help the story participate more fully in the divine aims for the world?
It might be useful to organize these latter reflections on three levels. (a) How are the immediate lives of the parishioners and the congregation as congregation affected by 9/11? (b) How is the life of our nation as a community changed? (c) How is our nation's relationship with other nations in the world affected?
With a little advance planning, a preacher might interview some people in the congregation. What do they remember feeling and thinking and doing at the time of 9/11? What have they felt and thought and done since? What have they learned about themselves, our nation, and its place among the other nations? What do they hope for improving the quality of life for themselves? For the nation? For the world?
Preachers have long understood the power of images to shape human life-consciously and unconsciously, intuitively as well as cognitively, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. The same line of analysis that I pursued in regard to feelings (above) pertains here. If we do not examine the images that populate the screens of our hearts and minds, they create force field of unexamined power. They can influence us in ways of which we are not aware, and some of these influences can run contrary to the values that we most want to support and embody. (Images can subtly influence us in positive ways, too).
A preacher needs to help the congregation recognize the images of 9/11 that continue to affect us, and to help us name and reflect on those effects. In my heart and mind, the predominant images are of destruction, violence, and fear. These images linger in my memory with incredible emotive power. Indeed, my impression is that negative experiences and negative images are often much more immediately potent than positive ones.
Preachers need to help congregations develop images of hope from the days of 9/11 itself and from today's world. Such images can serve as positive lures that help us want to shape our social worlds in ways that manifest God's purposes of love and justice for all.
A preacher might begin with images of people helping people on 9/11. The homily might also surface images of communities together in mutuality and support in the days afterwards. The sermon can create images of communities as they would be with God's love and will for right relationship flowing freely through them.
A preacher can still refer to the negative images from 9/11, and its aftermath, as reminders of the kind of world God does not want. But positive change most often results from positive attraction to the possibility of an improved world.
Two theological poles define the spectrum of understanding God's relationship with the events of 9/11. These ways of thinking can extend to any tragic event or distortion of divine purposes. I summarize each point of view, and explain why I prefer the second to the first. Of course, each theological position accrues certain gains and losses to the congregation.
The crucial issue in this discussion is the relationship of God's love and power. Is it possible for God to be completely loving and completely powerful at the same time?
At one end of the spectrum is a view that I think is most popular, especially among laity. It holds that God is absolutely sovereign and that nothing occurs in the world without either God's direct initiation or God's direct approval. In the latter case, God may not initiate an event, but allows it to take place.
God has a reason for either doing something or permitting it to take place. People can often discern God's reasons for taking action or permitting things to happen, but, sometimes, the human community can only infer such purposes, or can only guess at them. People may come up ideas and actions, but they can proceed only if God allows them. People have only as much freedom as God allows.
According to this way of thinking, God either caused the attack on the twin towers and on the Pentagon, or God permitted them. In either case, the preacher needs to help the congregation discern (or try to discern) the reasons why.
Beginning with this premise, a preacher might think that God used or permitted the attacks on the towers and the Pentagon to punish individuals for excessive or particular sin with death. Few preachers in my circle of acquaintance think in this fashion.
However, some preachers that I know do hypothesize that God sent the planes into the towers and the war center to punish the United States for our national arrogance, injustice, exploitation, wastefulness, imperialism, and other forms of abuse. In a spin off this interpretation, I have heard of preachers who think that God used these events to call the nation to repent of our arrogance, etc. By repenting, we would stave off worse national disasters ahead-disaster that will come about as the nations of the world become increasingly disaffected with the U.S. and turn against us. If we heed the lesson of the attacks, we would begin to act with more humility and justice.
This first viewpoint assumes that God is all powerful. God can do anything God wants. It attempts to say that God is, at the same time, all loving. If we think that some actions are unloving, the problem is that we do not understand them correctly. The divine purposes are hidden from us. People who adhere to this interpretation often say God is "mysterious," that is, God's ways are sometimes inscrutable to us.
