Prayer: Thou Whom some call Yahweh and some Adonai, Thou Whom some call Allah and others know only as breath or spirit or force or higher power, Thou Whom some call Jesus and whom we know as Christ, the one who goes back to find us when we are lost -- and rejoices when we are found -- Thou Beyond any and every human name, draw near... and may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord.
We stand ten feet deep in spiritual rubble. We have dust and grit in our eyes; we can't really see. We are still searching for lost people, lost sheep, those who are not only buried spiritually but are also buried physically. We are in a daze that may last on for days. And so all we can do is poke around for what we know of other similar horrors. We can try to see. And we will see through a glass dimly.
Let us begin by trying to remember where we were last Tuesday morning. We need to get our bearings. Just locate yourself. Last Tuesday morning I had a pile of worries similar to those you had. I was worried about taking good care of all the people in this parish with cancer. I was worried about how to get my car radio fixed. And I was pretty deep in a quarrel with an editor. I have been trying for years to get a certain publisher to pay attention to me and finally they did. I had made it through the first 500 rounds with a book proposal called Basic Christianity for Seekers, the kind of people we often enjoy as members here. People new and eager to the faith. I had just gotten an awful email from the new editor of this firm, the former one having died over the summer of breast cancer. This new editor is much younger, 36, I think, and she really didn't like the proposal. "It will never sell," said her email. It is too somber, too full of suffering, too much about the cross. ...I mean, "says she", who is not only young but probably thin, "is all this stuff about the cross really essential?" She will be glad to take another look at the proposal if I lighten it up, sweeten it up, so we can turn basic Christianity into a best seller.
My hunch is she will feel differently this week. We have been pierced by something that is not light and not sweet, something like a cross. If last week, we were sitting around worrying about "who moved my cheese?", this week we are wondering who moved our world trade centers. We are angry. We are weighed down. We are no longer as interested in our car's broken radio. Instead, we are asking, Is God on Vacation? Why hatred? How can steel crumble? Why innocent victims? How could they do this to my children's future? How could they do this to my son's first year in college? How could they do this to my sixteen year old twin's junior year? They are supposed to be playing frisbee, not discussing terrorism.
The earth, since Tuesday, has moved under our feet. The sky has come falling down. SHIFT has happened. I am going to take three takes, imitating a plane trying to land when landing is difficult. The first approach will be psychological, the second spiritual and the third theological. These will overlap, as does the rubble, with one steel beam on top of electrical wire, on top of a desk, on top of an arm or leg, on top of an airline wing. We know we can only get to the bottom of this mess by going slowly - we don't want to make things worse. And we know that some day those streets in New York will be clear. SO will our eyes and our spirits. But that day is not going to be tomorrow.
The first ten years of my ministry were spent working with rape victims. Not just dozens but hundreds. I learned a lot about what happens to people after they have been raped. I learned that many find their way to these words, "All I want back is yesterday." And that is the one thing they cannot have back. When an airplane penetrates what was seen as safe air space, something like a rape happens. We are violated. We are violated both intimately and publicly. We lose not only our physical coherence but our psychological coherence. If the men in the congregation will forgive my exclusive metaphor, we learn what it means to be overtaken and to be powerless. Frankly, the metaphor is not that exclusive. We also know that men experience an awesome rage when their lovers are violated. Many men do violent things in retaliation, simply to calm their souls. We are in that kind of period, right now. People do get "over" rape but they do so by going into it, through it, not around it. We have a very hard journey to take. We must go through this suffering, through this rubble, for its cross to bear its crown. Our journey will not be easy.
Another borrowing from psychological learning is helped. What I have learned about the early loss of a parent is that often people displace their own grief on to the surviving children. Instead of the husband grieving his wife, all he can think about is his child. He forgets himself because he thinks he should. The rest of the family does the same. Most typically a female relative, grandmother or sister, steps in and raises the children -- but burns out under the weight of additional infants and young children in her care. Then, the tragedy rehappens. The child is abandoned four to six years later when the surrogate parent can't sustain the care.
Many of us are right down displacing our grief and horror on "helping." We need to be careful of even that. In the same way that we are advised to affix our own oxygen masks first....before those of others.....in times of great spiritual rubble and great tragedy, we hvae to take care of ourselves.
