Sermon for 9/18
By Joe Casad
Peace Mennonite Church
September 18, 2011
It seems like I’ve been getting in the habit of starting off sermons by stating how difficult this sermon is going to be. It’s kind of a disclaimer, a hedge against failure. But seriously, does it get easier than this? Speaking on peace to a room full of Mennonites?
In Worship committee, we had this idea that we would have the sermon last week, on memories of 9/11, and we would follow up this week and tie it all together somehow—on a note of hope. Hope is hard fought sometimes, and maybe this is one of those times. And hope is always good, yet a few things about this topic are cause for concern.
First of all, it is important to be mindful and respectful of the terrible loss felt by so many families that day—that whatever one’s analysis would be of the
response should not be seen to diminish the sorrow felt by so many. Second, it is important to not be complacent, or smug if you will—to declare one’s own victory based on being on the right side of the peace issue, for the work of the Lord is never done, and each of us must ask ourselves what stone is next to turn? The third pitfall one faces with this topic is to not be too political. In our country, these dramas play our through the theater of politics, yet it seems all to clear to me that all this business of what happened on 9/11 and the response to it was not really about ordinary politics.
For what its worth, I personally believe we still would have gone into Afghanistan if someone else had been in the White House. It is perhaps likely we would have avoided Iraq, which the Bush administration seemed to be
planning to do anyway—even before the 9/11 attacks, but that is a topic for a political science class, not a sermon in a church. In terms of the militaristic response, the rhetoric, the intoxicated blend of patriotic fervor, martyrdom, and vanity that seemed to take hold of the American spirit, it was all there.
And it wasn’t anything as simple as sorting out the red states and blue states.
One of the reasons I volunteer to do these sermons is that, whenever I do, I always learn something. In this case, when I thought of a scripture to go with this topic, I thought of the tower of Babel—an underused image for the 9/11 events. The people of the Earth try to build a city and a tower with its top
in the heavens. A story of hubris—the ill-fated attempt to engineer a ladder to the sky. We really thought we could create a building a quarter mile in the air and still get everyone out of it in the case of an unexpected fire. What were we thinking of? And did we ask that question before we launched our missiles?
Yet, when I really read the scripture, I was amazed at how much this story was not just about hubris but was also saying something to us about diversity. This scattering of the people into different languages does not seem a violent or sudden punishment, unlike all the pictures depicting it in all those children’s
bibles. It comes across as quite methodical, a part of God’s plan unfolding, and it seems that all these people with all these different languages really are God’s children. He never does say, “these people I’ve scattered here to this one place are the special people.” They are treated as equals, and the bible says – in fact, God says, “Look, they are one people…”
And then they are stirred up and scattered over the face of the Earth, and given different languages.
And right there, the mind lingers and the story pauses in the emptiness of that abandoned, unfinished city, as all those people are scattered across the face of the earth and given all their different languages —given their different languages by God. So we get this topside view of the whole world, all in God’s
dominion. Then right at that point, in the very next verse, the story begins through the lineage leading to Abraham, and it transitions into the familiar voice of following one of those groups—the descendants of Abraham, who we know as the Children of Israel.
And the rest of the world takes the form of other groups, watching their own stories, following their own business, and viewing every conflict through the filter of their own experience and interest. It is interesting to me that so many people tend to remember this story of Babel as being about a building getting blown apart—the stones cast down and separated, but it was really about these people getting blown apart and separated. And maybe what God is really saying is, you are not ready to build this building yet. Maybe, instead of worrying about these bricks and these towers, instead of fixating on
this structure, maybe the puzzle for you should be to be thinking about putting these people back together, these people with the different languages, so they can be one people once more.
For so we have landed, scattered across the face of the Earth, so many bricks. In these times of conflict, I am always amazed, at least in our part of the world, at how many of these bricks think their brick is Abraham’s brick. Our government believed it. The 911 attackers believed it, for their religion also
descends from the books of Moses. The Israelis believe it. The Vatican believes it. The televangelists believe it. The faith-based anti-televangelists believe it. The televangelist who is a rival of a televangelist on a different channel believes it.
One of my lasting memories of 911 was a couple months later, after the war in Afghanistan had already started, getting caught in traffic on the east side of town as they were lining up to get started with the old-fashioned horse-drawn Christmas parade they do every year. And every carriage, and every rider in
that very long line—three blocks long—held an American flag. And they prepared to march and celebrate the birth of Jesus awash in their patriotic emblems. And the flags fluttered in the blue December sky. And the colors melted across the carriage wheels and the manes of the horses. And they
held their flags high and proud, as if to proclaim “We are Abraham’s brick!”
And yet, for every one, or 20, or 100 of these who wish to defend and project and celebrate the brick where they live, there are those who believe that is not about your brick. There are those who say, “Let us be the mortar between the bricks, to join the bricks together. Are we not to love our enemies? At the
Pentecost, did we not hear each others languages?
Jesus said love your enemies, and that means you’re supposed to love the other bricks. You don’t just love your own brick. You don’t just offer conditional love to the people in other bricks if they agree to join your brick. You love all the bricks, for how they have landed, scattered across the face of the Earth.
This call to be the mortar and not the brick, to reach out in the spirit of connecting not rejecting, is one of the reasons why Mennonites have always sought independence from nationalism and patriotic movements. But you see, it is not really about the Mennonites if the Mennonites are just another brick.
It is about each of us, individually and in community, meeting the challenge to remain in dialog and to never stop looking for the path of peace, with the conviction that, if one follows this path with the intensity and sincerity of someone following in the steps of Jesus, there will never be a time for war.
When those planes hit those towers, it was as if another Babel happened to the world again. People and nations who once could communicate, or at least, were engaged in an attempt to live together, found themselves suddenly without words, telling stories of their own despair, each brick imagining that it
had occupied the place on the tower closest to heaven.
And so the world began again with finding its way back. And it might seem endless, a labor of Sisyphus, to call for peace in a time of war, and yet, it is exactly what we are supposed to be doing—reaching out, with our prayers and our cares and our actions, to be the mortar.
You see, Jesus never said that turning the other cheek will unleash a whirlwind that will scatter the oppressor from the battlefield. He never said that walking the second mile will bring all old foes into sudden fellowship. This thing was never about engineering outcomes. It is about staying on the path.
And so we hearken to the words of Jesus, who states so clearly, and plainly, and unequivocally, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
[…] today I read through the sermon that one of our congregation members, Joe Casad, preached this past Sunday. One line of the sermon […]