A Sermon Preached by Lee Cheek, Lay Preacher
September 11, 2011
St. James & St. George Episcopal Churches @ Crissey Farm, Great Barrington, MA
13 Pentecost, Proper 19A
Someone wrote this week: “We don’t have to forget, but we should be careful about how we remember.”[i]
September 11, 2001 is a day that is saturated with memory for us. So saturated with memory that the layers of meaning for us will be developed for years to come. For the past ten years, as a nation and as individuals, we have tracked the movements in our souls and hearts in response to our memories of that day.
I was especially grateful this week for the public television rebroadcast of Helen Whitney’s 2002 documentary Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero. There was an interview I remembered but had not meant much to me at the time.[ii]
The photographer who captured many of the images of the stranded people who jumped from the Twin Towers was trying to imagine what was happening to them to enable them to fly down together from a high ledge. “Did they see a beautiful garden with rivers and lakes? Was heaven already there before they jumped? Something must have been going on because a lot of them jumped.”
Well, this was his remembrance, and maybe since then it has changed for him. But it was fresh to him then, and I was able to catch something about how his imaginings at the time were led by his compassionate identification with the jumpers. He sensed that for them a horizon extended out, out, out, and it included everything so that there was nothing to fear and it opened all the way into the freedom that “death need no longer be the end of possibility.”[iii] Whoosh!
What the photographer was describing, this horizon of heaven that he hoped they were jumping into, was what a Loving God of Creation has called us to since the foundation of the world.
When we hear the story of Jesus instructing Peter and the other disciples to forgive seventy times seven times, we are being invited to freely jump into this heaven, leaving behind a world that ends with us and our self-concern and arriving in a larger world that includes compassion for the other.
The hyperbole of the number stresses that it is more important to be kind than it is to exact payment in kind. I will repeat this. It is more important to be kind than it is to exact payment in kind.
Furthermore, Jesus follows with a parable which is a clear warning that if we remain unconcerned about the suffering of others however much we think they owe us, then we will end up tortured and stuck in the world of our own un-kindness, our own hard-heartedness, our own violence.
When Moses tried to call attention to the suffering of his people upon which Egyptian society depended, this caused such disturbances in Egypt that they are recalled and remembered as plagues. The pharaoh finally relents and lets them go, but upon further reflection about the benefits of slaves who can be whipped on a whim, goes off in greedy pursuit.
This time, self-induced fate of the hard-hearted Egyptians is represented by the sea waters, which in many ancient stories represent a crisis of violence that threatens to drown a society: the leakage and seeping of resentments, grudges and fears born greed and envy.
Rescue from the undertow of violence, as victim or perpetrator or both, is surely a miracle. Unimaginable faith in the ultimate power of love is needed to disengage and leave it all behind.
Whoosh! The waters of violence are parted and the Israelites walk through with dry feet, away from the world of hard-heartedness. The challenge for them will be to not only remember God’s loving gift of the miracle of their deliverance from the danger of their oppressors, but to remember—and understand—their deliverance from becoming hard-hearted themselves—which is exactly what will enable them to become a blessing to others.
But make no mistake: the kind of remembering without rancor that makes us a blessing to others is a long, slow, laborious journey for humans. The conversion to a precarious and vulnerable life of faith, hope and love—faith that we are loved more than we can love, hope for liberation from what keeps us enslaved to our own violence, and love that doesn’t end at home—this conversion does not happen by strict adherence to any known system of ethics or law. But, rather, it happens by the excess of love spilling into our lives in nearly inexpressible ways.
So I would like share a story about how love spilled into to one man’s life and transformed the horizons of it. I heard this story first-person in Jerusalem in 2007 on the last night of a diocesan sponsored trip to Israel.
Rami Elchanan, a graphic designer and 7th generation Jewish Jerusalemite, and Aziz Abu Sarah a Palestinian journalist arrived together to speak to us from an organization called the Parents Circle-Family Forum. This is Rami’s story.
He told us that he had served as a soldier in the 1973 Yom Kippur war and had come away from it embittered, cynical and furious after losing so many of his friends. But he went on to marry and have children and a career. In 1997, his only daughter, 14 year old Smadar, was killed by two Palestinian suicide bombers. For seven days he and his family sat Shiva and were consoled by thousands of people. After that he was consumed with how to react to the murder of his daughter.
One day he met Ytzchak Frankenthal who told him about how his son was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas a few years before and that he established this organization of people who had lost children in the conflict but nevertheless wanted peace.[iv] Rami recognized him as one the people who had come into his home during Shiva and was initially outraged. But Ytzchak calmly proceeded and asked him to come to a meeting of this crazy group of people.
Rami agreed and at the meeting he saw many famous Israelis, all grieving parents. But then he saw “an amazing spectacle”—Arabs, bereaved Palestinian families getting off the buses, coming toward him, greeting him with peace, hugging him, crying with him.
He later wrote of this experience: “I am not religious—quite the opposite—and so I am at a loss to explain the change I underwent at that moment. But one thing became as clear to me as the sun at noon: from that day on … I got a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Since that day I have dedicated my life to one thing only: to go from ear to ear and from person to person and to shout in a loud voice, to all who are prepared to listen, and also to those whose ears are blocked: This is not our destiny! … We can and once and for all must stop this crazy vicious circle of violence, murder and retaliation, revenge, and punishment.”[v]
Love spilled in and opened horizons that were previously inconceivable. Whoosh! And Rami’s way of remembering—stepping out of the damp, dank mire of rancor—becomes a blessing to those who meet him and hear his story.
Finally, let me tell you that 200 families who lost loved ones on September 11th 2001 have become blessings to the world, too, by following their desire that no one else feel the same pain they have felt. As the September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows[vi] they are reaching out to families in Afghanistan who have lost family members. Love has spilled into their lives, too, so that the horizons of their compassion do not end here … or here … but stretch way, way out to there …
May such love spill into our lives, so that our concerns do not end so close to home and each morning we get up out of bed to become blessings to the world.[vii]
Amen.
[i] The Rev. Bill Carroll, Episcopal Café Lead, in comments to “Using This Sunday’s Gospel on September 11, 2011” http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/peace/using_this_sundays_gospel_on_s_1.html
[ii] Photographer Luca Babini. Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero can be currently view at http://video.pbs.org/video/2120639608#
[iii] Davies, Oliver. A Theology of Compassion, p. 34 (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans: 2003; UK, SCM Press: 2001)
[iv] Parents Circle - Families Forum (PCFF) is a grassroots organization of bereaved Palestinians and Israelis. http://www.theparentscircle.com/ The PCFF promotes reconciliation as an alternative to hatred and revenge. For Aziz’s story and blog see http://azizabusarah.wordpress.com/about/
[vi] http://peacefultomorrows.org/index.php
For a televised interview with David Portorti about remembering 9/11: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/security/video-david-potorti-on-waging-peace-after-911/11420/
[vii] The preacher gratefully acknowledges her indebtedness to Anthony Kelly’sThe Resurrection Effect (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008).
1 comment:
beautifully conceived and written, my friend. I am so inspired by your preaching, over and over . . . .love, peggy
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