Podcast of "What We Remember" (MP3)
Exodus 14:19-31
Psalm 114
Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18:21-35
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts
be acceptable to you, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen
I guess I don’t have to remind
anybody what today is. Al mentioned it during the announcements and I even
touched on it in my greeting on this somber day. Vicke even brought it up last
week during her Children’s Sermon. One of the things she asked was if 9-11 fell
on Monday or Tuesday ten years ago. I was the first to say Tuesday. I knew
because I knew exactly were I was when the news started to make it out to the
Central Time Zone.
It’s easy for me to remember
because it was my second week in seminary. I was sitting in the Rev. Dr.
Kathryn Roberts’ Introduction to the Old Testament class, a class that met on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, and we were covering the Hebrew alphabet. As we were
learning our “Aleph, Beth, Gimel’s” a buzz started to rise in the hallway. It
was louder than usual, but it was my second week in seminary, so what did I
know about normal?
My first inkling about what was
going on happened when I went to the financial aid office. Glenna Balch, the seminary’s
wonderful Director of Financial Aid, was listening to the news playing on her
radio. Sorry folks, live audio internet streaming was still in its infancy and
live streaming video was embryonic; if you were at work and there was no TV,
you depended on the radio. I was her office for a while and did some paperwork
while listening to what was going on in New
York
For those of you who are not
familiar with 70 year old radio dramas, “War of the Worlds” was the brain child
of Orson Welles who was also director of the Mercury Theater of the Air. It
began like any regular music program would begin, with the announcer welcoming
the audience and a band starting the show. Suddenly, the music program is
interrupted by breaking news. The news was that the earth had just been invaded
by Mars. It wasn’t until the show’s fortieth minutes that the focus went from what
was supposed to be the radio news broadcast and onto the narrator and his story.
In a time before television, radio
broadcast not just news and music, but comedy and drama shows too. Breaking
news was also a part of the day because of the rise of Hitler and the war in Europe . To a listener who thought it was just a normal
music show, it sounded like a global tragedy was breaking loose in the swamps
of Jersey . Welles’ show was on CBS Radio and
broadcast nation-wide, and because it had no commercials the fake news reports
sounded like real news reports. It caused pockets of panic around the country.
What was meant to be a scary story for Halloween became an even scarier story.
As I told Glenna, listening to the
news was like listening to “War of the Worlds,” except that this time it was real.
I went home and went to Marie. She
had already been in the hospital twice since we moved to Austin
I’ll admit it; I suspect you are
thinking more about where you were on 9-11 than listening to me at this moment.
That’s fine, I was hoping to open a door to a moment of remembrance. I know for
a fact that my story is not more important than yours.
I went down this road because
honestly I had trouble knowing where to go with our readings from Romans and
Matthew.
Matthew gives us a parable with
commentary tacked on the end for good measure. Peter asks how many times we
should forgive. His offer of seven sounds overly reasonable to an Old Testament
scholar. Seven is forever connected to blessings and curses, so to forgive
seven times rather than curse for seven generations is quite generous.
So when Jesus tells him “No, not
seven times, but seventy-seven times” he’s blowing the Law of Moses and
conventional wisdom completely out of the water.
The parable itself is about a man
who seeks patience to repay his debt but will not show the same to his fellow
slave. The scope of debt is expressed in a way that we don’t relate to because
we don’t know the conversions. To put it in perspective, 100 denarii is 100
days worth of wages to the average laborer. Based on the average income for a household
in Marshall
The king forgives a debt that is so
incredible that none of us could scarcely fathom. One example we can begin to get
a grip on: This week Forbes magazine reported the Dallas Cowboys are worth
$1.85 billion.[i] So
imagine being forgiven by Jerry Jones for losing the entire Cowboys
franchise—lock, stock, and stadium. Funny, I don’t see that story ending the
same way as that part of the parable.
As for $20,000, that’s a new car;
and not one with a ton of bells and whistles either. We have a grip on that
kind of debt. It’s not cheap, but it’s doable.
The king forgives, he doesn’t grant
a reprieve he cancels the full debt. The king forgives more than we could ever
hope or imagine. But the man who receives such grace cannot extend it to his
brother, his fellow slave. The king is generous, but he also has an eye to what’s
right, even if that eye is focused in anger. If you can’t forgive then you will
pay the same price you assigned your brother.
Marie and I were watching “The
Children of 9/11” on NBC Monday night. They were interviewing children whose
parents were killed in the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and on United
Flight 93. One of the girls, maybe about 13 years old said even if 1,000
innocent Muslims came and apologized to her for killing her father, she would
not forgive. She could not accept the apology of a nation for deeds of a few. This
was followed by a young girl whose father, a Muslim, also worked and was killed
at the World Trade Center
Now, I won’t pass judgment on the
young girl who lost her father and cannot forgive. I don’t expect a thirteen
year old to have a faith that can move that mountain. She’s thirteen! She lost
her father in the premier national tragedy of our country! She was a spectacle
of media for months and now years after the fact! These are not the makings of
repentance from anger and delivery from grief and sorrow.
