Sermon at Pilgrim Congregational
Church – June 2003
By Jeff Jarvis
I should apologize for singing one
note. I don’t mean a note I sing in the choir. I have many notes to
apologize for there.
No, instead, I mean that in the
last two times I have had the privilege of standing here,
I have spoken about September 11th. And I will do that once more
today.
Most of you know that I was
fortunate to have survived the attacks on the
Those changes are still unfolding.
They are unexpected changes. And that is what I would like to talk with you
about today.
The first time I stood here, six
months after September 11th, I talked about the pain. The second
time, on the first anniversary, I talked about the anger. Today, I will talk
about the beginning of redemption in three small
changes for the good.
First, let me take you online.
After September 11th, I started writing what is known in the
jargon-crazed, fad-happy Internet as a “weblog.” It’s
just a web page that is easy to update with news and links and commentary. I
had read weblogs by many interesting writers before
September 11th but it was only afterwards that I started my own, for
it was only then that I had something to say. I wrote about my memory and reaction
to the tragic events at the
As time went on, as life moved on,
I wrote about other things – about politics, TV, and soon enough, war in the
So I spread the word on my weblog and others linked to what I said and spread the
word, in turn. Mr. Motallebi’s trouble
continue; he has since been released from jail, awaiting trial.
Through the support of this man and
the cause of democracy in
Now if you’re my age, your images
of
Yet here I was today, online, making
friends with Iranians and they with me. We didn’t
agree about everything – certainly not about all aspects of the war in
Now I’m no Pollyanna. I don’t
believe we’ll find world peace and solve mankind’s problems merely by making a
few such connections. It’s harder work than that. Still, this can’t hurt; it
can only help.
As I marveled at these connections,
these bridges, I realized that they came in obtuse and odd ways only as a
result of September 11th. That is a first change for the good.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking
about religion and September 11th. Obviously, religion – or a skewed
and sick misuse of religion – had a direct and causal relationship to the events
of that day.
Religion has a direct relationship
to so much of what is going wrong in the world today. The litany is tragically
long:
Fights over religion are at the
center of – are often, tragically, the cause of – war, suffering, death, even
evil.
Of course, it should be the
opposite. Religion should be our cure, our salvation.
You can blame much of that
discrepancy between the good and proper and the bad and evil uses of religion
on fanatics and fools who imprison God inside their hate.
But I’m coming to see that to some
extent, you can also blame us: the mainline, mainstream, normal, civilized,
decent people of God we try to be. I fear we are not doing enough – enough to
drown out the fanaticism, enough to protect and reclaim religion and God from
them.
Don’t worry: I’m not going to
lecture you and suggest that you should go out and hug a terrorist today. Hardly. The last time I stood here, I issued quite the
opposite message – one could say, an unchristian message, lacking in
forgiveness toward the men who had perpetrated the crimes of September 11th.
I confessed that I was not ready to turn the other cheek and probably never would
be.
Yet still, if religion – Jew vs.
Muslim, Muslim vs. Christian, Hindu vs. Muslim, Christian vs. Jew – if religion
is at the root of so much strife, isn’t it our role, our holy obligation, to
find a way through it, to build a bridge?
But how?
There’ve been interfaith
conferences and they are, I suppose, a start. A few months ago,
We can study, each of us. I have
been reading books about Islam in an effort to understand it better. My latest
is Bernard Lewis’ The Crisis of Islam. And I have to say that it helps me. But
it builds no bridges to anyone else.
We can learn as a group. We had Steven
Blackburn here to teach us about Islam and I know that everyone who attended
found it terribly enlightening and valuable. I’ve suggested in the Diaconate that we take advantage of the rich religious
diversity right here in
But we’re going to need a much sturdier
bridge if we’re ever going to contribute to the solution to this problem of the
ages. And so I think it is time for us to stop dwelling on our religious differences
but instead to recognize our common religious heritage.
As Christians, in every Christian
church, we do little to acknowledge our Jewish heritage other than to read the
Old Testament. Imagine if we went the next step and shared not just words but
also rituals. I have never understood why we don’t – why we rejected almost all
of the ways of our religious forebears – and I have never received a
satisfactory explanation for it.
So why don’t we, for example,
celebrate Passover – as Jesus celebrated Passover? Of course, we have communion
and we recognize the similarity of the act – but not of the act’s meaning. What
is the harm in celebrating both Jesus’ gift of freedom to us and God’s gift of
freedom to His people, the Jews? What is the good? Well, it creates a bridge
from worship to worship, belief to belief, people to people – more than a one-time
bridge in a lecture but an ongoing and meaningful bridge as part of our
religious life.
We acknowledge Passover in our
Maundy Thursday communion. Muslims acknowledge Passover in a fast called Ashura. Explains a columnist on Beliefnet:
“The Exodus story is a happy one for Muslims; it is a tale of bitter bondage
and hardship and the glory of God’s deliverance from that hardship.” What if we
all celebrated Passover together to acknowledge our common God, our common
faith, our common heritage?
For you see, we are all the
children of Abraham. We are all the children of Moses. We need to remember that
in our rituals and in our relations. For eventually, when we acknowledge our
religious kinship, it becomes just a bit harder to fight and hate and kill each
other.
That’s just a small suggestion. But
these days, I see that I am not alone in making it. Just this month, the European
newsmagazine Focus had a cover story suggesting the coming-together of on the
mega-religion of the children of Abraham. I don’t know that I want or that we
can manage a mega-religion. I just want to see us make small steps closer to
each other.
In any case, these efforts to find
common ground with each other and with God come in great measure, I believe,
because of the urgent need created by September 11th. That is a
second change for the good.
Finally, let me tell you about the
September 11th memorial. As you may know, the agency overseeing the
rebuilding of the
I decided to submit one myself –
not because I think for a moment that mine will be selected but simply because
I felt I had to, partly out of selfish introspection as a step in a process of
healing, and partly as a mitzvah, a deed that simply should be done. I
submitted mine last week; the deadline is tomorrow.
As I worked on my proposal, I wrote
about it on my weblog and once again, I found
surprising connections.
A filmmaker in
I saw that I wasn’t alone singing
my one note. Oh, I’m far from alone. More than 13,000 people from 50 states and
90 nations registered to submit proposed memorials – 13,000 for this memorial
versus 1,400 for the
This, too, came because of
September 11th. This, too, is a change for the good.
Of course, the world would be a
better place if September 11th had never happened, if that sunny day
had gone by with nothing more notable than a beautiful sunset. But it didn’t.
And we have to grapple with that now.
And so I tell you all this today to
make a simple and obvious point that has been made innumerable times before but
cannot be made enough.
We ask how these tragedies can
occur. We ask how God can allow them. We ask whether God ordains them. We ask: Are
they part of God’s plan?
I say they cannot be. If they were,
I would quit His company, defect from His nation, and dread life in His enternity. But I do not for one second, not in one cell of
my soul believe that God plans such tragedies. Man creates such evil and life
creates accidents and diseases and death.
God does not will us to suffer. But
He does will us to find some good out of suffering that occurs. And I believe I
see that good coming in ever-so-small, oh-so-tentative, and so-very-mysterious
ways following September 11th.
I see small bridges being built, person
to person, nation to nation, enemy to enemy, religion to religion, pain to
pain. They are being built slowly, a brick at a time, but they are being built.
And so that is why I wanted to sing
that one note again today. But this time, for the first time, it is not a note in
a minor key. It is not a note just of pain. It is not a note just of anger. It
is a note of hope, a first small sound of hope.