I am convinced that this pole of the spectrum fails. To be sure, our perception of God is always limited, relative, and distorted. However, it is beyond reason to think that the actions against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon expressed love in any way. Preachers in this camp sometimes speak of God expressing "tough love" through harsh actions, but I fail to see any "love" for the deceased (including the terrorists who were killed), their families, and the economic and social dislocation that followed the destruction.
If God had the power to stop these events and did not do so, then God acted in an immoral way and cannot be trusted.
At the other end of the spectrum is the view to which I subscribe. This position concludes that God is all loving, but not all powerful. That is, God designs all of the divine wishes and actions to express love or create situations of love. God is more powerful than any other single entity in existence, but God does not have the unilateral power to cause anything to happen any time God wants.
God works by offering persons and situations the highest good that is available for the circumstance in which an individual or community finds itself, but God cannot single-handedly bring things to pass. Individuals or communities (or elements of nature) must co-operate with the divine purposes for good to result.
Evil results when individuals, communities, or elements of nature reject the divine lure and act in their own self-interest. God does not want them to do so, but God cannot prevent them. When persons or groups (or nature) choose to go their own ways (against God's purposes), God does not give up on them but continues to offer them possibilities to make choices that are more in line with God's purposes. Because evil actions often affect the possibilities for people who are not themselves evil, God must sometimes adapt the good that is possible in view of the changed circumstances.
God's intention to love and to lure people towards good is inexhaustible. This quality is what this viewpoint calls the "mystery" of God. God's will is not opaque (mystery as inscrutability) for God always wills love and blessing for all. The mystery is how God's will for love and good can be inexhaustible.
Applying this logic to the events of 9/11, we would say that God did not intend for the World Trade Towers or the Pentagon to be attacked. At every step of the way, God did everything that God could do to lure the perpetrators away from that destructive path and towards behaviors that would more fully benefit the community. When the planes crashed into the buildings, and the towers and walls came down, God felt the pain of those on the planes, in the buildings, and the watching world. God also shared the sorrow of the families of the terrorists who were killed in the action.
In the wake of the crashes and collapses God worked with the changed situation to offer individuals and groups opportunities to express and receive as much love as the circumstances allowed. God lured people to form communities of solidarity with the families of the deceased. For the sake of people who have been displaced economically, God tries to spark ways of thinking about money and community that will result in greater and more just economic benefit for all.
God wants love and justice for all. Consequently, God would not seek for the people who encouraged the attack (in Afghanistan or elsewhere) to suffer.
Today, long after 9/11 itself, God is actively seeking for individuals and communities to participate with God and with one another in rebuilding the world as a sphere of love and justice in which respect prevails for different communities. God offers the world the possibility of people living and working together in ways that end the frustrations that led to the attack on the Trade Center and the Pentagon.
A minister can still lead the congregation in asking the crucial question, "What do we learn from the events of 9/11 that can help us move towards a more loving and just world?" Although God did not plan 9/11 as an event to teach us some lessons, we can still learn from it.
Christians are uncomfortable with this second point of view because they think it does not according sufficient place to God's power.
Of course, some readers will object that these poles are not the only ways of understanding the relationship of God and evil. Most preachers probably understand the place of God in connection with 9/11 in some intermediary way that tries to preserve a greater place for God's sovereignty and power while respecting the freedom and responsiveness of people and nature. I must say, however, that such intermediary attempts nearly always seem to me to be too muddy and indistinct.
In another article on this web site that offers exegetical commentary on the lections from the Revised Common Lectionary for September 8, I expand on the essential points that I make in short form here.
Some people in the U.S. tend to idolize our country, and regard our country as an absolute good. As indicated earlier, the preacher needs to help the congregation respect our national identity as a community while not succumbing to single-minded, even vitriolic, patriotism or national idolatry. As children of God we are part of the human community whose boundaries and identity far transcend our national ones. Commitment to our country is not unconditional but is always predicated on the degree to which our nation serves God's purposes for all. Sermons in this season of our national life need to remind congregations of the relativity of our national loyalty.
