Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Sept. 11, 2011 Proper 19
Romans 14:1-12, Matthew 18:21-35
Twenty years ago this fall, the Disciples of Christ held their General Assembly in Tulsa, OK where they were slated to vote for Michael Kinnamon as their new General Minister. Michael had been asked in an interview a month or so before the vote if he was in favor of allowing gays and lesbians to be ordained to the ministry. His answer was "yes." And that was when the issue of homosexuality hit major denominations across the country.
And I will confess that when that happened, my life was changed and my education in sexual tolerance began. I knew of a couple of lesbians in high school. There were some openly gay people in my college theater group and several in seminary but none were my personal friends and though they seemed a bit odd to me, I never thought about the matter very much.
But when I heard people wanting to skewer Michael Kinnamon because he was open to gays and lesbians, I had to pay attention because I knew Michael and I thought he was about the most intelligent and spiritual person I had ever known. This was complicated by my having just moved to Springfield and I inherited an associate pastor who was gay but who was afraid to speak up on his own behalf.
And so, without every planning it or having a moment to prepare, I was thrown into a religious battle which has defined a lot of the past 20 years of my life. The issue of gay marriage and homosexuality in the Church has been a dividing topic in both religion and politics.
And as painful as the battle has been, ironically, I can say that if the people who wanted to condemn homosexuals had not been so loud, so cruel, so vicious, then the issue might never have received much public attention.
The plight of gays and lesbians in this nation has steadily improved, not in spite of the attacks they have suffered but, if I may say it just this way, their circumstances have improved because of the attacks. The cruelty and judgmental condemnation from the religious right has forced the rest of us to wake up, pay attention and learn a lot about this community of people who have been hiding in plain sight since the earth had cooled enough for life to take tentative steps on the soil.
I had managed to skate through 12 years of ministry without ever discussing the issue a single time, until in 1991, a firestorm of condemnation was falling on the gay community and there was going to be a casualty in the office next to mine if I tried to remain neutral.
We are often reminded that the Chinese charter for "crisis" is made from two different characters, the character for "danger" and the character for "opportunity." A crisis, by definition is dangerous. Bad things can happen in a crisis but a crisis is also a time when the fruit basket is turned over... when the established order is disturbed, we have the opportunity to rearrange our reality.
Gay people had been forced to live nearly invisible lives in most of the world for most of history but when they were attacked, reasonable people of good conscience were awakened and motivated to change the dialogue. The battle is not over and yet, the outcome is certain. State by state, legal barriers to same sex marriage will fall and congregation by congregation, religious prejudice will fade away.
Ten years after that crisis in church and politics, we were even more suddenly ushered into a new crisis by the terrorist attacks on September 11 in 2001. There had been previous incidents, the revolution in Iran and the hostage taking in 1979, but on September 10th of 2001, the largest terrorist act in American history had been a domestic militant Christian attack on a federal building in Oklahoma City.
How much did you know about Islam on 9-11? I had read some chapters in a world religion text book but if you had, on that day, asked me to tell you anything at all about Muslim faith; I would have stammered and guessed for a few seconds before shrugging my shoulders.
I will not bore you with stories of where I was when I first heard the news.... We all remember the day as clearly as if it were yesterday, I will only say that a long scheduled meeting at church was canceled because no one had the heart to go on with business as usual. I went home in a kind of fog, passing gas stations with long lines of cars waiting to fill up because so many people were having hysterical reactions, acting as if the Mongol hoard would be invading Springfield at any moment.
The only Muslim I knew in Springfield was a man who lived across the street. He worked in Jefferson City and I went and knocked on his door to offer my friendship and support in what I knew would be a dangerous time for him. He was not home. He was, in fact, holed up in his Jefferson City office, afraid to venture out and come home. And so I did the only thing that I could think of to do. I mowed his yard.
Because, men and women, you have to think about where you want to end up to know how to start a journey. I didn't know spit about Islam ten years ago but I knew that we were in a crisis and the danger was that Muslims would be portrayed as our enemies and a cataclysmic war was distinctly possible.
I knew that it would be wrong to blame all Muslims for those horrible attacks and I knew that going to war against terrorists was both illogical and virtually impossible.
More people died in that single terrorist attack than in any other in the history of the world. But the issue is not simply a body count. We don't know how many tens of thousands of innocent civilians have died in Afghanistan and Iraq as a result of our decade of war since 9-11. We do know that more of our soldiers have died in the prosecution of those wars than were killed by the initial terrorist attack. And, in terms of sheer volume of violence, more than 50,000 Mexicans have died in drug wars just south of our border since 9-11 and almost no mention is made in our media about the fact that we are both funding and arming that civil war. It is as if it were not happening.
As horrible as it was, the issue is not the death toll.... It is our total shock at the nature of the attack. It is that memory seared into our minds of seeing people jumping out of windows, falling to their deaths on the pavement below to avoid the more painful death of being burned alive. It is our awareness of the sacrifices made by fire fights and police officers who bravely rushed into the burning, crumbling chaos to save as many people as they could, aware that many of them would die in the process.
