We share a deep grief today, a grief over losses that cannot be
counted. Our grief is over what we expect to be a loss of freedom.
Our grief is over the loss of innocence of our children. We share
today the grief of those who are experiencing first-hand the loss of
a loved one. Many of your lives have been touched by those who were
in New York on your behalf, working for you in a company there or
traveling there, and we grieve with you.
We also stand as a nation in resolve against terrorism by coming
together today and by joining with our neighbors of all races and
ethnicites. These days, we are standing together to say that
terrorism will accomplish nothing. Our God is greater than the ugly
power we witnessed.
We share today a love for our country and what it stands for in our
world. We love her people and all who would become one of us by
taking the risky journey into a place of freedom. And we desire to
see peace. We want peace. We do not want war. We may need it. But we
want peace. That's what we really want.
With you, I have been reading the paper, watching some TV. I have
been touched deeply by many words of wisdom and hope throughout the
week, and forgive me if you hear them quoted this morning without
attribution. I have been bathed in some fine preaching this week -
fine, wonderfully inspiring statements of hope and of resolve.
But I come today to bring you the Word of God, the true foundation of
our faith. And it is the Word of God, which we have already read
today in various forms, that convinces me that on Tuesday what we saw
was unmasked evil unleashed upon us. We saw destruction, utter
destruction perhaps even greater than the perpetrators expected. We
saw hatred unrestrained. We saw the co-opting of our planes and our
people for despicable deeds of the evil one. We saw what we never
ever could have imagined to happen here. We saw the evil one at work
in bald, gnarled, wretched form. We have to call it what it was.
This week we also saw remarkable goodness, revealed and multiplied
among the American people. We saw heroes who gave their lives in
exchange for innocent victims. We saw firefighters and police at
work, doing their job, which Tuesday meant giving their lives. We
heard of heroes in airplanes who did not expect to die today but
fully expected to come home for dinner.
We saw individuals pray. We saw others cry and weep. We saw the
compassion that is part of the sign of God's image within the human
heart poured out this week.
My friend Barry Bowman commutes to the World Trade Center every day
from New Jersey. Except for the fact that his train was late, he
would have been there. I talked with him Wednesday morning, and he
shared with me the experience of a diverted train dropping him off
"who knows where" in lower Manhattan and walking for miles
and for hours to get any kind of public transportation back home to
New Jersey. He said that every church on every street in his path on
Tuesday was open. Men and woman from the church had come to their
church home and dispensed water, offered a listening ear, helped
people kind of get in touch with reality enough to figure out where
they needed to go. They were so disoriented and confused. They
offered the use of their telephones so countless people could reach
their loved ones and tell them they were all right. That was
the ministry of the church on Tuesday. It was a beautiful thing.
Now how is it that human beings can make such diverse choices? Every
person alive is making choices about what he or she will do or will
not do. Some of those choices are harder than others. Some of them
take more planning than others. But some of them come out of a heart
that is ready for the moment.
President Bush mentioned a few of the self-sacrificing choices made
by the people in the towers, including the man who was able to save
himself but would not leave the side of his quadriplegic friend and
perished with him. What enabled him to make that choice? And
conversely, what enabled the evil ones to make their choices?
Though good, and sometimes even heroic, in their efforts to reverse
the effects of the horrible destruction we saw, not one person could
reverse the root cause. A human being can only deal with the
consequences. No one, no person could address the powers of darkness
that moved men to kill themselves and perhaps thousands of other
innocent people. No one has yet educated, trained or armed themselves
sufficiently to have prevented this evil.
And what about God? Why didn't he stop it? You know I'm
going to point to God today with hope. But I know your question is
"Where was he?" What was God doing and why didn't he
stop it?
He didn't stop it because he has given every human being the precious
gift of freedom of will, to exert his or her will either for love or
for hatred, for good or for evil, for faith in God or for disbelief.
And in this case, a handful of cowardly men chose destruction, and
no, God did not stop them. As Billy Graham said Friday morning,
"This is a mystery. Evil is a mystery."
"There is a question there," he said, "that hasn't
been answered even to my satisfaction."
But the point is that you and I - using this freedom of will - make
choices every day. God did not pick you up this morning and
make you come to church. You are not a puppet. You have been given
the precious gift of free will. That has not been taken away from you.
The question is, at the moment of truth, where will your
righteousness come from? What will enable you to do the heroic thing,
the good thing, if this is what is called out of you? And we must
also ask, where will the forgiveness come from if and when you make
the wrong decision or the wrong choice?
It is inevitable, you know, that you and I will make wrong choices.
