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 11^th. And I will do that once more today.

Most of you know that I was fortunate to have survived the attacks on the World Trade Center. And that, unquestionably, was a life-changing event for me. It was a life-changing event for most Americans.

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 11^th, 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 11^th, 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 11^th 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 World Trade Center and people responded. They linked to me; I linked to them. And thus, friendships and relationships were formed. I now consider some people I’ve linked to close and trusted friends, though I’ve never met them. And when I have met them, I have found that I knew them well before I ever looked them in the eye.

As time went on, as life moved on, I wrote about other things – about politics, TV, and soon enough, war in the Middle East. And one day, I clicked on a link and found a weblog written by a man calling himself Hoder, a young expatriate Iranian living in Toronto who wrote online in both Persian and English. I read what he had to say with fascination. The very next day, Hoder reported something quite disturbing: He wrote that an Iranian weblogger named Sina Motallebi had been arrested in Iran because of what he’d said on his own weblog. His sin and his crime – in Iran, sin and crime are synonymous – was defending an editor at a paper who had published a cartoon that offended the mullahs. I was, of course, disturbed at this: Here was a colleague online who did exactly what I did – who spouted words and opinions onto screens for anyone around the world who cared to read them – and he was in prison for it. To an American, an American journalist, this is inconceivable. To an Iranian, it is life.

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 Iran, something good happened: I found myself making friends and relationships with a host of Iranian webloggers.

Now if you’re my age, your images of Iran probably all stem from the 1979 kidnapping of American diplomats there: images of blindfolded American hostages and black-garbed, shouting, angry Iranian Muslim fundamentalists; images of fear and hate, alien and frightening.

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 Iraq – but even those who were the most critical of my views said that they were grateful for my support and I was grateful for their dialogue and kinship. We’d built a bridge – across nations, cultures, and religions. And we found common cause in freedom and democracy.

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 11^th. That is a first change for the good.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about religion and September 11^th. 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: Israel and Palestine… Northern Ireland... India and Pakistan… Bali… Chechnya… Serbia and Croatia… Iraq… Afghanistan… Iran… Morocco… Saudi Arabia… Tibet…

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 11^th. 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, Saudi Arabia played host to just such a conference. But there was one problem: They invited Muslims and Christians but no Jews. That is a bridge to nowhere.

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 Somerset County and invite Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Sikhs to come share their worldviews with us. Please do let me know if you think that is a good idea. That is at least a footbridge.

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 11^th. That is a second change for the good.

Finally, let me tell you about the September 11^th memorial. As you may know, the agency overseeing the rebuilding of the World Trade Center invited proposals for a memorial on that now-sacred site.

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 New York named Greg Allen at first pooh-poohed the idea of this competition on his weblog but then he, too, decided that he had to make a proposal. And, in turn, he brought together a half-dozen more people and we sat in a New York restaurant one night comparing questions and concerns. And right there, I found fulfillment for the effort that went into this, for I found six people who put care and concern and love into this project, six people who worked hard at remembering.

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 Vietnam memorial. Take those six good souls I met that night and multiply their good efforts now by thousands.

This, too, came because of September 11^th. This, too, is a change for the good.

Of course, the world would be a better place if September 11^th 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 11^th.

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.