February
20, 2002
Rector,
Trinity Church, Wall Street
New York, New York
This
sermon is also available in audio
This
has been a strange time for all of us since I was here last year.
The dust that fell on lower Manhattan on September 11 is still falling
on you and me, no matter where we live. At 8:30 a.m. that morning
I was in a little room one floor below my office. We have offices
in a twenty-five-story office building across the street from the
back of the church; which means we were very close to the World
Trade Center.
About
four of us were sitting in this small room, when suddenly we heard
something that sounded like a big gas main blowing. (For those of
you who have lived in New York, you know there are sounds all the
time. The first six months we lived in New York, I jumped out of
bed every time I heard a sound. I would run to the window and look
out, and nobody would be doing anything unusual. It was just another
big bang. I didn’t know where it came from. It’s just
a noisy place to live.) So on September 11 when we heard this huge
noise, we literally turned back to the agenda we were working on.
Five
to ten seconds after the explosion, the head of the real estate
department, who had an office down the hall, opened our door and
said, "A private plane has hit the World Trade Center."
We all jumped up and ran down the hall into his office to take a
look. We saw the smoke and we began saying, "Oh, isn’t
it awful. He must have had a stroke." Everybody remembered
the same thing had happened to the Empire State Building fifty or
so years ago. We kept looking at the smoke, talking about the Empire
State Building.
We
were looking towards the Empire State Building when suddenly, out
of the corner of our eye, we saw the second plane fly into the South
Tower. This time the explosion was so loud that the building shook,
and we were afraid the windows were going to break. The woman who
was running the meeting dove under a table screaming, "War.
War. War." With that, we didn’t know whether there would
be ten planes or twenty planes or whether the whole city would burn
down.
We
ran for the stairwells. Everybody in the building was in the stairwells.
You don’t use the elevators, you know, in a time of fire, time
of disaster, so we were all running down the stairs. Some of our
older staff members could barely get down. We were all almost tumbling
over each other trying to get down the steps.
Finally
we got down to the lobby, and then we remembered the children. We
have a hundred and forty kids in the day care; many of them just
babies in cribs. We have a rule that every single person who wants
to, is to take charge of one child in case of an emergency. We'd
never had an emergency before. Suddenly,
everybody begins to head for the school. Get the kids and bring
them down to the basement—the basement seemed to be a safe
place. What to do? We decided to stay in the building.
Inside
our office building, as was true with most people in Lower Manhattan,
when the first building fell and then the second, we thought we’d
been hit again. We didn’t distinguish that two buildings had
fallen. As a matter of fact, nobody imagined that the Trade Towers
would ever fall. People were screaming, "The American Stock
Exchange has been hit." (Our office building shares a common
wall with the American Stock Exchange.) And across the street from
the church is the New York Stock Exchange, and of course, we thought
they were being attacked.
We
finally began to realize that we had to get out of the building.
It started filling with smoke almost immediately. We thought our
building was on fire. Our office building has a wonderful air system
that sucks in fresh air, not from the street, but from the top of
the building. Of course, it was sucking in the dust and the debris
from the Twin Towers right into the building. Probably ten seconds
after the first building fell, every hall in the building and office
was filled with smoke and dust and debris of all sorts. So we said,
"What do we do? Do we
go outside and put the children at risk, or do we stay inside and
have them die in here with us?"
We
decided to go outside. Some of us went down a corridor to get out
the back way, and a metal door locked on us. The metal doors open
with electronic cards. We have a nice pecking order; you have a
card for your door, but nobody else’s. Because I'm the Rector,
my card is supposed to work on everybody’s door. I took my
card out and I flashed it, and it didn’t work. Flashed it again.
And of course, everybody said, "Let me try it. Let me try it."
As if to say, the stupid Rector doesn’t know how to run the
card, you see. We finally took a fire extinguisher and forced the
door open. It was a dark hallway, full of smoke.
Two
of the women on the staff came up to me independently and whispered
in my ear, "Dr. Matthews, if you live, and I don’t, please
tell my husband I love him very much." Another woman came up
and said almost the same thing. "I might not live, and you
might. Tell my husband I love him." Our CFO who heads the finances
of all of Trinity, real estate included—a devout Roman Catholic
with two sons at Notre Dame—leaned over to me and said, "I’ve
just made my confession, but I think I’m going to do it again."
And I said, "Why?" And he said, "The Lord must be
very busy right now."
It
was dark outside, like the middle of the night from all the dust,
smoke and debris. We got the kids out and began running down the
street. By then the dust and debris was four or five inches deep.
