An Urgent Call
Rev. Lindsay L. Fulmer
Ladera Community Church
September 11, 2011
Matthew 18:21-35
This September day dawned clear blue and beautiful, leaves turning from green to gold signaling summer’s end and the start of a new season. Remember? School had started, work had started, the routine had started. The coffee shop was quiet that early morning and Gloria, the Director of Faith Formation at the Mansfield church, and I were having our weekly meeting - busy planning for Rally Day over coffee and toast.
Up over the register, in the corner, a small television screen glowed. Katie Couric was hosting the Today show. Glancing up, I caught a glimpse of a bizarre sight. It looked like a small plane flew into World Trade Center, and then the clip played again, as if the camera had blinked, rewound, and repeated, to make sure of what it had captured. A small plane hit the world trade Center? The commentary was confused - was this an accident? I pointed to the TV, Gloria turned to see. The waitress behind the counter turned the volume up. As we watched, the second plane hit. Now fire blazed, a billowing black cloud shrouded both towers. Oh my God! Confusion rapidly plunged into shock, stunned disbelief, and fear. What was happening? Disruption of one report followed by another, in frantic succession…a plane has hit the Pentagon - a plane headed for the White House has crashed into a field. The towers tumbled and the world shifted.
Ten years ago today, a decade past, and the reverberations of the 9-11 attacks still rumble. Now on this bright September day, we gather again to celebrate another Rally day, and the start of a new program year. Children and teachers are set to explore new experiences together; a day of somber remembrance coincides with all the happy expectations of new beginnings. How do we reconcile these two? In this time of worship, we are called to do what faith asks of us, has always asked of us - which is to hold together in tender measure both memory and hope; and by our reflection, to trace the tenuous but binding thread that joins dark and light pieces together, creating a pattern we need step back far enough to see.
We each carry our own memories of 9-11, and from this distance have perspective enough to track the trajectory of events that followed. The deep wounding of a nation attacked and traumatized companioned by countless acts of compassion, heroism, and service of the highest order as firefighters, first responders, fellow passengers risking everything to save lives, sacrificed their own. Humbling then, humbling still. Who can forget the handwritten posters with faces of the lost, plastered on walls and fences, on lampposts and telephone poles? Posters waving like prayer flags - silent pleas for homecomings that would never happen. All the heartbreaking stories etched in ashes, each one someone’s child; someone’s loved one, someone’s friend. Trauma, fear, anger and blame laid out a minefield of emotions difficult and dangerous to navigate. The pain of loss remains. Has the healing happened? What has changed? What hasn’t? What have we learned?
The seeds of these questions lie imbedded in the text for today, and the call for forgiveness. Forgiveness that far exceeds any simple accounting, forgiveness not a simple, one time occurrence but a continual practice. Forgiveness, by this tough talking parable, is an exercise of the will, a choice to be made - muscular and alive enough to feel fully the sting of the outrages and inequities of human rage and hate, and deliberately choose differently.
This parable in all its intensity and drama occurs only in Matthew - and true to his style, the consequences of sin are instructively painful. Abundantly forgiven by God, we are called to forgive in kind. There is a direct correlation to forgiving others and being forgiven ourselves. So we are taught to pray, Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. In other words, Do unto us, Lord, as we do unto others. Be aware, Matthew warns, of the risks of turning your back on mercy and forgiveness, and taking up retaliation and vengeance. Hold onto hatred anger and bitterness, and who ends up hurt, even tortured? You.
I remember tears flowed as the towers fell, raising up a cloud of dust, and ash. Tears fell again, not long after, when bombs rained down shock and awe on Baghdad, and the city skyline erupted in flame and smoke, a fire this time of our own making. In the years since, we have spent two or three trillion dollars on fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now are in the grips of a panicky debate over how to cut two or three trillion dollars of debt. What kind of economy does our faith compel us, what measure of forgiveness, what practice of justice and hospitality?
In the days of grief and shock just after 9-11, two women found each other. Susan Retik and Patti Quigley both lost their husbands that day. Both were pregnant with babies who would never be held by their fathers. Sharing this terrible reality, they recognized a connection with other widows in the nation that had been named our enemy. Together, these two American women started an organization called “Beyond the 11th,” dedicated to helping Afghan women who were widows like themselves. As of last year they had helped more than 1,000 Afghan widows start businesses to support their families. All the work done by this organization over nine years has cost less than keeping one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan for eight months. As individuals, they chose not to harbor revenge, or retribution. They chose the way of connection, and new life. They chose for the children, not only their own, but for fatherless children in a far different land.
Most of the children here with us were born after 9-11, or were too young to remember. They may have seen pictures, or talked about it at school, but the only world they know is the world post 9-11, a world we have had a hand in shaping. A world still recovering, still healing, still searching out ways to reduce the threat of terrorism. A world now struggling to repair a network of eroding economies. A nation hard pressed by excessive debt and rising needs, where in a land of plenty, scandalously, many go hungry. How urgent the call must sound for our embattled, entrenched and divided legislature to work together, for those who are suffering cannot afford to wait.
Out of the rubble of 9-11 persistent questions challenge us to respond. How do we live with our deep differences? Differences of ideology, of religion? As individuals, and in community, and especially in church, our choices instruct, our actions, reactions, or inaction informs. We have these lessons Jesus taught to guide us, lessons on forgiveness forging right relationships, the way he demonstrated crossing the deep cultural, ideological and religious divisions of his time, his urgent call not only to welcome the stranger but love the enemy. So there can be no more urgent curriculum than the one we initiate today rightly titled Just Hospitality. What is just hospitality? From Letty Russell’s book by the same title, “Just hospitality is the practice of God’s welcome embodied in our actions as we reach across difference to participate with God in bringing healing and justice to a world in crisis.”1 This is the hope we hold, strengthened by every act of forgiveness, by every stitching together what is broken apart to make of all these salvaged pieces, something whole, something lasting, beautiful and true.
Inspired by spiritual educator Kent Neburn in his response to this tenth anniversary of 9-11: We do our children no justice when we hide their eyes from the cruelty in the world, for they will find it soon enough. But neither do we do them justice when we fail to show them the beauty of a sunset, or teach them the healing miracle of love. We must let them see the cruelty, and teach them how to love. We must show them the injustice, and teach them how to serve. We must teach them how to hallow life, to value kindness, to honor the strong who lift up the weak. And then we must take their hands and lead them to a high place of the spirit, where they can look out over the vast richness and diversity of life on earth and see that it is good.2
On this Rally Day, may we have the courage, and conviction to make this our mission.
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1. Russell, Letty M, Just Hospitality, p.19. Westminster John Knox Press, 2009.
2. Neburn, Kent, Reflections on the Tenth Anniversary of 9-11, The Eyes of Children, Textweek.com.
