Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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"What then can we say about these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?….Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?….No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." St. Paul. Usually we read these words generically. Today we hear them as if they were written this week, for us. This time it's doubly important for us to recall that those who first received this letter from St. Paul, and opened it and read it, the Christians in Rome, were (in fact) suffering all the evils Paul mentions: hardship, persecution, nakedness, sword, and so forth. Because of their faith in Jesus, their soft, comfortable worlds were tumbling in. Shortly the emperor Nero would hang hundreds of Roman Christians on crosses, cover them with pitch, and set them on fire "to light the streets of Rome," he said. (Today - especially today -- we can imagine loved ones, after the smoke had cleared, coming with tears streaming down their faces, searching on those crosses for the charred bodies of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, friends…and hoping not to find them. Today we can imagine that.) Paul and Peter, both, would die in Nero's persecution. It seemed certain that the church was dead. But, actually, it was just then coming alive. Paul's victorious words became a life line to all believers suffering for the faith, then and now: "…nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus…in all these things (these terrible, unconscionable, unspeakable, unexplainable things) we are more than conquerors…." And they were!

Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. a group of local ministers sat around the table in Room 7, just across the hall, and discussed the scripture lessons for this Sunday. The conversation turned to sin, and we all expressed frustration about how hard it is to speak about sin from the pulpit these days. To do so is perceived as negative, a "turn-off," a "real downer." Yet the doctrine of sin is so important! You don't need a Savoir if there's nothing to be saved from. At 8:45, I jumped into my car, turned the radio on, and headed up the road. And then, over the radio, came the unfolding of this great disaster. How could it be that a handful of terrorists, proclaiming a bogus and twisted version of Islam, could rain destruction on thousands of innocent people and disrupt forever the lives of tens of thousands more who were left behind. I thought of many things. And I thought, "We won't have any trouble talking about sin this Sunday, and not for a long time to come." We had forgotten what the human heart is capable of. Now we are forced to remember.

We had insisted on feel-good religion. Talk of sin and death was forbidden. H. Richard Neibuhr said the message of the modern church was, "A God without wrath brought men without sin, into a kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." How nice. And how unreal. After Tuesday, that kind of religion seems like pabulum.

I can't answer the tough question: "How such could things happen if God's in charge?" I guess I would say it has something to do with the freedom which God, in his grace, permits us. The same freedom that allows us to love God of our own free will (and any other kind of love would be a sham), the same freedom that permits us to choose right - even to live as saints - also allows us to hate God and to do wrong, sometimes terrible wrong. We cannot explain evil in a world that belongs to God, but we also cannot explain good in a world that belongs to the devil (or to no transcendent power). Why would firemen and policemen to run into a burning building when everyone else is running out? Why would so many give blood, and so many others run to the scenes of the tragedies and offer help? Animals don't do that. They high-tail it away. We are capable of great evil and (with God) of great good. There is a lot we don't know.

I saw on television that great, smoking pile of rubble that was the World Trade Center, such a scene of utter devastation, and thought of Jeremiah describing, in advance, what Jerusalem and Judah would look like after the Babylonian armies had come: "I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light. I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro. I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled. I looked, and lo, the fruited land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord…." The Bible knows what evil lurks in the heart of man. The Bible recognizes good and bad, and ties them to right and wrong.

Our faith never shrinks from disaster and sadness. Whether it's Jeremiah describing Judah's doom, or the Gospel writers telling of the crucifixion of Jesus, or Paul writing to persecuted Christians about peril and nakedness and sword, we recognize the presence of evil, and evil's consequences, in this world. And we never take it lightly. "For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe. His craft and power are great, and armed with cruel hate, on earth is not his equal." Where the "peaches and cream" religion, the "bowl of cherries" faith (which is so popular in our time)came from, I'll never know. It certainly did not come from the Bible, and it certainly can't help us in a time like this.

What happened on Tuesday - an unprovoked attack on our country, on innocent civilians - is, as the President has said, an act of war. But we stand up, with sword in hand, ready to declare war, and we cannot find the enemy! He appears and vanishes. He never looks the same twice. He may be mid-eastern, like Osama Bin Ladin, or American like Timothy McVeigh. He may be armed with bombs and missiles or with little knives made of razor blades. He may be an actor in the drama, or a supporter, or an encourager. We must go after these people. Not easy. A war without battle lines, without uniforms. Nevertheless, it must be done. We must stand, once again, between evil and innocence.

Thursday night, after Disciple Bible Study, Sam Hastings and I were standing in the parking lot, talking, when a vehicle pulled in and asked if the Chapel were open - they said they wanted to pray. I told them it wasn't but I would open it for them. It was a man, his wife and a brother-in-law. As they came into the Chapel, into the light, it was obvious that they were mid-easterners. They assured me that they were Christians and simply wanted to pray. When I left them, two were in the pews with their heads bowed, and the other was on his knees in the aisle. I don't know, but I would guess they had been in some kind of hiding, lying low for a while. It was a reminder. One minister told of a parishioner who works in an office with a Muslim woman. All day Tuesday, as the other employees watched the tragedy on television, this woman stayed at her desk. When the time came to go home, she got up, and as she prepared to leave, one of the others said to her, "Be careful going home." At which the woman ran to the one who had said it and hugged her, with tears in her eyes. And then they all hugged. This war will be a war against individuals, not against nations, or ethnic groups, or religions. Many Palestinians are Christians. Only a tiny fraction condone violence and terrorism. Most Muslims are good people. Our government will have to make these careful distinctions in the months ahead, and we will have to make them with friends, fellow workers and neighbors. We'll not be able to paint the enemy with a broad brush. It is a new kind of war, but it is a war we must win. It is not too much to say that not only are democracy and freedom at stake but at stake also is civil society.

Paul said, "We do not mourn as those who have no hope." He didn't say, simply, "we do not mourn." That would be to deny reality, and to deny our perfectly justified feelings. Of course we mourn. But it is one thing to mourn in utter despair, and quite another to mourn with hope. We are the Easter people. We understand that some who appear to be dead are actually alive, and some who appear to be alive are actually dead. We live "in sure and certain hope" of the resurrection. We pray for those who mourn that their mourning might not be hopeless. We pray for our country and its leaders, and for all freedom loving people here and abroad. And we remember the dead:

"They will hunger no more and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."