I’m going to start today’s sermon by doing something I’ve been hesitant to do in previous commemorations of 9/11 that I’ve been a part of, and that is, share what I was doing that day.
The hesitancy comes from the fact that I wasn’t even in this area at the time, and that my story is probably the least interesting in the room. In 2001, I had just graduated from Divinity School and was working my first job at a church out in Ohio to fulfill a 2-year commitment to my home diocese. On the morning of 9/11, I showed up at work and found out what had happened from the church secretary. Then, like much of the country, we spent the morning glued to the television watching events unfold.
In the early evening, we did a church service for the community, and then, after that, I drove home, picked up my college friend who lived nearby, and not knowing what else to do, we drove down to a place in Columbus where we had heard they were collecting donations for the victims’ families. The “collection center” was a bunch of strangers with big industrial sized buckets taking money from people out their car windows – just the sort of thing that, any other day, you might be rightly suspicious of. But I guess it was worth the risk to us just to feel like we weren’t completely helpless.
Finally, late that evening and after some more television, my friend Jessica and I took a walk around our neighborhood. This next part is a memory I think I repressed until recently, not only because it’s a bit cheesy, but also because it’s illegal. We came across a stretch of fairly newly poured wet sidewalk, and something in me just had to write in it. So I knelt down and, with my finger, carved out the words “Sept. 11, 2001 – Never forget.”
It’s strange to think back to what that meant to me at that time. Before long, it would become a sort of call to revenge - a reminder to keep the anger alive so we could get back at our enemies. But on that first evening before our reactions were organized and interpreted and our various narratives to help us explain the event took shape, Remember 9/11 meant something more like Remember the compassion and connectedness inspired by our feeling of vulnerability that day.
I’ll come back to that in a minute, but first let’s look at our Gospel reading. Peter here asks Jesus how many times he has to forgive his brother. He suggests seven times, probably having in mind an Old Testament command to forgive three times, and figuring he was being pretty generous. But Jesus, not impressed with Peter’s generosity, says you have to forgive not seven but seventy seven OR, in many translations (because the original Greek isn’t clear) seventy times seven times – or, in other words, so many times it’s difficult to count them. In his usual, provocative way when talking about things like love or humility or forgiveness, Jesus is being more demanding that seems humanly possible.
It’s a hard reading for a day like today. And in fact the bishop of New York gave us the option of using different readings – these readings, if you can believe it, were set down in 1994, long before anyone knew they would fall on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. I can maybe see where the OT text where all the Egyptians are wiped out is one we might just as well skip. For that matter, I can see where this harsh text on forgiving is one we might happily skip on a day like today. But then again, you don’t pick and choose the context in which you read passages on forgiveness, and something tells me that Jesus wouldn’t have softened his message even – and especially – today. So I decided to let it stand.
Plus it got me thinking about this saying that you hear a lot: forgive and forget. You know, of all Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness, both here and elsewhere, you never hear him say to forget after you’ve forgiven. In fact, quite the contrary. In the Bible, people are often called to remember times when they’ve been hurt and vulnerable. Remember when you were slaves in Egypt. Remember when you were lost in the wilderness. Remember when Jerusalem fell and you had no homeland. Remember, as we do each week when we celebrate Communion, when Christ was betrayed and crucified and sealed up in a tomb.
In both our readings and our rituals, we’re forever remembering terrible events. But of course the purpose of all this remembering isn’t to stoke our anger or get revenge, but to make us better people – the kind of people we are after major tragedies, when we’re most fragile and also most generous.
I spent some time this week listening to radio interviews with New Yorkers looking back on that day, and I was struck by how many of them spoke about the overwhelming generosity of those days immediately following the attacks, and, at the same time, wondered where all that goodwill had gone in the decade since. We’ve done a lot of remembering as a culture this past decade, but maybe not the kind that makes us more compassionate. So, as we grapple with what it means to forgive on a day like today, let’s also remember what happened so that we might leave here better people – the people we were that day ten years ago.
