September
11, 2001
Omaha,
NE
Rev.
Steven W. Plank
“‘Business as Usual’
No More”
Text: Philippians 4:7 – “And the peace of God, which
surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ
Jesus.”
Scripture Lessons: Psalm
137
Philippians
4:4-7
Proposition: On the evening of a day like today has
been, we draw ourselves together, and we place ourselves and all of our
feelings – including feelings of hatred and revenge – into the embrace of our
Creator who so powerfully and lovingly embraces us in divine arms of
mercy. Through it all, we will come to
know the peace of God.
Note: This sermon was preached at a special
Prayer Service at Central Presbyterian Church on the evening of the day that
the terrorist attacks were made on our nation.
Twenty years ago,
when I was a young, Assistant Pastor in a congregation in Springfield,
Illinois, a group of clergy met at the Episcopal cathedral there every
Wednesday morning at 7:00. For two
hours every week, we followed the same routine: breakfast together, singing the Episcopal office of Morning
Prayer in the beautiful side Chapel in the cathedral, observing twenty minutes
of silent meditation, and then spending about one-half hour in discussion of a
book we all would read together. I
learned to love the office of Morning Prayer, with its intoxicating monastic
melodies, as ageless as the tradition from which it sprang. In true Episcopalian fashion, we recited the
psalms that were listed in the daily lectionary, which meant that we would
repeat the same psalms every month. In
the rotation of the psalms that we followed, we discovered a dilemma. You see, the 137th Psalm was
included for us during Morning Prayer the 4th Wednesday of each
month. So, in the beauty of this ornate
Episcopal chapel, eight clergy would stand solemnly and intone together, in
ancient monastic chant, these closing words of our Old Testament lesson this
evening:
“Happy
shall they be who pay you back
what you
have done to us!
Happy shall
they be who take your little ones
and dash
them against the rock!”
I absolutely,
utterly, totally detested that Psalm! It seemed completely incongruous with the beautiful setting in
which we chanted that once a month. It
went against all of the teaching I had incorporated into the very fiber of my
being about “turn the other cheek,” and “return no one evil for evil!” Scholars have called this psalm, “The
Scandal of the Psalter,” a name that it rightly deserves! Yet there it is . . . right in the middle of
our Holy Bible . . . invading even our
worship service this evening in this hallowed place.
Over the years, I
have come to believe that even this Psalm has its proper place. And I am more convinced of that tonight than
I ever have been before! This is a time
in which we, especially we who live in this nation, have a full mix of emotions
boiling within us. We are shocked,
first and foremost. Pictures that we
are used to seeing only in disaster movies suddenly have crashed into our lives
with gut-wrenching reality. We are
saddened by the undoubtedly thousands of lives that have been snuffed out with
one stroke of madness, and the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives
forever have been changed by this one day in our history. We are outraged that something like this
could happen. Wounded pride wells up
within us in screams that long to be let loose in acts of sweet revenge, but
that are restrained both out of a sense of ambiguity and also out of a lack, at
least so far, of an identifiable enemy.
This is, indeed, “‘Business as Usual’ No More.”
Yet don’t these
words from the 137th Psalm hit a seeming sweet note deep within our
souls, within our national psyche, on this night? This is a psalm that comes out of the time in Israel’s history
when they, as a nation, had fallen completely from power and any degree of
international significance. The once
mighty nation ruled by the likes of Kings David and Solomon had been reduced to
a sniveling little blip on the map, run by spineless rulers who were mere
puppets of the mighty Babylonian empire.
Israel had been overrun and torn apart by the armies of Babylon who were
marching on their quest for the riches of ancient Egypt. The people of Israel had been scattered
throughout that part of the Middle East, in an effective attempt to exile all
conquered peoples and divide them into small groups so intermingled that there
could be no cohesive resistance against the empire. The author of this particular Psalm writes of the anguish of this
conquered group of people who are living in exile in Babylon itself. We can feel tonight the pain of the
opening words: “By the rivers of
Babylon – there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.” As we watched the ruins of the World Trade
Center towers, we can sense within us the sense of outrage that the psalmist
felt when he wrote, “Remember, O Lord, against (our enemies) the day of
Jerusalem’s fall, how they said, ‘Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its
foundations!’” And there is something
that rings true to our emotions this night when we hear those closing words of
the psalm, crying to God for vengeance:
“Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little
ones and dash them against the rock!”
