Washington National Cathedral

Homily by Cathedral Volunteer Chaplain Kathy Jordan

To remember is painful. It seems as though it all happened yesterday. I guess that’s because the memories that flood back are so intense, so deeply engraved in our psyches. And along with memories, of course, come the feelings: shock and horror, rage and sorrow and helplessness.

Nine years have passed, yet in some significant way we are still a people wounded, a people in pain. In acts of unbelievable violence, precious lives were torn from us. Along with all those lives lost, we “lost” something else that was precious: the collective illusion of our country’s strength and our safety. The notion that we were, perhaps, invulnerable. What happened in New York, at the Pentagon, and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, changed us. For many Americans a wound remains. If the wound is denied or ignored—not acknowledged—then rather than forming a scab, it will fester. The wound won’t heal because just under the wound is not only sorrow; it is also anger and fear.

Meanwhile on TV and talk radio a host of pundits and politicians are ready and eager to stoke our anxieties, our suspicions. Their super-charged rhetoric, unhinged from fact, plays to the need for some one, some group to blame. Lisa Miller reports in the recent Newsweek that the same group that introduced “Islamofacism” a few years ago has now come up with its latest.

Their term is “stealth jihad,” a phrase that “effectively conflates all Muslims with terrorists…because, think about it…in a stealth campaign you never know who your friends are.” This kind of “crazy-talk” (I call it) plays to our woundedness, our fears. It poisons our ability to move beyond 9/11 to a place of reconciliation, of healing.

Let’s consider some other very different words—Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount. Love your enemy. Pray for those who persecute you. Understand how radical this teaching was. In Jesus’ time the Law not just permitted, it encouraged retribution for personal or property injuries. And Jesus quotes the catchwords, “You have heard it said, ‘an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth.’” Revenge was customary; it was expected. You torch your neighbor’s field, then expect to be seeing smoke on your own north forty.

Jesus told his followers they were never to seek redress, that they must abandon even the thought of settling scores. He even rejects the impulse to defend oneself against assault. Jesus was not interested in an updating the legal code. He didn’t want to change the rules; Jesus called for people to change their hearts. We were to love our enemies, to pray for them. There was no other way to break the cycle of violence and oppression.

Nowhere in Scripture is Jesus’ teaching more uncompromising. It is considered by most folks to be wildly idealistic, unreasonable, and impractical—though let it be said that Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and countless other practitioners demonstrated otherwise. Jesus’ standard of righteousness is God’s gold standard of unconditional love for all God’s children.

Today we look back, we honor and remember those who lost their lives this day. It is also a time to look forward. For those of us pondering how we carry on, how we move forward, the first step is to acknowledge the residual wound of 9/11, that in some sense we all carry. Are you ready to befriend it; reconcile with it? Because unresolved, it will nourish a need to scapegoat and blame. And we all know where that leads.

It is a dangerous world. We will continue to be the target of terrorists. And the rancorous rhetoric continues unchecked. As followers of Jesus, how are we to become signs of healing and hope in such a broken world? By loving our enemies. (We squirm, right?) Listen once more to a paraphrasing of the Gospel by Eugene Peterson:

“I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone give you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. God gives God’s best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anyone can do that. In a word what I’m saying is Grow up. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.”

The way forward is not beyond our resources. God has entrusted us with the ministry of reconciliation. The time is now. The choice is ours. In the words of Ephesians, I pray, “May each of us may know the hope to which we have been called, the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe.”