Text of Sermon in York Chapel, Duke Divinity School
Stanley Hauerwas
Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics
September 11, 2002, 10:00 a.m.
Micah 4: 1-5
Ephesians 2: 13-18
Matthew 5: 43-48
September 11, 2001, a day of terror. September 11, 2001, "a day of infamy" for those that remember Pearl Harbor. September 11, 2001, a day when I remember where I was and what I was doing not unlike when I heard that Kennedy had been shot. September 11, 2001, a day that changed the world for those who long to live in the world without change. September 11, 200l, a day in which Americans discovered senseless violence can be quite effective particularly because it is senseless. September 11, 2001, a day when Christians, long accommodated to the sentimentalities of American culture, discovered they had nothing of use to say.
A year later we find we are still silence wrapped--a silence that could be redemptive if it was an expression of patient sadness. But such a silence is hard. The images are too strong. We try to resist, to forget, but such forgetting seems too much like a betrayal of those who died. We remember the beautiful arc the second plane made before erupting into the brilliant fire ball that burned away any hope that all might not be lost. The terror those in the upper floors must have felt knowing they were doomed. Bodies, desperate bodies, choosing to float briefly on air rather than be trapped and incinerated. It was as if the whole world was caught in slow motion as the great towers implode leaving barren sky. New York, New York, no longer a wonderful town. We divert our gaze not wanting to be reminded what is missing.
An apocalyptic moment Christians in America cannot ignore. Surely something like how we felt as we survived the days after September 11, 2001 is how the followers of Jesus felt after the crucifixion. Pure terror. The one on whom all hope was placed, the one we gave up all to follow, the one we had hoped was the one to redeem Israel, dead. It is not even clear who killed him or why he was killed. Another meaningless death against the blackness of a meaningless cosmos. Best to face the fact that it is kill or be killed. In such a world meaning is determined by those with the largest swords. They are the ones who will write the histories making it possible for us to know what "really happened."
Thank God, for the time being we are on the winning side. We get to call the violently secured order that makes our lives possible--peace. Only terrorists refuse to accept the peace our order names. The only way, moreover, to deal with terrorist is vengeance. Justice demands vengeance. We cannot let the innocent die meaningless deaths. They were not victims. No American gets to die a victim. Sacrificially they died that we might live. They are freedom's martyrs. Lives made more significant by how they died than could have ever been imagined by how they lived. Their deaths will not be in vain.
But wait some say He has been raised from the dead.
He appeared to the disciples showing them his nail marked hands and feet. He even ate a broiled fish. He ascended to heaven and they worshiped him. Worshiped him? You can only worship God. Yet it says clearly, Luke 24: 52, they worshiped him. What are we to make of that. We confess we are not quite sure. We have been at it for two thousand years and we are still "not quite sure." We often think we must find some way to explain the meaning of his death. We call such efforts "atonement theories." But the scripture makes clear we do not get to vindicate Christ. We do not need to avenge his death. His ascension to the Father is the only vindication needed.
In his book, "He Came Preaching Peace", John Howard Yoder observes that in the New Testament the death of Christ is sometimes described as a sacrifice, sometimes as a ransom, descriptions we normally assume name our reconciliation with God over the barrier of our sins. But Yoder observes the barrier between people, a barrier as real as the wall of masonry in Jerusalem that separated the outer court for Gentiles from the temple proper, is not anybody's sins. Rather, the barrier is the historical fact of separate stories. It is not a barrier of guilt, but of culture and communication. It is not a barrier between each person and God but between one group and another. It is not the case that inner or personal peace comes first, with the hope that once the inward condition is set right then the restored person will do some social good. In this text it is the other way around. Two estranged histories are made into one. Two hostile communities are reconciled. (pp. 111-112)
Note the breaking of this barrier is not something we must try to do. The breaking has been done. What was hidden from the ages is now revealed. We live in a new time. We live in an apocalyptic time. So it is only now that the rulers and authorities, the principalities and powers, can learn through the church what the rich variety of God's wisdom has always been (Ephesians 3: 10-11). God has judged between the peoples, God has beat the swords of the nations into plowshares. God has abolished war. We need no longer to learn of war.
But who is the "we" that no longer learns of war? Why is it those who were taught by the One raised that we must love our enemies? How can we possibly be told to love enemies--enemies who think nothing of wanton murder? A good question, but one those who live in the new age inaugurated by Christ need not ask. We know it is possible to love our enemies. Otherwise why would Christ in the Sermon on the Mount ask that we so love? Are we to make Christ a liar? If we do not think it possible to love our enemies then we should plainly say Jesus is not the messiah. But Jesus is the messiah, not dead but alive, indeed present to us in this meal of the New Age.
So we find ourselves living in the aftermath of two apocalyptic events. Those events produce two people with two quite different stories. The one fears and worships death as their only lord; the other fears and worships the Lord of death. The people of the September 11 apocalypse, the people who worship death, do not believe that God has removed the barrier between Jew and Gentile. The people of the September 11 apocalypse do not believe that Jesus has been raised from death. So these people of the September 11 apocalypse are determined to have vengeance. They are determined to make their world safe no matter what cost others must bear to insure their safety.
The people of the September 11 apocalypse rage against death, believing through the memory of their accomplishments they do not have to die.
Jesus people are also an apocalyptic people. They are so because they worship the Lord of death. Like the people of the September 11 apocalypse, the Jesus people are also a storied people. But they do not think they get to make their story up. Their story, moreover, is certainly not a story of their accomplishments. It is a story of their sinful unfaithfulness. It is the story of their living as if the work God accomplished in Christ is somehow not sufficient for our salvation. It is the story of the impatience of the Jesus people desperate to convince ourselves and those outside the church that our God exists and on the whole is a pretty good guy. It is the story of our unwillingness to acknowledge to ourselves and others that we live in a dangerous world, a world of death, made all the more dangerous by our unbridled desire for safety.
If that is the story of the Jesus people why, we must ask, would anyone want to be part of that story? The world is terrible enough. Why cannot we recognize that when all is said and done, we are pretty much the same, so let's just try to get along. Tempted though they may be by that story, the Jesus people know that cannot be their story. It cannot be their story, because their story is not really about them. The story that makes the Jesus people a storied people is the story of God and God's unfailing love of us. How extraordinary. How wonderful. It really is not all about "us." It is about God. A God not rendered powerless by events like September 11, 2001, but the God that has made his church, the Jesus people, the alternative to those that would rule the world in the name of putting right the terror of September 11, 2001.
But are we Jesus people? We think we might like to be Jesus people, but we know we are those storied by September 11, 2001. We may not want "to kill the bastards," but the images and the feelings we felt that day cannot be denied. I am not suggesting that we simply try harder to be Jesus people. Such trying I fear too often only increases our narcissism, underwriting the presumption it is all about us. Perhaps a beginning is to recognize that we are an apocalyptic people, a new age people, who have been given all we need not to be captured by the powers fueled by our fear of death. Such a people do not need to try to be better, but rather only to receive the gifts we have been given.
Gifts as simple as bread and wine made by the Spirit the body and blood of the One whose sacrifice is the end of all sacrifice. At this table we find God's justice. We deserve death, but God refuses our refusal making us His storied people, His Jesus people, so that the world may know there is an alternative to terror. That alternative, at once terrible and wonderful, is us. Here at this table God lifts us up so that we become for the world the end of all sacrifices.
How extraordinary. How frightening. How wonderful. Amen.
