Exodus 32:1,7-14
1 Timothy 1:12-17
Psalm 51:1-18 or 51:1-11
Luke 15:1-10
This Sunday was supposed to be a day of great rejoicing, on which we would celebrate twenty-five years of women's priestly ministry in the church. And rejoice we must, for where would we be in this fall of the year 2001 if it were not for the women and men who have answered the call to serve during these last decades?
I myself am on the road to priesthood, and because of that, at the bishop's direction, I spent last year, from August to May, in New York City, at General Seminary. I didn't want to go. I knew I would hate it. And I fell in love with the seminary, and with New York. At the beginning of the year a few of us took a boat cruise around Manhattan Island. We floated past the soaring towers of the World Trade Center, and took pictures. We cruised under the Brooklyn Bridge. Our boat chugged mightily against the current up the Harlem River, and out again into the broad Hudson, and home. It was home; it was my city, and now my friends, the ones who didn't graduate yet, are caring for the injured, counseling the bereaved, and organizing food for the survivors. I read their names in news dispatches, and I feel sad that I can't be there to help.
I did my field education work at the Church of the Holy Apostles, where I helped to counsel and feed hundreds of people each day, people whose whole lives are a disaster. On one of my first days there another volunteer, who had once been a guest of the soup kitchen herself, said to me: "I know Jesus is here every day. I'm not always sure which one he is, but I know he's here." She was right, of course. Jesus is on the streets of New York every day; in these days he's moving the rubble-and he's trapped underneath it, too.
On Tuesday my son phoned to tell me that the World Trade Center towers had collapsed. I didn't believe him. I knew about the planes, of course; I had the radio on. But I couldn't imagine those towers going down. The top stories, maybe. But not all 110 floors. Then I went home after work and turned on the TV, and I saw. I suppose I'll never be free again of those images, of the plane flying into the tower, of the buildings falling. On Wednesday I was in prayer and I saw them, again and again and again-and then I saw something else. I saw inside. I saw Jesus there, in the planes, in the fire. I saw this peculiar God of ours, this God who does not sit in the seats of the mighty, but instead shares the lot of the lost and the lowly.
This gospel we have today is about that-about how strange God is, from our point of view. What kind of reasonable person leaves 99 sheep to go look for one? What woman in her right mind spends time sweeping the house for one little coin, when she could earn ten times as much in the same length of time doing something useful? And yet God would do just that; does do just that. God has a different kind of economics in which each individual person is worth more than the whole universe. Thanks be to God.
We have all had many conversations in the last few days about what has happened, and what may happen, and why, and how. Probably many of you have had the same conversations I have had. We have talked a lot about the unfathomable evil that we have seen at work; about how cruel human beings can be to one another. We are baffled by it. And then I think: this is the race of beings God chose to join. "To live and die as one of us," we say in the Eucharistic Prayer. One of us. Not just for a time, but forever: our God is one of us, down here in the trenches with us, every day; on the planes, under the rubble, in the fire. "Behold, I am with you all days"-even days like these.
And let's be clear about this, too: if in our haste to "set things right," to strike back at those who have hurt us, we rain destruction on other innocent heads, we know where God will be: in the rubble, in the fire, in the tears of the sorrowing.
As I was crossing the parking lot on Thursday I saw on a bumper sticker a saying of Pope Paul VI: "If you want peace, work for justice." And at the service of prayer at the National Cathedral on Friday, Bishop Jane Dixon gently reminded all present that justice must go hand in hand with love, if peace is to come. So I was depressed to hear from the lips of our national leader the statement that it is up to the United States to "rid the world of evil," and that the conflict "will end in a way, and in an hour, of our choosing."
For I know most certainly that it is not in our power to rid the world of evil, and that when that day comes, the Day of the Lord, it will come not in our time, and not through our choosing, but in God's time and through God's choosing. Our calling is to be the servants of that victory, and not its masters.
Presiding Bishop Griswold has asked us to pray that the spiral of violence may end with us, not that we may carry it on toward some imagined end that we can accomplish. Another writer speaks of lightning. She says:
It seems to me important to try to be a lightning rod which earths some of the pain and hate, before it strikes elsewhere. And it seems to me important to let our sympathy and empathy sink deeply into us and wash through us into the ground.
This speaks especially to us Midwesterners. We see the lightning storms every summer; we know how the lightning flashes about the sky, at random it seems, striking who knows where. The only protection for your house or your barn is a good lightning rod that will catch the energy and carry it into the ground. The fire ends there and doesn't spread.
We already have a lightning rod that has captured all the evil of the world and carried it down into the depths. Here it is. By the power of his cross, Christ has armored us with the Holy Spirit, so that we can stand as his lightning rods in the world, to capture and carry off the pain and hatred that flash around us. That, I am thinking, is what it means to take up our cross daily and follow Jesus. The fire will not burn us, because he has annulled its fury once and for all, and has clothed us with the Holy Spirit for just this purpose.
But it's not an individual thing. The end of all these stories of finding and losing in the gospel is the bringing back together of the whole, and the celebration. God did not make us to be solitary, but to be together: to be church, the people called together. It is as God's people together that we can absorb and destroy the strokes of evil. We recognize that somehow, instinctively: for the one good thing that came immediately out of the evil of this week was that people came together, turned to one another, and made community where before there was isolation.
To resist evil alone, as individuals, would be impossible. To do it as church is not only possible, but necessary. I fear for the world without you. You are very much needed, and what you are needed for, above all, is to pray, to transform the pain not into fury, but into prayer. Our very helplessness can make more room than ever for the Spirit to bear witness through us.
How shall we do this? Our lives are so fragmented that we find it almost impossible to come together in one place, but I propose to you that before we leave here we choose a time during the week, a certain hour in the evening, let us say, when for at least ten minutes we will come together in our hearts, focusing our prayers to ground and carry off the evil that has rained on us from the sky, lest it rain on other innocent people, this time in our name.
Burnt-offering and sin-offering you have not required,
and so I said, "Behold, I come.
In the roll of the book it is written concerning me:
'I love to do your will, O my God;
your law is deep in my heart.'" (Ps 40:8-9)
In the last three decades, many a woman called to Holy Orders has prayed those words from Psalm 40, accepting her call along with her brother priests and deacons and bishops. But that is not enough. In the last few years many other women and men have prayed them as they accepted the call to Total Ministry teams. But it is still not enough. They need to be the prayer of the whole church, of each and every member, if God's will is to be done and the world have peace. Can we all, this day, accept our calling: to pray and to work without ceasing so that God's will may be done in the world? God's desire, God's deep yearning, is to draw the world together to the feast of love and reconciliation. May God, using us, gather the world from the four winds into God's reign. And may we all pray: Come, Lord Jesus.