We will do the bad rather than the good. We will do the ignorant
rather than the wise. We will do things that dishonor our Lord,
because sin is harbored in our hearts also. Darkness lurks in the
corners of our hearts and souls. Perhaps because of Christ, evil is
restrained in us, but the root of sin was there in our hearts. Not a
single one of us came into this world without Adam and Eve's mutated
spiritual gene, the sin gene, or as the church has known it for
millennia, original sin. And that is the basic human condition: not
one is righteous in his or her own goodness, for all have sinned and
fall short of the glory of God.
In this particular week, this realization would lead us to despair if
it were not for another staggering truth revealed by God and sent as
a gift to all humanity. Against this black, ugly, demented, depraved
backdrop of evil, Jesus Christ has been revealed to us as the only
true sinless one to live as a human being, and it is to him we look
today as a beacon of hope and comfort. You know the hymn "Fairest
Lord Jesus"? I love that hymn. It's been on my mind this
week. "Jesus shines brighter, Jesus shines purer," than all
God's creation which merely point in his direction.
Jesus was sinless through life. Our Hebrews passage said he was
tempted, he experienced pain, he experienced the temptations, the
lures towards sin, but he did not sin. Several of the apostles
in their letters reiterate this point, that Jesus had no sin. He
didn't commit sins. He didn't fall into the traps that you and I fall
into. Yeah, we have a record of him getting angry, but he did not
sin. He was righteous and holy and just and compassionate. He did not sin.
Not only that, he - unlike us - was sinless to the core. He had
no original sin. He was not dealing with that inevitable drive
towards the impure. He was not a victim to that. He did not have a
sin nature. He was God. That's what we talked about last week. His
closest colleagues, the ones who would know all the dirt on Jesus, to
the one, say that he was without sin. That's pretty high praise. I'm
not sure the people who work with me or the people who work with you
would be able to say the same thing. What do you think? They
know our flaws. But those with whom Jesus walked for three years and
taught and ate and solved problems with, who saw him at his worst and
at his best still all said Jesus had no sin.
It was necessary for the one who would be the sacrifice for all of
humanity's sin to be spotless, to be blameless. That was what
was required. Going way back, early in the Old Testament, the animals
that were sacrificed on behalf of a family or the nation of Israel
had to be perfect, spotless, without sickness, without blemish of any
kind. The disciples realized after the resurrection that Jesus
had been that spotless lamb, the true, complete, once-for-all
sacrifice for all human sin. We count on that today.
Jesus is the true hero today. Last Tuesday the sad and heartbreaking
realization was that those who were there to save others, those
firefighters going up the stairs while everyone else was going down -
those firefighters were vulnerable and perishable because they have
human skin and flesh and need air to breathe. But Jesus is not
vulnerable to sin and therefore is the only one who can rescue us
from its effects. He cannot be touched by it or destroyed by it. He
willingly gave his life in sacrifice so that we would not have to,
eternally speaking.
On the cross he said, "It is finished." The war against
evil was won. Satan was vanquished. The last 2000 years have been a
mop-up operation, battles and skirmishes, until the evil one is
convinced of his defeat. He is still on the loose reeking havoc. But
Satan knows he has lost the war. It is over. We stand here to
testify that the war over sin and death has been won because the
sinless one, Jesus the Lord, took upon himself the death, eternal
death for us. He had victory because of his resurrection. The
Scriptures say God made him who had no sin to be sin for us so that
in him we might become the righteousness of God.
I asked you earlier about the moment of truth in your life and
mine. Where will our righteousness come from? It will
come from the one who can see past our most subtle rebellions to the
remedy for our sin. From him we have righteousness enabling us to
make good and noble choices.
But in him also we have forgiveness. He is the only one, as the
sinless one, who has authority to forgive sin. Forgiveness is
offered freely to any who would believe in him.
What results is peace for our souls. We do not fear the evil one who
may at this point be able to snatch away our bodies but cannot hijack
our souls. He does not have that power. We believe that in Christ we
have life, life eternal, that God stands as a protection over that
life that cannot be taken away in Christ Jesus.
This, my friends, is why it is so important for you and me to know
from whence comes that life, to know the one who gives it, to love
him and be devoted to him, and to come to church and to share the
life of Christ with one another. Because it is in him that we are
saved. It is in him we have confidence.
Psalm 46 means so much to us this week. Let me read it to you.
"God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in
trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth give way and the
mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and
foam and the mountains quake with their surgings. There is a river
whose streams make glad the City of God, the Holy Place where the
Most High dwells. God is within her. She will not fall. God will help
her at break of day. Nations are in uproar, kingdoms will fall, but
he lifts his voice and the earth melts. The Lord Almighty is with us,
the God of Jacob is our fortress. Come and see the works of the Lord,
the desolations he has brought on the earth. He makes wars to cease
to the end of the earth. He breaks the bow and shatters the spear. He
burns the shields with fire. Be still and know that I am God. I will
be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth. The
Lord Almighty is with us, the God of Jacob is our fortress."
Let us sing our conviction with one of the greatest hymns ever written:
A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.
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