Remembering 9/11

Most of you can probably remember where you were on the morning of September 11, 2001.  I’ll never forget when a fellow faculty member popped his head into my classroom at Barclay College and, with a dazed look on his face, reported that “a plane flew into the World Trade Center.”

As I think back over the events that transpired that day in New York, Washington, and rural Pennsylvania, I continue to do so with a deep sense of profound loss.  This is not only because 3,000 people were killed and another 6,000 were injured on September 11, 2001, as tragic as that may be, but because I continue to believe that something died in the American spirit that day and in the days that followed this extraordinary crisis commonly referred to as “9/11.”

If you Google the word “crisis” you will find the following definitions:

• a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger, e.g., “the current economic crisis”
• a time when a difficult or important decision must be made, i.e., “a crisis point in history”
• the turning point of a disease when an important change takes place, indicating either recovery or death

Looking back, I believe that all of these definitions are fully applicable to 9/11.  Without question, it was “a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger.”  It was also “a time when a difficult or important decision must be made” regarding the appropriate response to terrorism, violence, hatred, religious extremism and other tangible expressions of blatant evil.  And last, but not least, it proved to be “the turning point of a disease when an important changes takes place, indicating either recovery or death.”

If we have learned anything about ourselves as Americans since 9/11, I believe it has become increasingly clear that the changes that have taken place in our country over the past 15 years provide unmistakable evidence that our “disease” is not, in fact, moving toward recovery.  Who in their right mind would argue that our American culture (not to mention our American church) is less self-centered, less materialistic, less violent or less racially, economically or politically divided than it was on September 11, 2001?

Something died that day.

In the midst of the intense pain surrounding 9/11, important decisions were being made all around the country about the kind of people we would be in the face of the devastating disease that presented itself to us, and was about to be made manifest in and through us during the days that followed 9/11.  Would we be the kind of people who respond to the manifestation of evil, in others and in ourselves, with genuine humility, repentance, forgiveness and an increasingly desperate dependence upon God, or would we respond with escalated levels of anger, hatred, pride, fear, self-justification and self-defense?  Would this disease lead towards recovery or death?

I think by now the answer is painfully clear.

Something died that day.

That’s the bad news.  But it is not the whole story.  The last chapter has not yet been written.  There is still time to change the final outcome, for ourselves and for those we love.

“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).

Something may have died on 9/11, but if there is one thing that we learn from our risen Lord, it is that death never has the last word.

“I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die” (John 11:25).

– David O. Williams, General Superintendent