I noticed a strange thing as I was looking down. I saw shoes everywhere,
especially women's clogs, the thick-soled ones. We didn’t know
if there would be a body beside the shoes. We discovered later that
the women had left their shoes behind because they could run much
faster without them.
We
finally made it down to the ferry. Some of us got the children on
buses up to another day care. By six o’clock that night, every
child in our day care had been reunited with his/her parent. We
began using the word miracle a lot in New York. Miracle! Miracle
that we got out! Miracle that no parent had been killed, and many
of them worked in the Trade Center.
We
felt so blessed. We thought we were all going to die.
It does something to you when you are in a situation where you are
just certain you are going to die. It kind of puts perspective on
all of the life that you have ever lived before. And
of course, three thousand or so did die, and prayers have been offered
for them here and all over the world ever since.
We
have two churches in Trinity. I am the Rector of what is called
Trinity Wall Street and an old church about four blocks away called
St. Paul’s Chapel—primarily a museum. It’s where
George Washington said his prayers after he was inaugurated. St.
Paul’s is right across the street from the World Trade Center.
We knew it had been destroyed. But lo and behold, not one window
was broken. Another use of that word, Miracle! Rudolf Guilliani
later remarked, "It’s a miracle that St. Paul’s remains
standing!" It is where the ministry is going on right now as
we speak, twenty-four hours a day--fifteen hundred police and fire
fighters are fed every day in that space.
The
following Friday after September 11, a huge memorial service was
held in Washington at the National Cathedral; the President of the
United States asked everybody in America to ring their church bells
in solidarity at twelve noon. I got my little cell phone, because
none of the phones were working, and called one of the engineers
who I knew was down around St. Paul’s. I said, "Mike,
the President has asked for the bells to be rung at twelve noon."
I could just see and hear him, "Oh, you don’t know what
it’s like down here. We can’t possibly. Those bells are
rung with solenoids, and the solenoids have to have electricity,
and the electricity is off—there’s nothing. That church
tower is pitch black. I could never get up there." Almost saying,
"Don’t ask me to do that." So I said, "Okay.
Okay. I just wanted to remind you if you could."
At
about 12:30 p.m., my cell phone rang. "This is Mike. Guess
what? I crawled up the tower. I found an iron pipe half-way up.
I crawled up and got on top of that big bell, and I beat the hell
out of that bell!" And I said, "Praise the Lord."
And he said, "You haven’t heard the best part." I
said, "What’s the best part?" He said, "The
best part is when I came back down. I looked out the back door,
and all the firemen and the police officers and the rescue workers
had taken off their hats during that bell ringing and placed them
over their hearts, as if to say, ‘Amidst all of this hell,
God reigns.’"
God
reigns even in this hell. It’s very hard for us, isn’t
it, because so many things have happened as a result of this.
We’ve just discovered for most of us a brand-new religion we
barely knew anything about. Most of us had never even heard the
word iman. Didn’t know the difference between Muslim and Moslem.
Didn’t really know what Islam was all about. Now we are beginning
to learn, aren’t we? We’re beginning to listen and pay
attention. We’re beginning to sense something is going on with
that religious group that we knew nothing about, and it is almost
as if God is calling you and me to pay attention to something that
wasn’t even on our screen.
One
of the wonderful stories in the Old Testament is the one we usually
think of as a children’s story—the story of Jonah and
the whale. It isn’t a children’s story, but we think of
it that way because it is always told to children, and it’s
kind of a fun story. Just in case you’ve forgotten it, let
me just tell it briefly to you:
Jonah was told by God to go to Ninevah—a great, huge, very
corrupt city. The Jews hated Ninevah. Wasn’t anything good
about Ninevah. And God said, "Jonah, you go to Ninevah and
tell the people in Ninevah, even though they are very corrupt,
that if they will repent, I’ll give them my blessing."
Well, Jonah said to himself, "Those people are trashy people.
They’re not worth it. Why would I want to give the blessing
of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to those trashy people
in Ninevah?" So what he did was run away in the other direction.
He went down to the water, got on a ship, and went the opposite
direction. Remember the storm came, and everybody on the ship
thought they were going to drown? So they said, "What’s
this storm all about? This is just terrible." And somebody
found Jonah sleeping down below. "What are you doing?"
"I’m trying to run away from my God." "You’re
the problem," so they threw him overboard. Then the big fish
(It doesn’t say whale in the scripture, by the way; it says
big fish.) swallowed him. Three days later, it spewed him out
onto dry land. Just at the time he hit that dry beach, God said,
"I thought I told you to go to Ninevah."
