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A Sermon by Donel
McClellan
A Sermon by Donel
McClellan
There is a Balm in Gilead
September 23.2001
A READING FROM THE PROPHET JEREMIAH
18My joy is gone, grief is upon me,
20"The harvest is past, the summer is ended,
THIS IS THE WORD OF GOD
There are times when poetry alone can address our human longing:
My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick. . .
I want to mention
or even the death
- Linda Pastan[2]
Into
this neutral air
. . .
All I have is a voice Defenceless under the night
- W.H. Auden[3]
In words which are eerily current, Auden writes of the invasion of Poland by Germany on
September 1, 1939. Pastan writes of autumn’s perennial reminder of death. Jeremiah addresses
the political bankruptcy of his time. None of the poets wrote of the events of our September. All
of them speak to a circumstance they never knew.
Over the centuries every human disaster and every human triumph has been experienced over
and over again on smaller and grander scales. Historians keep count of the variations of victory
and loss, yet our human experience is constant. Death, loss, suffering, courage, resolve, hope are
the building blocks life. Words are fragile boats carrying meaning from person to person, age to
age.
Today it is time to look around. Time not because we have finished our grieving, nor because
we have been able to assimilate what is happening to us. It is time to seek perspective because of
what will come next. We will need words with which to address what comes to pass.
For a moment, let us revisit Jeremiah’s world—625 BCE. Change was rampant. Markets rose
and fell. Those who were shrewd or lucky did well, so well that they began to relish the power
and prestige that wealth brings. The newly prosperous averted their eyes from the poor. Since
they had succeeded they assumed that laziness and ignorance held others down.
The affluent stepped away from historical faith, preferring religious leaders who blessed them
in their comfortable lives, and never challenged them to take care of those who couldn’t care for
themselves. Soon the comfortable convinced themselves that God had blessed them and was
pleased with them.
Jeremiah observes the religion of his people turning away from tradition and focusing on
prosperity. The poor are ignored. The widow, the sojourner in the land, the orphan, and the
afflicted are forgotten. People become so cynical that they fail to notice that their temples are
empty, the promises of their priests hollow. God has already departed from their lives.
The Lord is not in the city says Jeremiah. There is no balm in Gilead. By paying attention to
armies, profit margins, crop yields, political treaties and comfortable, encouraging preachers, the
nation shifted its allegiance from the God of their ancestors, to their own intellectual power and
physical strength. The God they created could not salve their wounds when everything fell apart.
The scene reminds me of a scene in the old move Oh, God. You may remember the young
grocery clerk played by a young John Denver who discovers that he can hear and see God in the
form of George Burns. At one point in the film a famous evangelist—who assumed that it was
God’s business to prosper him and his ministry—asks the clerk if God had a message for him.
I am reminded of the movie this week because of the unfortunate statements of TV
evangelists Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson. They suggested the attack of September 11th
succeeded because God had lifted the curtain of protection from America. And why would God
do this? Because, said Dr. Falwell, of those who have tried to secularize America: feminists,
gays, lesbians, the ACLU, People for the American Way.
“Does God have a message for me?” asks the evangelist in the movie. “Yes,” says the clerk,
“[God] want’s you to shut up!”
Does the passage from Jeremiah suggest that God has withdrawn the curtain of protection
from America? No, God had nothing to do with the attack on September 11. God may have had
something to do with the courage and self-sacrifice of those who came to the aid of victims of the
attack, however. America was assaulted by very sophisticated, very well prepared, devastatingly
dedicated opponents. We need to look carefully at what happened and how we might respond.
As a minister, I recognize the appropriate place and authority of government to respond to a
horrendous attack on its citizens. I have no political wisdom to offer, no military strategy to
suggest. I do have a responsibility, as a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to speak out
clearly whenever political rhetoric begins to make theological claims. In the past few days
several spoken words and phrases have caused me concern. Let me share my perspective for
what it may be worth.
