Loss, Anger, And Hope

A Sermon by Rev. Mark R. Thomson

Harundale Presbyterian Church

September 30, 2001

26^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Scripture: Lamentations 1:1-3, 3:17-26, Romans 8:18-28

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight,

O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen

I want it to be a dream.

Images of

planes slicing into majestic buildings,

billows of smoke and flame,

people falling,

buildings collapsing,

firefighters weeping.

Voices of loved ones in their final moments saying, "Goodbye," on cell phones.

Screams of horrified witnesses.

Tears of those who are left behind searching.

Its all too much.

I want to sit up in bed with a start,

wipe the sweat from my brow,

calm the beating pulse of my heart,

look around my bedroom and say,

"Thank God, it was just an awful nightmare."

But I can’t. 9-11 happened.

My soul aches. America’s soul aches. The worlds soul aches. The world groans as Paul says.

Words alone cannont express the depth of our feeling of loss.

We turn to our faith.

I lift up my eyes to the hills

From where will my help come?

My help comes from the Lord,

who made heaven and earth.

Our Scripture is intimately familiar with horrendous loss,

And the whole gamut of feelings that go with it.

Walter Brueggemann, a noted Old Testament scholar says that to understand the Old Testament properly you must see it as a reflection on the unimaginable loss of Jerusalem and the Temple in 597 BC when the Babylonian invaded.

The loss of Jerusalem was unspeakable.

The destruction of the Temple was unfathomable.

This was God’s Holy City.

The one founded by King David,

the Temple built by King Solomon.

Together they had stood as a monument to God for four centuries.

They were the center of Jewish life, culture, and pride.

They had seen battles before and miraculously survived.

Yet, one August long ago, the people stood on the hillsides and watched as

all that they had known,

all that they had thought about themselves and God,

all they had hoped for the future,

was torn down,

burned,

pillaged,

and they were carried off to a foreign land to live.

They were never to be the same.

In five poems, the poet author of the book of Lamentations took great care to pen the totality of this loss from A to Z. Literally. You see, each stanza in the first four poems begins with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The third poem in chapter three repeats each letter three times, and the final poem in chapter five has twenty-two verses, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

From A to Z this poem was probably read during every month of August that came and passed while the people of Jerusalem live in exile.

From A to Z they lamented over what they had lost.

I can nnot help but co-opt their lametn as my own:

…..my soul is bereft of peace;

I have forgotten what happiness is:

so I say, "Gone is my glory,

and all that I had hoped for from the Lord."

We too have experienced a great loss; a loss too great for mere words to express adequately.

9-11 was an event that closed a chapter of history and began a new one with the chilling words.

"Today terrorists hijacked four airplanes. Two crashed into the World Trade

Center Towers destroying them. One crashed into the Pentagon. The fourth

Crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Over 6500 innocent people have died."

We lament the loss of so many people: mothers, fathers, sons and dauthters…heroic rescue workers who ran towards the danger and perished. Innocents who did nothing to provoke their attackers except be Americans.

All of us have shed a tear whether we knew anyone personally or not. For my, these past few weeks have been lived in a gray fog of sadness. Thoughts randomly stray to the nightmare of what it must have been like for those on the planes, trapped in the towers, escaping the Pentagon – thoughts I must quickly banish or they would overwhelm me.

I grieve for the families who must rebuild from this mess while a chair at the dinner table sits needlessly empty, and children can’t understand why someone would do such a thing.

We lament the loss of a sense of security that we have long enjoyed.

For so long, the great expanse of ocean that surrounds us has kept our soil free from the terror that so many others in the world live with. We felt safe over here far from the voilence. Like the bombing of Pearl Harbor 60 years ago, the veil of security has been torn and we feel the nakedness of our vulnerability. Our innocence is over.

I find myself keenly aware of planes as they fly overhead, watching and willing them with a prayer to be safe.

For years we lived with the cold war fear of nuclear annihilation, but deep down we thought no one would ever go that far because it would mean the end of everything. Today, we face the evil that is not deterred by their own death. Rather they are glad to die for their cause, and their fanatic hatred of all things American scares us.

We worry about whay might be next. The thought that a biological, chemical, or even nuclear attack could come like a thief in the night to steal more lives frightens us. And for the first time, this generation must go forward with a palpable fear lurking in the background of our thoughts.

We lament the loss of the future that we imagined for our children.

They will grow up seeing adifferent skyline in New York and they will hear the stories about 9-11. They will grow up in a world in conflict. What will happen next? What does war mean and where will it lead? All questions we can not answer yet. The future is suddenly unclear.

There are some who say they are not angry about what has happened. I can not say that I am one of them. My fists have clenched more than once as I hear the stories of our loss, and the cold blooded calculations of those who would destroy us.

Our Scripture is not unfamiliar with anger either. Psalm 137, written by those in exile, taunted by their captors, releases from deep inside a raw, uncensored, gruesome anger born out of intense loss. C.S. Lewis warns that this Psalm give voice to such anger that,

"….the spirit of hatred that strikes us in the face is like the heat from a furnace mouth."

1 By the waters of Babylon,

there we sat down and wept,

when we remembered Zion.

2 On the willows there we hung up our lyres.

3 For there our captors required of us songs,

and our tormentors, mirth, saying,

"Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"

4 How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!

6 Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,

if I do not remember you,

if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest day!

7 Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem,

how they said, "Raze it, Raze it! Down to its foundations!"

8 O daughter of Babylon, you devastor!

Happy shall he be who requites you with what you have done to us!

