A DAY OF REMEMBRANCE
A sermon by the Rev. Dr. James G. Kirk
Harundale Presbyterian Church
Text: “This day shall be a day of remembrance for you.” Exodus 12:14
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This past Tuesday PBS had a special called “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero.” Several people were interviewed about what effect the events of September 11th had on their relationship with God and their faith. Some of the people interviewed were wives who lost their husbands, a man who lost firefighter friends and many people in his community, an Episcopal priest, a Rabbi and a rabbinical student. Let me just highlight some segments for you that seem to speak to where we are on this Sunday before the first anniversary of what is becoming another Memorial Day in our calendars.
Marian Fontana lost her husband who was one of the firefighters killed that day. She said, “I guess all I feel, at this point, is the profound absence of Dave. And my conversations with God that I used to have, I don’t have anymore. I just can’t bring myself to- I used to talk quietly to myself or to God and say, ‘Thank you for Dave. Thank you for Aidan. Thank you for my life. God bless everyone. God bless the children.’ You know, ‘Please heal the sick.’ You know the usual blessings. And now I can’t bring myself to speak to him anymore because I feel so abandoned. But I guess deep down inside, I know he still exists and that I have to forgive and move on. But I’m not ready to do that yet.” (“Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero,” transcripts; PBS. Page 10)
Tim Lynston said, “I really can’t see the purpose why all these people had to die. I can’t accept this. Right now, God’s not giving me that comfort. We’re a community in mourning. We were hit pretty bad. I knew close to 30 people who died at the World Trade. Basically, they were firemen, young stockbrokers, sons of friends I knew. I miss them dearly. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get over a couple of them. I mean, we were really tight. You know, we did a lot of things together.
“And I had to come down here to the beachfront to just let loose, and it was brutal. I let loose at God. I fired all my barrels at him. It might sound crazy, but I cursed him. I damned him. I think God could have just ended this all. That’s why I feel strongly that I’m losing respect for him. I know there’s a Trinity. I believe in the Son, but the Father I’m having a rough time dealing with. I’m really having a rough time. I didn’t have any love for God the weeks that followed September 11th. It was really hatred. I can’t accept this unless I can have an answer as to why it all occurred.”
(Ibid. Page 11)
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield said that, “Since September 11th, people keep asking me, ‘Where was God?’ And they think that because I’m a rabbi, I have answers. And I actually think that my job as a rabbi is to help them live with those questions. If God’s ways are mysterious, live with the mystery. It’s upsetting. It’s scary. It’s painful. It’s deep. And it’s interesting. No plan, that’s what mystery is. It’s all of those things.
“You want plan? Then tell me about plan. But if you’re going to tell me about how the plan saved you, you better also be able to explain how the plan killed them. And the test of that has nothing to do with saying it in your synagogue or your church. The test of that has to do with going and saying it to the person who just buried someone and look in their eyes and tell them God’s plan was to blow your loved one apart. Look at them and tell them that God’s plan was that their children should go to bed every night for the rest of their lives without a parent. And if you can say that, well, at least you’re honest. I don’t worship the same God, but that at least has integrity.
“It’s just it’s too easy. That’s my problem with the answer. Not that I think they’re being inauthentic when people say it or being dishonest. It’s just too easy. It’s easy because it gets God off the hook. And it’s easy because it gets their religious beliefs off the hook. And right now, everything is on the hook.” (Ibid. Page 11)
“One of the most impossible and memorable images of that day were people leaping out of the windows, being forced out by the fire behind them, driving the, herding them out of the windows. And to see that image of two people – co-workers, strangers-I had no idea, but that not knowing made it all the more poignant. For reading out for somebody’s hand to take your last step, that you would end your life in the hands of a stranger, plummeting thousands of feet to your death. (Ibid. Page 26)
“I think that the power of that image is it doesn’t give an answer. It takes us in two opposing directions. On the one hand, we are all alone t the end. Life is fleeting. There’s no one to help us when we face the abyss. And there wasn’t. No one came for them. And on the other hand, they reached for each other. They said that in that moment when they’re facing the absolute ultimate, there are other human beings to reach out, to be there, to help them, to help us. (Ibid. Page 26f.)
“I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers, but I keep coming back to his hand in her hand, nestled in each other with such extraordinary, ordinary, naked love. It’s the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It’s everything we’re capable of against horror and loss and tragedy.
“It’s what makes me believe that we’re not fools to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them, like seeds that open only under great fire. To believe that who we are persists past what we were, to believe, against evil evidenced hourly, that love is why we are here.”
“To me, that image is an inescapable provocation. This gesture, this holding of hands in the midst of that horror, it embodies what September 11 was all about. The image confronts us with the need to make a judgment, a choice. Does it show the ultimate hopelessness of human attempts to survive the power of hatred and of death? Or is it an affirmation of a greatness within our humanity itself that somehow shines in the midst of that darkness and contains the hint of a possibility, a power greater than death itself? Which of the two? It’s a choice! It’s the choice of September 11. (Ibid. Page 27)