The first cautionary word is war. From the moment of the attack on New York, Washington,
and Pennsylvania, the president and numerous government officials have described the bloody
deeds of September 11, as acts of war. Writing in this week’s New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg
replies:
. . . unless a foreign government turns out to have directed the operation (or, at
least, to have known and approved its scope in detail and in advance), that is a
category mistake. The metaphor of war—and it is more metaphor than
description—ascribes to the perpetrators a dignity they do not merit, a status
they cannot claim, and a strength they do not possess.[4]
If our response it to be considered a war, then it departs from historical precedent and takes
on the amorphous shape of the “war on drugs” or the “war on poverty.” This is not a war in any
recognizable form, but something new and different. I trust that our nation will attempt to bring
to justice those who are responsible for inflecting this deep and grievous wound upon the people
and the national fabric of America. I anticipate some response soon. Whether or not that response
is declared a war, I know that the church cannot give its blessing to it.
Even when violence becomes is the Nation’s only response, or even its duty, violence must
always be seen as an expression of human sinfulness. As a minister I stand ready to support
families as they face the difficulties of armed combat, I stand ready to pray for wisdom for our
president and national leaders, I stand ready for the sad task of burying Americans who are killed
in the effort to pursue terrorists, and I stand ready to offer prayers of confession for my
complicity in binging about a circumstance in which so many people suffer. The church does not
bless war. It suffers with those who suffer, it prays with those who pray, and it hopes for a way
of peace.
The second word of concern is evil. On the Friday after the attack, the president addressed an
interfaith congregation at a Prayer Service in the National Cathedral. I must confess that I am
generally impressed by the manner in which our president speaks in public. The president and his
speech writers have achieved a simple elegance of language which is most often very appropriate
for the situation. In the National Cathedral, the president said:
Just three days removed from these events Americans do not yet have the
distance of history but our responsibility to history is already clear: To answer
these attacks and rid the world of evil. War has been waged against us by
stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful but fierce when stirred to
anger.
Although the metaphor seemed warranted at that time and in that place, I need to remind us
all that it is never the function of any government to rid the world of evil. The reason is very
simple. Evil is ubiquitous and pervasive. Evil is present in every adult human person and in
every group of persons, every family, every tribe, every corporation, every nation. To suggest
that one nation can rid the world of evil implies that evil exists solely outside that nation. From
the perspective of the Christian faith, this is never true.
I anticipate a just attack on terrorism. I fear any nation that would presume an assault on evil.
The final word is crusade. Last Sunday, President Bush warned Americans that "this
crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." I regret that neither the president nor
his speech writers were aware of their tragic choice of language. To the whole Muslim world,
crusade means only one thing. SoheibBensheikh, Grand Mufti of the mosque in Marseille,
France said, the use of the word crusade,was most unfortunate. It recalled the barbarous and
unjust military operations against the Muslim world by Christian knights, who launched
repeated attempts to capture Jerusalem over the course of several hundred years.
This simple linguistic slip reveals how little our society knows or cares about the vast areas
of the world in which Islam thrives. It does not give one assurance that our response to terrorist
attacks will serve to heal rather than to widen the deep breach between the Arab world and the
West.
In the end we are left with words. And the words are a balm, for they capture our hearts and
buoy our hopes. Words are the weapons with which we combat the evil forces of hatred,
discrimination, and racism.
Once again, I find Hendrik Hertzberg’sinsight helpful. He writes:
In the decade since the end of the Cold War, the human race has become, with
increasing rapidity, a single organism. Every kind of barrier to the free and
rapid movement of goods, information, and people has been lowered. The
organism relies increasingly on a kind of trust—the unsentimental expectation
that people, individually and collectively, will behave more or less in their
rational self-interest. . . . The terrorists made use of that trust. They rode the
flow of the world's aerial circulatory system like lethal viruses.[5]
Faith’s response to the horror and terrorism that seeks to divide the world into opposing
nations, religions and languages is to reaffirm that we are one human race. That hope is elegantly
expressed in a poem that has appeared on the Internet. It is called:
And We Became One
[6] As the soot and dirt and ash rained down,
We are
Amen.
Notes:
[1]. Jeremiah 8:18, 20
[2]. Autumn, from Heroes In Disguise by Linda Pastan
[3]. September 1, 1939 from Another Time by W. H. Auden
[4]. HendrickHertzberg, The New Yorker, September 24, 2001, p. 27
[5]. Hertzberg, p. 27 [6].
Found on the Internet. Attributed to professor Cheryl Sawyer. The original |