I know you caregivers. I know you members of CGCC. You will be out there taking care of everyone else. I am so proud of you...but be careful. Also take care of yourself.
A rabbi I heard on NPR tells this story: his synagogue is at the end of the Brooklyn bridge. On 9 - 11 he was in the office as the news broke. A parade of people crossed the bridge and simply walked in to his synagogue. No one had walked in for a long time but there they were. He didn't know what to do so he asked for people to divide themselves in groups: who needed help and who could offer help? Fortunately the hundred or so people divided themselves quite evenly. And then in a stroke of brilliance, after about an hour, the rabbi asked the members of each groups to switch positions. For those in need to offer help and those helping to express their need. This brilliance, this mutuality is exactly what we need in these times.
We need to be ready to be both helper and helpee. We need to switch roles. We need to know that in every person lies strength and vulnerability. Just as in every person there is good and evil.
I may as well keep picking on editors. Many of you know that y husband is writing Bill Coffin's biography. Warren's editor, a new one after the many years of the project, said to him that she couldn't understand how he could say Coffin was a good man when he is also, for real, a wife beater. How could good co-mingle with bad like that? I wish this young woman knew more about humanity. If she did, she would know that the co-mingling is a permanent aspect of the human condition. The same mixtures apply to the matter of strength and vulnerability. That's what we need to know psychologically now. We who think we want to help need to make sure that we are getting help as well.
Because this event has no psychological or historical context, I can only go to what little I know of other contexts, like rape and like the early loss of parent. They help us see where we are going to have to go. It will be important not to displace. It will be important not to think yesterday is coming back. So then what, psychologically, what do we do? WE GET OUR SHIFT TOGETHER.
We try to become, like Jesus, less afraid to suffer. To understand not only the love of God but also the power of God is hard. That love from which we cannot be separated in Romans is the powerful love of God. Not just the love. We also try not to displace in service or in blood banks. Instead we get simple and real, the way people who handed out wet paper towels in lower Manhattan truly helped, simply, to assuage the hurt of the smoke.
And we also put out positive images to ourselves and to others. Someday that street in lower Manhattan will sparkle again. It will be cleaned up. So will our spiritual rubble find its way to resolution. Our shift will be together again. Just remember how this has to happen: piece by piece, dump truck load by dump truck load.
I know we all wanted to go back to work on Wednesday. We can't. That would be too soon.
Specifically what can our churches do: we can hold prayer services. We can listen to children and teens. We don't need to talk to them. All we need to do is listen. The question is not what shall I say to children but can I be bold enough to really hear. That's what the cross does: it hears humanity suffering. We can have interfaith dialogues. And we can mutualize the dialogue between the strong and the weak.
Spiritually, to add another layer, let me suggest another kind of metaphor. Many of us are feeling spiritually dismembered. Our Heart is over there and our head is awash with images that we can neither look at nor stop looking at. I recommend most essentially the psalms for this time. Last week preparing for spirit Sunday we actually chose not to use the psalm that was designated for the day, Psalm 72. "It was too depressing." My editor has more than one accurate reading of the situation before Tuesday.
For me and maybe not you, spiritually, this is not a time for optimism. I find it a bit chirpy. "So how are you..." we say. "Fine," we respond. LIKE HECK.
Spiritually, this is a time for confidence, not optimism. Optimism will carry caregivers of orphans the first few years, then they will collapse. Spiritually in America it is time for a rest. In music, a caesura, a break. Things have been going way too fast. That airplanes can't fly and that meetings get cancelled is a little like the gift heart disease gives to Garrison Keillor. And I hear it from many of you. You whisper to me that "cancer is not that bad...it gives me some time to think.." Or you whisper, "I needed a break."
Yes, the economy is threatened. And yes, our security is not in the economy. I say that as the pastor of a church mightily dependent on good interest rates. The best church I ever served was one with 80% of the people unemployed. They did a kind of ministry in that community on the Eastern End of Long Island which was fabulous. They didn't have enough money but they had great love. Our capacity for ministry is not just our endowment!
Let me suggest instead of optimism or even rest a strategy that I can only call spiritual judo. A great unnamed force has come up on us. It has made all our normal thoughts and feelings seem small. In judo, people turn the force against them back on itself. They don't let it in muscularly. They use its strength to push it back.