9 Happy shall he be who takes your little ones

and dashes them against the rock!

We are shocked by the carnality of that final line. Even angry Americans would not wish to see the suffering of children. Yet, we relate to the anger this psalm expresses.

At work, many times over the last few weeks I have heard more than one person express their desires to, "Kill the [illegitimate ones]" to put it politely, or worse, "Kill them all." I’m sure you have heard similar epithets, perhaps expressing some of your won in colorful metaphors.

It is understandable to be angry. It bubbles out of the pain and fear that these terrorists have heaped upon us. Our fists may clench, our teeth grit, and our wishes for those who attacked us be dark.

But what keeps us Christian is that we will not allow our anger to rule our actions. For, as James reminds us

…..the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God.

Anger leads to lashing out, looking for blame in a desperate attempt to regain control of a world gone upside down. We want to blame the intelligence community or the airline industry for failing us. All the useless what-if questions are anger seeking targets.

I have the unique position of not only being in this pulpit, but also being in the intelligence community. I can tell you that the first reaction in my office and many others was, "Did we miss something?" Everyone in the intelligence community that I have talked to has taken this blow personally.

Yet there is anger among our ranks that the media thinks an under-funded, under-paid, intelligence community can somehow work miracles. These people deserve our support not our anger.

The hard fact of the matter for all of us is: if someone wants to break into your house bad enough, they will find a way to do it no matter how many security measures you put in place.

We feel violated. Our attacker took advantage of our open society and did most of their planning in the U.S. where we protect the right of individual privacy. It is the risk that freedom brings, and we must now weigh carefully how much of that freedom we are willing to give up without changing what it means to be American.

We can only do our best to cope in a sinful world and remember that our security ultimately does not lie in our technology but with God.

Worst of all, some want to blame Muslims. Muslim Mosques, people of Arab descent, Arab accents, or those who wear turbans have become targets of anger. As Christians we must categorically, emphatically, and with loud voice condemn any such expressions of our anger.

I was so pleased to see our President be very clear on this matter. Our enemy is not Islam, it is terrorists who misuse Islam for their twisted purposes. In fact, we should take action to protect any Muslim or Arab we know who might become the target of hate crimes.

I was also pleased to see how in Annapolis banded together to protect an Indian women who was harassed because an angry person thought she was an Arab. They offered to stand watch over her store, or walk her safely to her car at night. That’s what makes America great.

We do not want anger to turn us into those we would oppose. There are people angry at our nation for reasons real and imagined. Some of them want to destory us. We can’t let that happen. We must support actions that seek justice and encourage acts of compassion and understanding that seeks to change the hearts of those who would hate us.

Osma Bin Laden hates us. Him and those like him who support terrorism must be brought to justice. But to rid the world of terrorism we must also change the hearts of those who are angry enough to follow him or applaud him. We must listen to their grievances and address those that are legitimate while battling those who would use terrorism to further their agenda.

We are angry just as the Israelites were angry at their loss. What we must must not do is be ruled by our anger because that will not serve God’s righteousness. We may be angry, but we are ruled by justice and love.

These are the times that test our faith.

Many people wonder how God could allow such a thing to happen. It is an unanswerable question.

Yet as we read the Psalms and the poems of Lamentation they bear witness to an incredible faith in God in the midst of deep despair and nagging questions. After witnessing the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, the Israelites would have every cause to think that God didn’t care; that God didn’t even exist!

Yet even in the midst of sorrow and loss we find the words of faith and trust:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,

his mercies never come to an end;

they are new every morning;

great is your faithfulness.

"The Lord is my portion," says my soul,

"therefore I will hope in him."

All throughout the Scripture we find incredible expressions of despair that sit side by side with statements of faith."

O Most High,

when I am afraid,

I put my trust in you.

Psalm 56

The Lord is my strength and my shield;

in him my heart trusts;

so I am helped, and my heart exults,

and with my songs I give thanks to him.

Psalm 28

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God

The Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans

Faith is easy when things are going great. To trust in God when you wonder what in the world God is doing; when the world seems upside down; when you wonder where God is – that takes true faith.

Nearly two thousand years ago an innocent man hung from a cross and died. The sky turned dark and the earth trembled. Three days later that man, Jesus, whom we confess the Christ, was raised by the power of God to shine light into our darkness and the world was forever changed.

Through him you have confidence in God, who raised him from the dead and

These are indeed trying times. Perhaps now more than ever as we face the uncertainty and anxiety of this new chapter in history we can understand Paul’s words

Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope

for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

We can’t see the future. We don’t know what will happen next. Things could get worse before they get better. We wonder what this war will entail and whose children will pay the price for our freedom.

Yet we face these coming trials with the confidence and patience of our faith, trusting God and giving Him all glory and honor.

We have experienced a great loss; a loss of life; a loss of security; a loss of our expectations. We are angry. Yet we will not be ruled by our anger, even though those

We face a new chapter in history that has begun on a dark note. The world is a different place today than it was a few weeks ago. We will remember 9-11 and tell it to our children and grandchildren.

While we begin the process of getting back to some sense of normalcy, draw strength from your faith to face each tomorrow with confidence knowing, as Paul says in vs. 39 of 8^th chapter in the book of Romans, that:

neither death nor life…nor things present, nor things to come….

will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus

We go forth from this place knowing that no matter what tomorrow brings,

in the end

God’s love and justice

will prevail

through all the creation.

To him who loves us

and has freed us from our sins by his blood

and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father,

to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever.

Amen.