My God how we know the truth of those words!
But what do we do
with those kinds of feelings, feelings that even now feel somehow “foreign” to
our ears? Eugene Peterson, pastor and
theologian, wrote words that are helpful and instructive for us here. In addressing this particular part of the
137th Psalm in his book, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer, he wrote, “… our hate needs
to be prayed, not suppressed. Hate is
our emotional link with the spirituality of evil. It is the volcanic eruption of outrage when the holiness of
being, ours or another’s, has been violated. . . . Just as hurt is the usual
human experience that brings us to our knees praying for help, provoking the
realization that we need God, so hate is frequently the human experience that
brings us to our feet praying for justice, catalyzing our concern for the
terrible violations against life all around us.”[1]
So what do we do
this night? We first need to do what we
can to help those who are in need – giving blood, donating medical supplies,
helping in the untold numbers of ways that will spring up in the next days and
weeks as needs are further identified and the extent of the tragedy is further
known. We need to hold ourselves back
from the excesses that intense emotions can bring – charging customers
outrageous prices when panic leads people to hoard things, whether food or
batteries or fuel. We need to hold
ourselves in check so that we do not blindly strike out in retaliation at
anyone who might wish us harm. We need
to make sure that we do not let our anger and our fears and our hurt result in
the mistreatment of people around us in this country who are different than us,
who are Arabic peoples, who are Muslims, who in any way might be ignorantly
confused with “the enemy.” We need to
be people of compassion and outreach, as we at the same time garner the
resources we need as a nation to be people of courage and decisiveness.
We also need to
be spurred on not only to put aside blind hatred of others because of their
identity, but also to put aside any sense of blind loyalty to people who we
know are perpetrating injustice and abuse on others. We need to let our emotional energy spur us to new heights not
only of strength and rightness, but also to new heights of compassion and
justice for those in our world who feel that the only way they have left open
to them to protest is terrorism. Make
no mistake! I condemn, in the strongest
possible terms, terrorism of any kind!
Yet I also condemn, with equal passion, countries and policies that
refuse to acknowledge the needs for compassion and justice of any peoples.
We need this
night to claim ancient words to help us pray when our own words fail us. We dare to pray those feelings that we
hardly let ourselves acknowledge. We
bring our fears, our pain, our outrage, and even our desires for vengeance to
God, so that healing and comfort can come.
St. Paul was not writing in some idealistic vacuum, as if he lived in
some innocent utopia or fairytale never-never land. Paul was writing as a member of a people viciously oppressed by a
foreign army of occupation. He was
writing as a leader of a clandestine religious group whose members hid for
their lives because of the threat of being dragged out of their homes and
burned on crosses while people danced in the streets! And in the midst of this kind of setting,
the apostle dared to write these words:
“Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication
with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” We need to open ourselves – totally and
completely – to the embrace of the God who cares for us, who loves us, who
loves even enemies, who cries with us in our pain and suffering, who strengthens
us for battles that lie before us. Only
then, when we dare to place all that we are, all that we
feel, all that we fear at the feet of Christ, can we then come to the
place of experiencing what Paul knew in his own tumult and turmoil: “And the peace of God, which surpasses
all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
I don’t know the
answers about today. I feel as if I
hardly am able to understand the issues and the questions. However, I do know the God who
comes to us, in this and in every time of need. And I trust that God whom I know to provide
for all our needs, and to strengthen and guide us in the ways we should go in
the days and weeks and months and years ahead.
And I also know that, at least for now, that is enough.
AMEN!
[1] Eugene H. Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), pages 98-99.