Jesus - Jesus is our peace:
Jesus is our peace in our broken life with God,
Jesus is our peace in our broken life with ourselves,
Jesus is our peace in our broken life with one another.
Jesus - Jesus is our peace.

"In his flesh," proclaims the writer to the Ephesians,
"Jesus has made both groups into one
and has broken down the dividing wall, the hostility between us.
Which two groups were hostile? - Jews and Gentiles:
those two groups, whose hostility was the issue for the early Christian community.
But don't we treasure these words because they speak to all the both-groupnesses of the human story:
female and male, free and slave, black and white, Gringo and Tejano
and maybe, just maybe, terrorist and victim.

The heart of our faith is not a philosophy or an ideology,
not even an idea.
The heart of our faith is fundamentally the proclamation of an event:
God one with us in Christ Jesus,
God so locked in an embrace with humanity
that the writer to the Ephesians can say that Christ did that "that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross."
There's the event.
There's the doing.
There's the accomplishment.

Stand on that event, dear friends.
Hold fast to that event.
Embrace that event.
In times such as these, when the not-yetness of the Reign of God seems splayed out about us in horror, grief and hostility,
we need desperately the alreadyness of the Reign of God:
the alreadyness of what God has already done,
the alreadyness of how God has decisively tipped the balance of the universe in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We need that.
On September 11 I was in New York City, at the Episcopal Church Center.
My wife Jane was in the air, en route to Chicago.
When I was assured that she'd arrived safely
and when I'd taken in the magnitude of the news of the day,
I walked south to join our daughter, a city resident, at our apartment at the General Seminary.
Everyone else - I mean everyone else in Manhattan - seemed to be heading north:
tides and tides of people walking,
walking because the subways weren't running,
walking away from the huge cumulus cloud of smoke rising off the bottom of the island.

Tides of people not talking, just walking determinedly,
their faces showing forth the catastrophe:
faces frightened, faces horrified, faces blank.
All of that the impact of the event, of course,
but a horror and a quandary that went beyond the event:
Yes, questions about enemies and geopolitics, and all of those justified,
but questions that went beyond those to our humanity were etched on their faces:
Who are we?
What are we?
To what depths can we descend?
Is there no end to our capacity for destruction?
What are we as a human community?
What is happening to the bonds that connect us to one another over the barriers of race, nationality, ideology and religion?
And so September 11 bleeds into the other horrors that afflict us:
vicious cycles of retaliation in Israel and Palestine,
Hindu-Muslim massacres in India,
genocide in Rwanda,
killing fields in Cambodia,
a wedding party bombed by accident in Afghanistan.
Or, close to home, the battered woman three blocks away,
the child who shows up at school with bruises from home,
the latest gang rape,
the latest corporate larceny that empties the hopes of modest retirees.

The most compelling photograph from 9/11 for me was one published by the New York Times the next day:
an image of a man, falling down headfirst and utterly alone after he jumped from the north tower of the World Trade Center.
To me, he looks to be an African-American man, maybe 35 years of age.
He's wearing dark trousers and what looks like a white pullover jacket that may have a hood.
It looks like there's something attached to his waist, maybe a plastic water bottle.
He's one of the people who jumped,
so he made a definite decision,
perhaps a decision to die instantly in a way of his choosing rather than desperately in a way not of his choosing.
Caught in this moment, just a few moments before his death,
he seems poised, composed, peaceful.

What is the gospel in that moment?
The gospel in that moment, I believe, is something like this:
Jesus the word of God made flesh,
had shared the experience of jumping into death,
and so watched horrified as this man jumped.
Jesus in his heart reached out and embraced this man in his jumping,
and formed soundlessly with his lips the words,
"I am your peace; in my flesh I have made all groups into one and have broken down the dividing walls of hostility among you.
"In the corrupting oldness of this story of evil,
I am still making one new humanity that all might be reconciled to God."