Our
friends in the Jewish tradition read that scripture on the holiest
day of their year, Yom Kippur. Around the world they read that scripture.
The reason they read that
scripture is that they must remember, though they are the chosen
people, they must know that the only reason for their being chosen
is to give the blessing of God away. That’s
what Jews do on Yom Kippur. You know what Yom Kippur is like? You’d
have to take all the forty days of Lent, throw in Good Friday, and
put them all into one day, in order for we Christians to grasp the
powerful importance of Yom Kippur for a Jew.
It’s
always true with tragedy, isn’t it? You have to say, "Is
there anything that is good that can come out of this? Is there
any message? Is there anything for me to learn from this?"
Well, there are about a billion people who are children of God who
believe things that are kind of unusual for us, and yet, this incident
is calling us to pay attention to the folks in Ninevah. That’s
the essence of what it is to be a follower of the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, and we’re right in there with the Jews. That’s
part of our tradition, too. What’s the purpose of a blessing?
Is it just for you? God forbid! It’s for you to share. It’s
for you to—like we used to say as kids—"Pass it
on. Pass it on."
We’re
all wondering now where we go from here. It’s not just for
America. The whole world is wondering, where do we go from here?
Have we indulged long enough in the exclusivity of our religious
theologies? That’s a very difficult question, isn’t it?
It challenges us all, doesn’t it? Carl Sandburg was once asked,
"What’s the worst word in the English language?"
He replied, "Exclusivity." And that’s been a part
of my religious tradition. I don’t know about yours. But I
have certainly had a lot of that in my tradition. It feels like
as a result of September 11, I am being challenged, challenged at
the roots of the theology of our tradition. Challenged at the roots
of our thinking of ourselves as better than everyone else. Challenged
to go to Ninevah.
We have a savior that gives us permission to do that. The simple
truth is Jesus died for us to do the same for others. You see, what
we’re about is not just that Jesus died for me; I ought to
be willing to die for somebody else. Somebody who maybe doesn’t
even deserve it. Then we are getting close to the center of our
faith.
In
St. Paul’s Chapel, where we serve the firemen and the police
officers and the rescue workers, the walls are just covered with
banners and posters and colored things made by both children and
adults. Oh, thousands of things all over the wall, high as you can
reach. One little girl sent one in just the other day. It was going
to go up on the wall, but it didn’t get to the wall because
of its poignancy. She’s eleven years old; happens to live in
Scarsdale, New York. Here’s the letter she wrote to put on
the wall at St. Paul’s Chapel, to be seen by the fire fighters:
Dear
Fire Fighters,
There are many deaths that I can die: cancer, heart attack,
AIDS, hepatitis, sickle cell anemia, leukemia, natural causes,
choking, being strangled, shot, or hanged. [She’s got
a pretty good imagination; doesn’t she? We’ve just
begun.] I could get the death penalty or rabies or a snake
bite or a wild animal could attack me. I could get run over
by a car. I could be in a car crash. I could fall, slip, get
a concussion, get small pox, or be stabbed, crack my skull,
get poisoned, heart disease, get stung by too many bees, and
many, many more. But I know that I will never, ever die in a
fire because people like you, great people, would go into the
flames to save an ordinary person like me, and that’s what
makes you so great and courageous and brave and terrific and
wonderful, special people.
Yours
truly,
Claudia Fischer
It’s
not a bad symbol for us, a fire fighter. Three
hundred forty- three fire fighters died that day. More fire fighters
died in that incident than have ever died in any single incident
in the history of the world, and every one of them died knowing
full well that his purpose was to go in and save somebody else.
No wonder that hat has become a symbol for us. No
wonder the power of that hat is almost like a new cross, isn’t
it? It’s almost like somebody is willing to die that another
person might live. What a symbol! Of course, we need to stop and
say, "God, what—what does this mean to me? You died for
me. Firemen died for hundreds and thousands of people at the Trade
Center. Maybe you’re not asking me to die, but maybe you’re
asking me to do something about a people in the world that hate
us so much—that dislike us and dislike this place, and what
we stand for and who we are, and the faith we have."
Maybe
September 11 is a very important date for us to remember and for
us to begin the process of turning toward those with love, with
concern and compassion, and yes, even with God’s blessing through
us, into their world."
Thank
you God, for opening our eyes and using this tragedy that we
might be more clearly your servants in this your world in need.
Amen.
© 2002
The Rev. Dr. Daniel P. Matthews
Preached at Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis, Tennessee as part
of the Lenten
Noonday Preaching Series
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