After
A sermon six months after 9.11
by Jeff Jarvis
March 10, 2002
Pilgrim Congregational Church



Life changed.

Life changed for all of us six months ago, on September 11th, 2001. And since that day, I have continued to catalogue the changes.

For some people, of course, the differences are devastating, tragic beyond words: I still cannot read the New York Times' stories of the victims' lives without choking on the mention of their children, and without mourning all their futures lost.

For the rescue workers and construction workers who've toiled every day since, I cannot imagine their struggle.

And for the soldiers who are off fighting -- and still dying -- for us in a very strange land -- and for the families who miss them -- I cannot fathom their fear.

Yet for the rest of us, life also changed on September 11th. Today, six months later, we are still measuring the depth of it.

As many of you know, I was there that day. Chance brought me in on the last PATH train to the World Trade Center and foolishness kept me there as I reported for NJ.com and the Star-Ledger and witnessed the fall of the south tower, becoming engulfed in its cloud of debris and darkness.

Yet even though I saw it all and even though I was enveloped in the destruction, the event was so horrid, so alien, and so unbelievable that I sometimes find it difficult to hold onto the memories.

I know that I must remember. And so I read the accounts of others who were there that day, looking for common experience. I stare at pictures of that day to see it through others' eyes and to remember the details. I find my own memories coming back at odd moments. For weeks afterward, the slightest waft of dust would remind me of being engulfed in that cloud of dust that came as that first tower fell; dust reminded me of the fear and anger and desperation.

Objects remind me, too. The New York Times has had a spectacular series by Jim Dwyer about small objects that tell stories of survival from that day: One was the story of a window washer's squeegee that became a Godsend of a tool that allowed a small group to dig through a wall from their stranded elevator and climb to safety, running down a thousand steps with only minutes to spare to save their lives. Another told of a pair of handcuffs used to dig one of the precious few survivors from the pile of rubble.

I have my own small objects that hold the story for me. After coming home that night, I threw out clothes encrusted with the dust and a book that was infused with the dust on every page and many other things. But I kept my briefcase. More than once as I ran away from the cloud of debris and stumbled through it without air to breath or light to see, I dropped my briefcase and -- stupidly -- I stooped to pick it up; I'll never know why. So I kept it. The briefcase is covered and filled with the dust. I wrapped it inside a bag and inside another and put it on a shelf in my garage and didn't look at it. Then my parents visited. They wanted to know more about that day. I didn't know how to tell them more. I said that visiting the hole in New York would tell them nothing. So I finally took them to the garage and just showed them the briefcase. It carries the cloud for me.

We do need to remember. On a web site I quite like, a woman named Rossi talks about her memory and September 11th. She writes:

I remember growing up, my mother would tell me the stories of the Holocaust, about our family members who had died there and the stories she had heard from those who managed to escape. She began to tell me these stories when I was quite young, maybe only 5 or 6 years old.

They terrified me.

When I got older I asked her why she felt it was so important to keep telling me these stories over and again, the same stories each year. She said it was so I would always remember. That it was my duty to remember so it would never happen again. She said, "Slovah ... you must always remember the words ... never again."

So I do remember, and if I ever have children, I will tell them about the Holocaust and make them promise to repeat the words "never again."

Then I will tell them about the towers and try to explain that in every generation, evil, blind, soulless people do inexplicably terribly things.

But the good has always outweighed the bad.

When it is time, we will put together our collective memories of September 11th and build an appropriate memorial to help us remember. But first we must find the meaning in this event. And that will take time.

When I dredge up my memories of that day, it sometimes seems so long ago. Yet when I try to examine the meaning of that day, it seems like only yesterday, for we have just begun to calculate the change, the impact, the importance of that day in our lives.

I cannot speak for you, only for myself, but I do know that the impact is great. Life has changed in so many ways.

For me -- for many of us -- the first and most important effect of September 11th has been to draw us closer to those we love. Ever since that day, our children will not let us out of their sight without saying, "I love you." Of course, every time, this fills me with joy -- but it also brings sorrow, for I know the fear that lies inside.

That small but important act betrays the wisdom of a child who knows that life has changed -- and that it could change again. If for a rare moment, I try to think that life is returning to some old normal, all I have to do is go to work or get ready for bed and hear those words from my son to be reminded that the change is, in fact, fundamental: The potential for change is always with us now. We never expected to be attacked from the sky that day. We cannot know what to expect next. So we hold onto each other and remind ourselves of what matters. We simply say, "I love you."