One of the immediate results of the attacks on New York and Washington is the war on terrorism. As I write, an old chapter of this effort is being reopened as the United States contemplates an unprovoked attack on Iraq, and one that is not invited (to my knowledge) by the Iraqi people, to end the rule of Saddam Hussein.
The preacher must raise the question of whether such action is consistent with God's purposes of showing love for all and of creating communities of love within which all may live in peace, freedom, dignity, mutuality, and abundance.
I recognize that the situation in which we find ourselves is complicated. While I incline towards pacifism and nonviolence, I also think that some circumstances are so savage and vicious that only violence can end them. However, I an convinced that when a nation or group concludes that violence is a last resort, that people should do so with the heavy heart of recognizing that they are complicit in sin by continuing the spiral of violence. Violence begets violence. The brutality of war should never be celebrated. Instead of brass bands, rhetoric about the glory of defending our nation, and flag waving, a community should undertake to root out evil with violence by first confessing their/our sin.
I am not very sophisticated in international matters, but I do not believe the enemies of the United States pose such an immediate threat that we can only deal with them through massive violence such as is now U.S. policy. Some preachers, from the earliest moments of attack, interpreted the actions of the terrorists as profoundly regrettable symptoms of international frustration with U.S. policies of arrogance, imperialism, human and economic exploitation, complicity with repressive regimes, and other evils.
In line with the preceding paragraph, the sermon might raise the question, "How do the persons who led the attacks on the Trade Center and the Pentagon view the world and the place of the United States in it?" The sermon might compare and contrast the answer to this question with how people in the US view the world and our place in it
In the U.S., we view the people who planned and carried out the incidents in New York City and Washington D.C. as "terrorists." Their own communities view them as freedom fighters or agents of liberation.
In place of instruments of war, it would be better for the U.S. to explore how other peoples of the world view us, and how we might enter into relationships with other nations and groups that are characterized by mutuality, justice, seeking the economic and social good of all, and institutionalizing respect for all. At this point, we cannot precisely foresee the results of such an exploration. But I think it has more possibility for bringing about a great reunion of the global family than the current pattern of using bombs, missiles, and other instruments of destruction and death.
Several hymns are especially meaningful to me at this time in our national and global life. They each stress that God is sovereign of all peoples and seeks for all to live together in peace.
Lloyd Stone and Georgia Harkness, "This is My Song, O God of All the Nations" (tune: Finlandia)
Wm. R. Reid, Jr., "O God of Every Nation" (Llangloffan)
Ruth C. Duck, "We Cannot Own the Sunlit Sky" (How Can I Keep from Singing)
Shirley Erena Murray, "O God, We Bear the Imprint of Your Face: The Colors of our Skin are Your Design" (Raumati Beach)
Miriam Therese Winter, "O For a World Where Everyone Respects Each Other's Ways" (Azmon)
Hyn Sul Hong, "God Made All People of the World" (One World)
Other hymns that could serve this occasion incluce:
African American Spiritual, "Down by the Riverside" (Study War No More)
Constance Cherry, "When Will People Cease Their Fighting" (Rustington)
Henry W. Baker, "O God of Love, O Power of Peace" (Canonbury)
Henry F. Chorley and John Ellerton, "God the Omnipotent!" (Russian Hymn)
A lot of people are touched by Sy Miller and Jill Jackson, "Let There Be Peace on Earth" (World Peace).
I want to say candidly, and to the disappointment of many of my prophetic friends, that I do not object to singing "God Bless America" as long as it is clear that a prayer for God to bless this nation is not simultaneously a prayer for God to curse other nations. I would like for all nations to be blessed in the biblical sense. In the case, all nations would not only work together for the common good, but would work for the day when the disruptive distinctions between human communities would give way to a vast common life.