With everything going today with all the news shows and observances, there are plenty of opinions about what 9-11 means today and memories of when it happened. It was just a little eerie to hear CNN stream its 9-11 broadcast online in real time. Looks like its still going on as I write this.
Me? I was on my way to the office at the church where I was serving in Ohio. I was getting my morning laugh on The Bob and Tom Show (I am first believer that a good laugh is the best way to start a day) when I heard the report that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Towers. I turned around and went home, thinking to see video of a small plane or helicopter. What I saw was the second plane hit real time. The rest of the day was spent with a TV hookup at the church, calling the local ministers group together for a special service that evening, and trying to help folks make some kind of sense of it all. There wasn’t any sense, though, and that is hard to deal with when you believe in an almighty God.
What now? For GenXers like me, this will be our defining memory, like the boomer’s assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK; like WWII for the builders/greatest generation. I’m not real sure about its impact. As a pastor, I think the church missed and largely continues to miss the boat. People flocked to churches for two weeks after 9-11 and what did they hear? Not much, apparently, because within a few months worship attendance across the country was back to “normal.” What I tended to hear as I checked around online or on TV was a crass patriotism wrapped around a cross that bordered on 13th Century Crusader fever. There was also a kind of wimpy “we need to understand” pascifism that was embarassing to my Mennonite friends, which is an historic peace church. And there were some, who convinced that “the Gospel” was what people needed to hear, preached on the scheduled lessons and more or less ignored 9-11 in their worship services. Very few seemed willing to wrestle with the existential reality of terror, disaster, and grasp that Christians had to have better answers than its a sign of the end times so get right with God so you don’t burn in hell, its God wrath for homosexuals, or a resigned “its God’s will.”
Today, I would have to say the most insightful comments I have heard today were on NPR by Frank Miller, famed comic book author. Found on series This I Believe, it is a very real reflection on patriotism in the 21st Century.
It will be interesting to see how some of us continue to wrestle with a real spiritual journey in the 21st Century, a journey that has to pass Ground Zero but must somehow find a road beyond it.