The hesitancy comes from the fact that I wasn’t even in this area at the time, and that my story is probably the least interesting in the room. In 2001, I had just graduated from Divinity School and was working my first job at a church out in Ohio to fulfill a 2-year commitment to my home diocese. On the morning of 9/11, I showed up at work and found out what had happened from the church secretary. Then, like much of the country, we spent the morning glued to the television watching events unfold.
In the early evening, we did a church service for the community, and then, after that, I drove home, picked up my college friend who lived nearby, and not knowing what else to do, we drove down to a place in Columbus where we had heard they were collecting donations for the victims’ families. The “collection center” was a bunch of strangers with big industrial sized buckets taking money from people out their car windows – just the sort of thing that, any other day, you might be rightly suspicious of. But I guess it was worth the risk to us just to feel like we weren’t completely helpless.
Finally, late that evening and after some more television, my friend Jessica and I took a walk around our neighborhood. This next part is a memory I think I repressed until recently, not only because it’s a bit cheesy, but also because it’s illegal. We came across a stretch of fairly newly poured wet sidewalk, and something in me just had to write in it. So I knelt down and, with my finger, carved out the words “Sept. 11, 2001 – Never forget.”
It’s strange to think back to what that meant to me at that time. Before long, it would become a sort of call to revenge - a reminder to keep the anger alive so we could get back at our enemies. But on that first evening before our reactions were organized and interpreted and our various narratives to help us explain the event took shape, Remember 9/11 meant something more like Remember the compassion and connectedness inspired by our feeling of vulnerability that day.
I’ll come back to that in a minute, but first let’s look at our Gospel reading. Peter here asks Jesus how many times he has to forgive his brother. He suggests seven times, probably having in mind an Old Testament command to forgive three times, and figuring he was being pretty generous. But Jesus, not impressed with Peter’s generosity, says you have to forgive not seven but seventy seven OR, in many translations (because the original Greek isn’t clear) seventy times seven times – or, in other words, so many times it’s difficult to count them. In his usual, provocative way when talking about things like love or humility or forgiveness, Jesus is being more demanding that seems humanly possible.
It’s a hard reading for a day like today. And in fact the bishop of New York gave us the option of using different readings – these readings, if you can believe it, were set down in 1994, long before anyone knew they would fall on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. I can maybe see where the OT text where all the Egyptians are wiped out is one we might just as well skip. For that matter, I can see where this harsh text on forgiving is one we might happily skip on a day like today. But then again, you don’t pick and choose the context in which you read passages on forgiveness, and something tells me that Jesus wouldn’t have softened his message even – and especially – today. So I decided to let it stand.
Plus it got me thinking about this saying that you hear a lot: forgive and forget. You know, of all Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness, both here and elsewhere, you never hear him say to forget after you’ve forgiven. In fact, quite the contrary. In the Bible, people are often called to remember times when they’ve been hurt and vulnerable. Remember when you were slaves in Egypt. Remember when you were lost in the wilderness. Remember when Jerusalem fell and you had no homeland. Remember, as we do each week when we celebrate Communion, when Christ was betrayed and crucified and sealed up in a tomb.
In both our readings and our rituals, we’re forever remembering terrible events. But of course the purpose of all this remembering isn’t to stoke our anger or get revenge, but to make us better people – the kind of people we are after major tragedies, when we’re most fragile and also most generous.
I spent some time this week listening to radio interviews with New Yorkers looking back on that day, and I was struck by how many of them spoke about the overwhelming generosity of those days immediately following the attacks, and, at the same time, wondered where all that goodwill had gone in the decade since. We’ve done a lot of remembering as a culture this past decade, but maybe not the kind that makes us more compassionate. So, as we grapple with what it means to forgive on a day like today, let’s also remember what happened so that we might leave here better people – the people we were that day ten years ago.
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