Jesus - Jesus is our peace.
The life, death and resurrection of Jesus cemented God's story to our story,
and our story to God's story.
In taking our flesh, suffering in our flesh, dying in our flesh, rising in our flesh,
God made every person's story infinitely precious beyond any degradation, dismemberment or incineration,
In Jesus God enacted solidarity with every human narrative
and so opened a way for us to see every human story as precious,
and opened a way for us to be in infinite solidarity with the suffering of every human being.
In our prayers, in our theology, in our pastoring
9/11 drives us back to the Jesus event,
the event that makes a cosmic difference to the cosmos and everything that happens in it.
Our foundation, our starting place, our point of infinite depth must be the alreadyness of what God has already done in Christ Jesus:
any other starting place will betray us into shallow sentiment, trivial moralizing, and superficial politicking.
Jesus - Jesus is our peace.

There is the not yet.
Oh, how we know and grieve the not yet!
It is in the gap between the already and the not yet that God's call to mission comes to the fore;
it is in that gap that the ambiguities and the hard questions arise;
it is in that gap that we turn to one another for counsel.
In fact, it was to ask the mission question that I was at the Episcopal Church Center on 9/11:
a small group from the Standing Commission on World Mission were to meet with then newly appointed Anglican Observer at the United Nations to ask her the question,
"What should the Episcopal Church's mission look like over the next ten or twenty years?"
Our meeting was scheduled for 9 a.m.
Naturally she was not there at 9, but we were left with the mission question,
as all of us still are a year later:
"What is our mission post-9/11?
"In what ways is our mission the same?
"In what ways is our mission different?"

Here are seven brief declarations about that before I tell you two stories:
First, in our prayers and reflection we must receive more and more in our hearts the reconciling love that God offers us in our life with God.
Second, reconciliation among human communities must more and more be a criterion of our mission in the world.
Third, embracing difference among human communities must more and more be at the heart of our catechesis, baptismal life and theological education.
Fourth, conversations among people of differing religions must become the norm rather than the exception in our congregations and seminaries.
Fifth, bringing our economic and political life in these United States under the scrutiny of the gospel must be nurtured in our churches,
Sixth, we must explore the sources of violence and militarism in our world and bring our national practice - in Afghanistan, in Iraq, everywhere - under the scrutiny of the gospel.
Seventh, we must join our prayers with that of Francis, who prayed, "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace."

One of the people who came to St. Peter's, Cambridge, for the first time on 9/11 and stayed was Martin Green.
English in background and now a retired Tufts University English professor, Martin had grown up in the Church of England but had never been an active church person as an adult.
9/11 changed that, for it raised for him profound questions about human community, human need, human service.
Not only did he come and keep coming to church,
but he immediately became a committed member of Wordworks, our ministry of English for Speakers of Other Languages.
A year later he is still found every Saturday morning in the Undercroft, helping teach English to a group of 25 or 30 recent immigrants from all over the world.
Martin felt the catastrophe.
He heard the call.
He embraced the mission.

At the Mission Personnel Orientation in Santa Fe last January, two of the 20 outgoing Episcopal missionaries were Nancy and Gerry Hardeson from San Diego,
she a theological educator and he a medical doctor who had been working for several months in Diocese of Maseno North in western Kenya, where Jane and I were able to visit them in May.
In January, I'd asked the missionaries to introduce themselves and share their conception of Christian mission.
When Gerry's turn came he launched into an extended and animated description of the problems in Maseno:
how the church hospital had declined to almost nothing through mismanagement and lack of personnel,
how everything they tried to do was afflicted by corruption in the church and in local government,
how discouraged but persevering the staff was,
how every step forward was followed by two steps backward -
he was going on and on and clearly could go on and on.
Finally, I broke in and asked: "Well, Gerry, in all of this, what does mission mean to you?"
He paused, and then after a long reflective moment, he said,
"I guess it's John Donne's poem, 'No man is an island . . . I am involved in mankind."
Gerry and Nancy had seen the catastrophe of the world.
They had heard the call.
They were embracing the mission.

Jesus - Jesus is our peace.

Links to other Dean Presler sermons on Sept. 11 from the year 2001

God in Catastrophe -- September 16, 2001

Resources and the Call of Justice -- September 23, 2001

Compassion as Stewardship -- September 30, 2001

Keeping Faith with Friends and Family -- October 14, 2001