50,000 people worked and did business in the World Trade Towers on a daily basis. I assumed that the death toll would be in the tens of thousands if not, in fact, a hundred thousand. The organization and bravery of those public servants can be credited with a lot of the reason why the body count was not much much higher.
But our reaction to the event has not made much sense. A few months ago, my friend, Jeanmarie, and I took a trip to visit some of my friends in Kentucky. While there we spent a day at Mamouth Cave National Park near my hometown. We took a cave tour which starts out with all fifty or sixty tourists gathering in a cavern near the entrance to listen to a little safety speech delivered by the tour guide.
I shouldn't have, I know, it was childish and a little mean, but when the tour guide got to sentence where he said that more than ten thousand bats live in the cave, I made the sound of flapping wings...... the woman in front of me screamed... but then she turned and looked at me and could tell that I was the one who had frightened her and then she punched her husband.
She explained, "I know you did it but I don't know you and I had to hit someone." That's not really logical but it is very American. When we're scared, we feel like we have to punch someone. When that is done on a national level with armies and war planes, we reveal the very worst side of our character.
Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. Any testimony linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda was obtained by repeatedly water boarding prisoners who said what their interrogators wanted to hear. On the strength of that obviously bad intelligence, we have wasted the lives of our soldiers and Iraqi citizens as well as trillions of much needed dollars hitting someone who didn't do it.
That has resulted in a decade of war which has not made us safer but has, in fact, made terrorism more likely and has left us on the threshold of what many are calling "a perpetual state of war."
The goal of a journey defines the path. If you want to end up in St Louis, you don't drive towards Tulsa. If you want to end up with peace and security then you must make steps that lead in that direction. The attack on 9-11 required a meaningful response. We obviously couldn't start out with a tea party to discuss our differences. But if the goal is peace, what do you do to move in that direction?
In many ways, similar to the crisis in the church of the previous decade, I took this crisis as an opportunity to learn and grow. I immediately put together a class in world religions, specifically to have a chance to study Islam with my parishioners so that we could all learn to tell the difference between those who were dangerous terrorists and the one and a half billion Muslims in the world.
We have been so shocked, so frightened, so sickened by what happened that anger and hatred are always close at hand, easy options for dealing with the pain of 9-11. And anger and fear will take hold of us unless we choose to go in another direction.
The Apostle Paul reminds the Roman church that we are not all going to agree on matters of faith but we must not allow ourselves to despise those who disagree with us. Paul is never very good at hiding his own prejudices, saying to them that they should "welcome those who are weak in faith," which you can bet is not how the people who disagree with Paul would describe themselves.
Muslims often think that we are morally lax and doctrinally messed up polytheists. We often think they are extremists locked into the middle ages. In fact, European Crusaders a thousand years ago often called the Muslims religious extremists which is pretty odd since they had walked all the way from England, France and Spain to fight them in the name of Christ! Religious hypocrisy is present on both sides of this equation!
Our gospel lesson lies at the heart of the religious solution to a world crisis in which religion has so far played the role of a villain rather than the heroic role we would like to choose for ourselves. Religion has taken a part in creating this rift and now religion needs to play a bigger role in healing it.
If what we really want as our goal is peace and security, the necessary path to that goal is the one Jesus talks about here.... The path of forgiveness. Even when there is a lot to be forgiven.... Even in light of memories so painful that we can barely stand them even ten years later, the right path is the path of forgiveness. And it is a long long journey.
I will share with you that there are five guys in this church who made a pact a couple of weeks ago to encourage one another in losing weight. The five of us added together make up nearly 3/4 of a ton and so we have a bet about who can be the biggest loser between now and Thanksgiving.
We are all taking this very seriously. I have started exercising every day. I have cut back my calorie count to less than half of what I normally eat. I have cut out breads, potatoes, rice, and all fried foods. I eat very little meat and a whole lot of raw vegetables.
And it is working, we're all losing weight. But the hard thing for me, after passing up donut holes and hot dogs, driving past burgers and saying no to fries, after walking three or four miles every single morning and yet, when I catch my profile in the mirror, I'm still fat. It make me feel a little bit like God hates me or something. Now, I mention this but don't misinterpret this self revelation as being permission to give me advice or to talk to me about dieting. This is an illustration, not a public invitation.
My issue is that I'm being so good! I'm denying myself so much but I'm still fat. Because real change takes time. You can't do the right thing for a week or two weeks and then everything is OK again. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable...Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."
We grieve the loss of life from terrorism and from warfare. We grieve the prejudice born of misunderstood and distorted religion which has led to violence and death, poverty and want. We resolve to forgive today, knowing that we will have to forgive tomorrow too, and the day after and next month and next year because we are on a journey to peace and we will not rest until we get there.
