Mark 8:27-38
Thursday morning I arose at 3 AM to be able to join in the activities at the World Trade site for 9-11. We met as Red Cross chaplains and others at the site at 5 AM and deployed at various places there--some down at the “Lower Level”--the term “Ground Zero” is no longer used; some on the two “Bridges” behind the speaker podium you may have seen on television; and some at the intake point for the families whose lives were forever changed on September 11, 2001.
At one point during the day a few of us at a time were permitted to leave our posts briefly, and we walked to the podium area to hear some of the names being read by the victim’s children, and we also heard former Mayor Giuliani’s speech. One very small girl read the names of both of her parents as being victims on that fateful day. Another broke into tears as she read her list of names. They all ended with a reference to their own personal family losses and a chimed-in, “We love you, and we miss you.” It was a very poignant and moving time there as it was on your television set. At the lower level Governor Pataki comforted a woman overcome by grief. Everyone was laying flowers there on the bedrock. Groups were gathering at various places on the former base of Building One I could see from my vantage point above. It was a time of grieving, a time of healing for many, and a time for remembrance of the shortness but importance of life.
The families of the 413 fire fighters, police, and EMS workers who perished were clearly evident as were their fire and police units. They will always be remembered as heroes on that day. Many were practicing Christians. They lived and died their faith. They had likely heard the words we hear again today when Jesus told his disciples, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Their cross has become their glory. And of course there were many, many other heroes outside the recognized services, many of whom we probably shall never recognize as such, those who died while trying to help just one more down the stairways to safety or who chose in those last final minutes to stay with someone who would never be able to walk down. Their bond of love to someone in terrible pain was their final gesture in this life.
It is a sobering thought to consider how one would have reacted in such similar circumstances. It occurs over and over in combat, but in civilian life it is a rarity. But on 9-11 it was enacted in hundreds of ways. One young Filipino woman I saw that day at Trauma One, St. Vincent’s Hospital, had apparently been hit by a piece of shrapnel from the collapse of Building Two at about the 14th floor of Building One as she was going down the emergency staircase from her office on the 62nd floor. Her ankle was shattered, and someone lifted her into his arms and carried her the rest of the way down to the entrance to the PATH train in the lower vestibule, laid her gently beside the short wall of the escalator there, and then went back up to try to help others. She laid there in the dark as the lights flickered and went out, and she told me she was pummeled by falling debris from the collapsing building. Finally, a flashlight appeared in the darkness and a voice called out to see if anyone was there. She screamed for help, and the person finally located her and carried her to safety just before Building One collapsed. She felt as though she had come out resurrected from what she thought would be her tomb. And she was very happy to be alive.
Many others escaped with various degrees of injury that day due to the heroic efforts of many unknown persons acting as human angels of mercy. Without help, most of the people I saw at the hospital would never have had a chance of survival, their injuries were so severe.
A fellow chaplain said we chaplains received vicarious heroic status by simply being with those who were saved. We did not want the lives of the real heroes to be lost for naught. Helping those survive mentally and emotionally who were barely spared physically was the best we could do that day and in the following weeks. And then we had the task of bringing a sense of stability to the workers at the temporary morgue as body part after body part was recovered from the rubble. At East 29th Street in Manhattan, just beside the FDR Drive, there is a large white tent with the remains of those who could not be identified due to the destruction of their DNA by the fires that burned continuously until the middle of December. The fumes that were given off until then were chokingly dense from time to time, but it was the crude incense of the place consecrating the ground until the last remains could be found. And those whose bodies only remained as dust stuck to our shoes, clothing, and even lodged in our own lungs. A battle field is not a pretty place. A fitting memorial will be difficult to design.
How can we find the word of God appropriate to this tragedy? Peter tried to veer Jesus from what Peter thought was his Lord’s self-destructive drive. Peter apparently expected Jesus to overcome the enemy occupation force of the Romans; that was Peter’s idea of who the Messiah would be, a quasi-military figure of resistance. But the face of Peter became a disguise for the Satan who would try once again to tempt Jesus to change his direction from the self-sacrificing servant prophesied by Isaiah. By Jesus’ death we would find life. His giving of himself purchased a life of immortality for us who believe in him as our Lord. So Jesus rebuked the Satan in Peter.
Each week I come into contact with several detainees at the federal immigration detention center not far from here. Several Christians have escaped from certain death because they challenged a drug cartel in Columbia or a Moslem paramilitary unit in Indonesia or a sadistic policeman rapist in Russia. The stories are many and quite varied. I hear them not because I ask to, but because the detainees sometimes come to me for prayers because of fearful dreams, sleepless nights, and depression about the families they had to leave behind so abruptly. It is not easy to face death and come away unscathed by it.