Our reading from Romans teaches us
we are not to pass judgment on those whose faith is weak. We are not to cast
away someone just because of judgment on “disputable matters.” The New Living
Translation says this more cleanly, “Accept other believers who are weak in
faith, and don’t argue with them about what they think is right or wrong.” I
know not to reject the thirteen year old girl who does not have forgiveness in
her heart today. She’s known the most horrible sorrow a girl or boy can know
and she’s had it for three-quarters of her life. I can pray one day she will
forgive, but I cannot and will not blame her for how she feels, especially not
today.
There’s something else in Romans
that needs to be addressed today. Paul writes, “One man considers one day more
sacred than another; another man considers everyday alike.” In a way we started
our worship today saying that today was different from last Sunday and will be
different from the next. We say this because there is something in the fiber of
our nation that says this day is different.
There is a story that a member of a
Baptist church asked his preacher why they didn’t celebrate Lent (the season of
preparation for Easter). The preacher told him that they don’t celebrate Lent
because we are an Easter people. To this preacher every day is just as special
as any other, every day is a celebration because since the resurrection
everyday is Easter. This is how we are called to live our lives, we are
supposed to live like everyday is the resurrection because everyday we live in
the resurrection.
Despite being someone who likes the
calendar that gives us Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter, I like this story.
We should live everyday like it’s the
day of the resurrection. So here’s the question, is today a special day or
should every day be just a special? Paul doesn’t answer this question.
He does say “He who regards one day
as special, does so to the Lord… For none of us lives to himself alone and none
of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord and if we die, we
die to the Lord. So whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. For this
very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of
both the living and the dead.”
In short, it doesn’t really matter
whether we consider this a special day or another special day as long as we
give thanks to God. “Every knee will bow and every tongue confess to God.” By
this, each of us we will ultimately be held accountable.
In the eyes of some, this is where the
church fell short as the people of God on 9-11. Will Willimon is the Presiding
Bishop over the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist
Church
For the most powerful, militarized nation in
the world also to think of itself as an innocent victim is deadly. It was a
rare prophetic moment for me, considering Presidents Bush and Obama have spent
billions asking the military to rectify the crime of a small band of lawless
individuals, destroying a couple of nations who had little to do with it, in
the costliest, longest series of wars in the history of the United States.
The silence of most Christians and the giddy
enthusiasm of a few, as well as the ubiquity of flags and patriotic
extravaganzas in allegedly evangelical churches, says to me that American
Christians may look back upon our response to 9/11 as our greatest
Christological defeat. It was shattering to admit that we had lost the
theological means to distinguish between the United
States and the kingdom
of God
September 11 has changed me. I'm going to
preach as never before about Christ crucified as the answer to the question of
what's wrong with the world. I have also resolved to relentlessly reiterate
from the pulpit that the worst day in history was not a Tuesday in New York , but a Friday in Jerusalem
My way of paraphrasing what Willimon
is saying is that in the shadow of 9-11 the phrase “God and Country” has become
“Country and God.” He says that in the shadow of 9-11 the people of God set
aside the cross for the flag and this is the failure of the church.
I thank God everyday that I live in
a country where not only am I allowed to praise God, I am allowed to praise God
as I am called to praise God. I thank God that our nation is protected by men
and women who are volunteers, who have chosen to offer themselves to protect
all of us. I thank God that I am allowed to pray for the civilian and military
leaders who create the policy they help implement. I thank God I am allowed to
pray that our political leaders are worthy of the respect shown by our
military.
But there one thing we need to take
from our readings that if we don’t we won’t be Christ’s church.
God saves. Our God saves; and one
of the things God expects us to do in return is to have mercy, to forgive one
another. To take our parable a little too literally, God our King has forgiven
us $2 billion worth of sin against the Lord and asks that we forgive a
comparatively paltry $20,000 worth of sin against each other. All the while, we
are called not to judge poorly those who cannot forgive because their faith is
weak.
We are called to forgive because
humanity’s sin against God is greater than the sin we can commit against one
another, even the sin a group of 20 terrorists perpetrated against thousands of
individual people, their families, and this nation. Maybe that’s the hard
lesson of 9-11 for the church. Humanity’s sin against God is greater than our
sin against each other. God forgives, God saves, and so we are called to
forgive too. This is what we are called to remember.
Some people call today “Patriot’s Day” and I want to
wave the flag, shoot, I approved the bulletin cover. But that is not my
vocation, not from this pulpit. My call is to raise the cross. My call is like
that of John the Baptist and point to Jesus. My call is to exalt Christ above
anything the world will try to put along side him. This is not easy. I pray for
the strength to proclaim Christ over exalting a nation, even, in my opinion,
the greatest nation on Earth. As we remember the victims of 9-11, let us
remember the one who saves us all first.
[i]
Associated Press, “Dallas Cowboys Most Valuable NFL Franchise,” http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/6941473/dallas-cowboys-most-valuable-nfl-team-forbes-list,
retrieved September 11, 2011.
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