As I join you i praying for and with the people who may even now still be alive and conscious under the rubble, the very very few, I pray that they know what they are doing. They are holding up what is left of the World Trade Center. They are in an air space or what God might call a cleft, as in Rock of Ages Cleft for me. We can find those places too. Clefts. Places where the power of evil can't get us - and not because we are strong but because we are clefted.
I go to a notion of spiritual judo because I have seen others use it in times of great distress. Small and weak people are often a lot stronger than they seem. When we say that nothing can separate us from the loving power of God, that God will seek even the last sheep and the last coin out, what we mean is that nothing can penetrate our core.
There are so many ironies and reversed directions in this whole mess. Not just the planes reversing field in the air. But the whole use of the open society against itself. The use of our own airplanes to damage our own buildings. SO WHY NOT reverse the evil upon the evil itself? I believe that is what Jesus did on the cross. He received the blow but he did not accept it. He threw it back.
Spiritual judo is a trained capacity to be confident in the face of great trouble. In this non violent, martial art, we become rubble rousers.
What does this mean specifically? This is what you would say to a rape victim. Get enough sleep. Eat right. Don't let the rapist take out your job or your grades or your capacity to live your life. Cut your intimates some slack. Model speech. Model openness. You are in the rubble. You are going to touch weird things. You are going to find yourself flipping out, with almost no warning. This is no time to shun embarrassment or to overdo politeness. Your life is at stake. Many people will shut down. Many Americans will not make it back from the rubble, the land of the numb and the totally freaked out. Make it out. Rise from the rubble. Dig your way out. Those who don't make it won't be able to care any longer. They will be the people selling your civil liberties for a dime on the corner. Don't let them. And don't become one of them. Get out from under the heavy steel.
Psychologically, shift happens. We need to get our shift together. Spiritually, evil is strong and good is stronger. Reverse field, rest under the weight till it lifts or is lifted. Think of Your spirit asd something thousands of people are trying to dig out from. Be ready to rise from the rubble.
Finally, theologically, what do we say? By theology I don't mean seminary stuff. I mean God's constant action in the world. What the great theologian Walter Brueggeman calls God's ongoing action in history to redistribute power and to bring the world back to what it was in the beginning. What Jesus does when he returns for the lost sheep and comes back rejoicing. We restore the beginning; we create in ourselves a new heart.
What in the world is God up to? Let's be very clear. This tragedy is nothing God either allowed or did. Human beings created this mess. In stead when horror happens, God is simultaneously always at work. God is not afraid to work in rubble. Dismembering, blood, these are God's habitats as much as gardens as sanctuaries. Ask Golgotha.
Again, forgive the thought embryo, but if everything else now seems so small, my book contract, our acne, does not likewise everything else seem so small in the light of great good? And is there not great good, always, eternally in God?
When we see this new world from the perspective of God's world, there are positives. We are now as scared as the people of Israel, Palestine, Nicaragua and East Timor. America just joined the world. God wants us to be part of the world. God was more than a little miffed at our self-obsession and self-congratulation. God has long wanted a long and serious American introspection. Likewise God has long been asking this question. How long could Americans really think we could live openly and freely with less than 10% of the population and more than 92% of the world's resources? Do we think God approved of that pattern? Our twin towers in God's eyes sit next to the shacks of most of the world. Is it really that bad that this part of our Ameriacfn way of life is threatened? I think not.
The good news is that the terrorists picked the wrong buildings. They picked our sites of secondary security, financial institutions and defense centers. Taking out the Status of Liberty would have been much worse, or any church or any synagogue. . Madeline Albright said it right, "America's security is not our monuments. Our security is our liberty. It cannot be air bombed."
So if you think I am suggesting that you experience both sorrow and joy right now, you are right. To God good can come of this horror. The same God who raised Jesus from the dead can raise America from the rubble.
By the way, my editor is right. There is a lightness to this heaviness.
We simply have to find a way to say it to each other. And God knows my book
proposal failed. Still, I see the cross through the psychological haze and the
spiritual rubble. Whenever we see a cross, we know that a resurrection is not
far behind. We do suffer. And then we rise. Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
Senior Pastor
Coral Gables Congregational Church
Sept. 16, 2001