Many of the injured people I saw at the hospital on the evening of September 11 were trying to get congruence in their minds--at one instance they had decided they would imminently die, and yet somehow their lives were miraculously spared. Trying to understand their good fortune was not easy. The terror of the day was still very much with them, and over time their terror became lodged in me as well while they would retell their story of near death over and over again. Each time they would get nearer to the reality of their survival which they desperately wanted to do; they desperately needed to do to be able to go on with their life. Death is terrifying, and near death is almost as terrifying.
When Jesus calls us to take up our cross it is no mere figure of speech. The cross in his time was a weapon of mass destruction--sometimes two thousand or more were crucified simultaneously after an unsuccessful uprising against the military power. The scene from the movie, “Ben Hur” comes to mind as the Judean roadside was bracketed by cross after cross after cross with dying people hanging on each of them. It was a brutal putdown of a slave rebellion in the first century AD. Some historians even think Jesus saw such a mass execution as a boy following a zealot attack on the barracks of Roman soldiers, a scene that became emblazoned in his memory. People had taken up their crosses and had been fixed on their crosses until they died a horrible death. It was not a pretty sight but one engineered to bring terror into the heart of anyone else with political subterfuge in their mind.
Yet Jesus willingly spoke the truth, a truth which was not acceptable to the Jewish authorities whose very power would be usurped if Jesus’ claims were proven correct, which of course they were. The very foundations of the failed religious practices were to be replaced by a new covenant between God and God’s chosen people. And that new covenant would entail the sealing of it by the blood of the Son of God. No longer would the blood of bulls or goats or lambs be sufficient for the removal of the stain of sin. In the terms of the new covenant only the blood of the one holy person ever to live would suffice in removing the eternal curse of sin.
Eleanor Searle Whitney said, “Christians are like tea bags. You never know what kind you are until you are in hot water.”
One pastor said a parishioner told him, “I know I should go to church more, but I try to keep the Ten Commandments.” That sounds a lot like what the first century Pharisees thought--that to keep the commandments was all God needed to find a place for them in heaven. But they had missed the whole point. It was not works, keeping commandments and laws, that God required, but faith in God’s incarnate Son.
King Duncan expands the idea with the little rhyme: “To live above with the saints I love, Oh that will be glory. But to dwell below, with the saints I know--now that’s another story.” Our life with Christ cannot be lived in isolation--we are bound to others in this world by choice or by chance. How we show the love of Christ to them is how we will be judged at the last day. If we cannot love the ones we see, how can we love the God we cannot see? Jesus told Philip, “If you have seen me you have seen the Father.” It is through Jesus that we experience what God is truly like.
There is a fork in every spiritual journey, one way goes to heaven and the other way goes to a discussion about heaven. We can talk heaven all we want, but until we are willing to bring some semblance of heaven on earth, we will be aficionados of heaven instead of its owners. We buy our piece of heaven by our faith in Jesus Christ. All other ways lead to eternal destruction.
A lot of ink has been spilled about what is or is not a sin. The consensus that I have heard recently is that sin is in the eyes of the beholder. But that is quite contrary to the Bible. It is not a relative God we serve, but an absolute God, a jealous God, a merciful God, yet a demanding God. Holiness is not something to be trifled with. “Be holy as I am Holy,” God declared. If it isn’t holy it isn’t of God. So let us be very careful what we declare to be relatively harmless in God’s eyes. Fornication, adultery, blurring of right and wrong, crass behavior, small thefts or large, all these estrange us from the love of God in Jesus Christ. Only by turning back to God in our everyday lives can we once again have the assurance that our Lord is truly our Lord.
Charles Spurgeon said, “There are no crown-bearers in heaven who were not cross-bearers here below.” Taking up one’s cross is one of the very few times Jesus calls people to imitate him.
Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador was killed in 1980 because of his talk about the oppression of the poor campesinos. Before his death, the Archbishop said, “Martyrdom is a grace of God which I do not think I deserve. But if God accepts the sacrifice of my life, let my blood be a seed of freedom and the sign that hope will soon become reality.” He saw his effort to find relief for the downtrodden of El Salvador was the best he could do to bring a piece of heaven to earth.
How will each of us bring a piece of heaven to earth in our time? It may not be through martyrdom--few have to walk that pathway. But maybe challenging the laws of society that put weights on those who can least bear them may be what we are called to do. Finding the inequities of life and remedying them is a way of the cross. It will oftentimes not be a popular way, but it may be the only way we can act as disciples of our Lord. Consider whose we are. Christ died for us. What can we do for him? Amen.
(Comments to Joe at joe.parrish@ecunet.org.)
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