Implicit in this is another change in our lives: our greater need for protection. After the murders at the World Trade Center, after the onslaught of anthrax attacks and deaths, after the arrest of the would-be shoe bomber, it's impossible to say what is safe now. Certainly, other civilians have coped with this: Europeans living in the wars; Israelis and Irish enduring terrorism. But this is the first time that we Americans have faced this fear and uncertainty on a large scale -- and the impact is unsettling, especially for those of us responsible for the safety of others.

As a family, we have chosen not to fly because of this. I'll admit to making contingency plans if another attack comes here. And just the other day on the PATH train, we were stopped for a "police action," and I shared frightened stares with other passengers who, I'm sure, were thinking, like me, "not again." Perhaps I'm reacting to this more than others -- perhaps I'm overreacting because I was there that day. But at one level or another, I'm sure you'd agree that we all share an insidious new fear in our lives now.

This new imperative for protection has lead to a very big change for me. It has changed my stand on war. I grew up watching the Vietnam War on TV and that is probably the reason I declared myself a pacifist at an early age. I took the Bible seriously if not literally on these points: Thou shalt not kill meant just that, and the Prince of Peace meant what he said too. I was challenged back then: What about Hitler? What about evil? What about a threat to those you love? The truth is, I didn't have an answer then.

But I do now. Now my generation has met its Hitler face-to-face. Now I realize that sometimes, we have no choice but to fight. It's not that we must fight for the sake of victory or vengeance or even punishment. No, we must fight for protection. We have a moral obligation to protect more people -- our families -- from meeting the fate of September 11th. We must stop it.

In a book called From the Ashes, published by the Web site Beliefnet after the tragedy, Rabbi David Wolpe advised: "We have to fight, but without filling our hearts with hatred." Another religious leader in the same book went farther. The Rev. Forrest Church, a Unitarian, said, "to pray only for peace right now is unwittingly to pray for a war more unimaginable than awakening to the World Trade Center in ashes." He continued:

After simmering for decades, World War III commenced in earnest yesterday, against an enemy more illusive and more dangerous than any we have ever known before. Good people here in America and around the world must join in a common crusade against a common enemy.

I agree with those words, but I struggle with saying them. For I still do believe that the Prince of Peace meant what he said; I still do believe that killing is wrong. So how do I reconcile this? How do I handle this change?

I wrote about this conflict on my Web site and a stranger sent me email with a with a link to a Washington Post column by Henry Brinton, a Presbyterian minister. He preached a wise sermon on this war to the wider congregation in the paper and on the Internet. I'll quote him at length:

Exploring the morality of warfare has been the biggest of these challenges for me -- and the area in which my own thinking has changed the most as I try to guide my congregation. Until Sept. 11, I would have described myself as a pacifist. I grew up inspired by the nonviolent teachings and strategies of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and my preaching consistently opposed the use of violence. That is, until I learned about the passengers who downed the hijacked airplane in Pennsylvania.

Although I have always tried to encourage others to follow Jesus's command to "resist not evil" (Matthew 5:39), in this case resistance appeared to be the highest moral course. I see no virtue in allowing countless others to die -- as they surely would have if United Flight 93 had continued under the hijackers' control -- because of personal scruples about the use of violence.

And if resisting evil makes sense on a hijacked airplane, where else can it be justified?…

In an effort to bring greater clarity to my own thinking as the United States engages in war, I've been asking colleagues how they believe such notions fit within their understanding of theology. A divinity school classmate, John Lentz, who is now a pastor in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, persuaded me that "violence is always an immoral act." John argues, though, that there may be times when immorality requires an immoral response.

That reminded me of what Martin Luther wrote 480 years ago: "Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world." A realist, Luther believed that every one of us is destined to sin, no matter how hard we try to avoid it.

So I've begun articulating the notion that a faithful response to terrorism is to sin boldly, never forgetting that violence is sinful, and that true righteousness lies beyond the realm of human effort…

I could not have said that better myself and I sent Pastor Brinton email thanking him for helping me cope with a fundamental but necessary change in my own moral code, a change brought directly by September 11th.

Another small change came hand-in-hand with this: I not only became a hawk, I became a patriot. Now it's not as if I was not a patriot before. I simply believed in being quiet about it, not unlike the way I believed in being quiet about my faith. I didn't wear bumper stickers about God or country. But now I do. I decided to reclaim the flag and wear it on my lapel; I might as well wear it on my sleeve. It is an act of defiance: They killed thousands of us and almost killed thousands more that day, just because we are American. So now is not the time to hide my citizenship.

And now is not the time to hide my faith -- or my struggles with it.

So what are we to think of God after September 11th? Does September 11th change your faith?

Well, if you wanted to indict God for complicity in evil because He created its perpetrators -- or if you wanted to convict Him as an accomplice for not stopping evil -- then you would have had many opportunities before this: other acts of terrorism or genocide or simply the death of an innocent child. Bishop John Shelby Spong says we do not have a God who will "intervene in human history to accomplish miraculous rescue. We know intellectually that such a God is but a phantom of human hope." That is how I knew God already. So my relationship to Him did not change in September.

But my relationship to religion did change. Now, more clearly than ever, I have come to see the dangers of fanatic fundamentalism of any stripe. By this, I mean those who are so completely sure of their beliefs, so immovable in their certainty, so devoted to the utter superiority of their creed, so fierce in their opposition to any competing belief that they would do anything to further their cause: They would imprison and persecute nonbelievers; they would kill their opponents; they would commit these terrible evils in the name of God… they would let their hate take flight and flame and murder 3,000 innocent people in a day.

The Times of London reports that "religious groups accounted for half of the world's 60 terrorist groups listed in the late 1990s." Fanatic religious fundamentalists frighten me to death.

I believe that this is a clash of civilizations, as one historian has labeled it. This is a fight by civilization and tolerance against fanaticism and hate, a battle to defend God against those who would commit evil in His name. I believe that those of us who are in the mainstream of any faith, those of us who hold that religion and society should be open, forgiving, and full of grace and humility, must speak up and fight back -- or the meek shall lose the earth. This is our war.

But what now stops me from becoming a fanatic in this war myself? I'll tell you what stops me: My doubts. Since September 11th, I have come to treasure my doubts and questions about faith all the more, for those doubts are precisely what separate me from the fanatics.

Those doubts and questions are even part of our Congregational heritage. As Virginia Scott has taught us in adult education classes, ours is a tradition of openness. We do not have a creedal requirement; we know that people come to this faith -- we come to these pews -- from different backgrounds and different beliefs, with different needs. As a denomination, we value education, adaptation, growth. We value change.

And so I try to look at the change of these six months since September in that light. Yes, life has changed. But life is about change. It is a mark of our maturity and our civilization that we as individuals and we as a society can adapt to that change and not lose our bearings and our moral compass. For our faith may not tell us exactly, literally what to do. But it does tell us where north is. And with that, we can reset our lives around the change that comes upon us. We change. God does not.

And so there is my personal catalogue of change. But there is something important missing: the good that has come out of even this. As my online friend Rossi said, "The good has always outweighed the bad."

Soon after that day, my sister, a Presbyterian minister, reminded me that these evil deeds were committed solely by humans. This could not have been part of God's will; if it were, I would choose not to believe in such a God. I may never fully understand the equation that balances free will with evil but I accept it. People can be evil. Suffering comes in life. And many have suffered a great deal more than we have. In this Lenten season, we remember that even Christ suffered. But my sister said that God does not will that suffering. Instead, He wills that good can come of it. Our own free will allows us to accomplish that good.

And so I try to find the good. And I do not have to look far. I find it in our tremendous outpouring of charity to the victims of September 11th. I find it in our national unity and common sense of purpose and in our international unity in this fight against evil. And, of course, I find the good in the stories of tremendous courage and heroism that came from that day.

I have many images in my mind from that morning: from the beautiful, pure, clear, sunny sky that started the day to the utter darkness that quickly followed. But of all the images in my mind, the ones that stay with me most are of the faces of the firefighters and rescuers I saw rushing into those buildings. I remember them clearly: etched with fear and determination but without doubt or hesitation.

Those were the faces of the saints of September 11th.

One of those saints was Father Mychal Judge, the beloved chaplain of the New York Fire Department, who died at the towers ministering to the victims. While he lived, Father Judge like to hand out cards with a small prayer on them. So today, in memory of him and of all the saints of September 11 -- in memory of that day -- let us pray Father Judge's prayer:

Lord, take me where you want me to go.
Let me meet who you want me to meet.
Tell me what you want me to say.
And keep me out of your way.

Amen.
. . .