"My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?"
Jesus was overtaken by catastrophe.
Tortured, he was facing the onset of death.
In that catastrophe he felt abandoned and utterly alone.
In that desolation, he cried out,
"My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?"

So at the heart of the story of God being with us
is the fact that this person,
whom we worship as Emmanuel, God with us,
experienced God as being very much not with him at that time of crisis.
In fact, he cried out in desperation,
and his question inevitably carries a tone of reproach and accusation:
"God, you have promised so much to me and through me,
you have been with me so constantly and deeply,
your presence in me has been so real and vivid that I realize that I have a special part in your plan for the world.
"How can you have allowed me to come to this place?
Where are you?
Do you not care about me, after all?"

Jesus' question has been hovering over the catastrophe this week of four airplanes being hijacked and used as flying bombs for the destruction of thousands of people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania:
"Our God, our God, have you now forsaken us?
And if you have, why is that?"
Jesus' question is a sharper form of some more general questions people are asking:
"Why does God allow the evil that causes such catastrophe?"
"How can people come to a place in their lives where they inflict such evil on others?"
"Given that such evil happens, is God really real?
Does God exist, after all?"

The week's events have been shocking for us all,
and the shock has taken different forms for different people.
Yasmeen Granville is secretary to the Anglican Observer at the United Nations,
with whom some colleagues and I were to meet Tuesday morning at her office at the Episcopal Church Center in New York City.
When we arrived at 9 the observer, a lay archdeacon from Samoa, was not in yet,
but Yasmeen arrived shortly sobbing as she rushed to her desk,
for the first plane had just crashed, her husband worked at the World Trade Center, and Yasmeen did not know whether he was dead or alive.
She later discovered he'd gotten to safety,
but the shock of what could have happened to him continued to affect her throughout the morning.
At that moment, ironically, I was in New York, but my wife Jane was in Chicago,
having flown from Laguardia at 6 Tuesday morning,
so there was the concern of getting in touch and making sure all was well.
She ended up driving through the night with a colleague,
and we were able to rendezvous in Tarreytown, up the Hudson, on Wednesday.
I've found myself slightly jittery this week,
having difficulty focusing on tasks and following them through, and then exhausted every evening.
Insatiably hungry for information, we've all read acres of newsprint
and watched much of the unprecedented 90 hours of continuous television coverage
that has functioned, as Peter Jennings of ABC observed, like a national campfire for us to sit around at this time as the story unfolds.

Where is God in this catastrophe?
As we recover from shock,
as we grieve for the injured and the killed,
and as we consider the options of foreign policy,
there are the questions of faith that hover over the catastrophe -
Does God exist?
Does God make bad things happen?
If not, why does God even allow evil?
Where is God in this catastrophe?
On TV yesterday, I saw an older man weeping over the death of his younger brother and asking,
"How could God have done this to me, that my brother has died before me,
for I was to die before he did?"
The notion that God actually plans and inflicts suffering on people is one of the commonest reactions to misfortune and catastrophe.
I often hear people react to an untimely death, for instance, with the observation that
"This is all part of God's plan, there's a purpose in this,
and it will just take time for it to become clear to me."
Close by the notion that God causes misfortune is the notion that, while God may not cause misfortune,
God allows specific forms of misfortune so that we will learn specific lessons.
In this case, the lessons might be thought to be lessons about the vulnerability of human life,
lessons about not setting up idols of false financial security,
lessons about keeping watch.

The truth of the gospel is much stranger and more difficult to grasp,
but is has much greater power for the human family.
The idea that everything happens for a reason is essentially a pagan notion
and on it are based systems like astrology, which looks to the stars for answers,
and primal religions such as Chivanhu in Zimbabwe,
which sees some ritual or ethical lapse as causing every misfortune that comes to a person or family.
The religion of the Bible,
and, more especially, the gospel of Jesus Christ
proclaims that God's central passion is is creating genuine community.
That's what God is up to; that's why God created us.
For community to be genuine, people need to have the same kind of freedom God has,
the freedom to create and embrace community,
but also the freedom to reject and destroy community.
Destroying community was the intent of this week's attacks,
and that is evil.
That kind of evil is responsible for the events of this week.

Look at it this way.
As I've shared with some of you this week, one of the most compelling images for me was one from Wednesday morning's New York Times:
an image of a single 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 horribly and desperately in a way not of his choosing.
Caught in this moment, just a few moments before his death,
he seems poised, composed, peaceful.
As I see him and as I make all these observations, my heart goes out to him.
My heart doubtless does not go out to him in quite the way his relatives' hearts must have gone out to him as they saw the picture.
Nevertheless, my heart and my spirit go out to him, and I love him in his falling,
and I want him to know in his falling that he was loved and that he is loved.
Doubtless the hearts of millions went out to him in just that way as they saw this picture.

Then there were the many pictures of people's hearts going out to the suffering.
I think of one caught of several people standing in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue:
an Asian woman with her eyes widened and her mouth open in horror, with her hand raised as if with her hand she could stop the events;
and beside her a white woman with her hands over her mouth,
and behind them a white man covering his mouth as he watched.
These would not be their reactions if they were watching two stars collide through a telescope.
No, it was the impact on people, on lives that was horrifying them.

This is the kind of reaction you all had this week to what you were seeing:
You were horrified and shaken.
You were suffering with those who were suffering,
you were dying with those who were dying,
you were grieving with those who had relatives, friends and colleagues.
That is compassion,
which means to suffer with one who is suffering.
That is solidarity,
which means to stand with those who are oppressed and suffering.

Those responses arise out of the image of God in us.
We have those responses because we are created in the image of God.
God is a loving God.
God created us in love, and God cares about us in love.
So I say to you that your compassion for the injured, the dying and the dead is an expression of God's compassion for the injured, the dying and the dead:
as you weep, God is weeping;
as you grieve, God is grieving,
your tears are God's tears.
We know that with a bedrock certainty as we toil through this story,
because we have another story which forms the background to all our stories,
and that is the story of how God came to us in Jesus
and was willing to suffer this kind of thing in Jesus,
even to the point of Jesus crying out, like we want to cry out sometimes,
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

The human situation is made up of stories,
and what makes or breaks our journey is how we understand the stories.
How you understand the story of this week's bombings will make all the difference to what you can contribute to the healing from this story.
If you understand this week's story with just the dry categories of good and evil,
you may be able to assign blame,
but you will not be able to discern finely the course of justice.
If you understand this week's story only in terms of geopolitics,
you may come out with some geopolitical options
but you will not discern how this story can be redeemed.
If you wrestle only with the dilemma between God being good or God being all-powerful,
you may work out a theological solution of some sort,
but you will not be able to release either the love or the power of God in the world.

On several Palm Sundays, I've said to you, "Now the story takes over."
The story of God with us needs to take over in what George Bush called on Friday the "middle hour of our grieving."
The full import of God's story with us comes out in the story of the cross,
the story I've chosen to be our gospel today.
We Christians often disempower the Jesus story by imagining that it all had to happen just the way it did,
that it was preordained that the God who came among us
would end up tortured and dying on a cross.
Yes, if that's the way we think about our own sacred story,
then, of course, we will be dumbfounded when bad things happen to good people,
and we will wonder whether the notion of God amounts to a hill of beans.
The truth is quite otherwise.
God created a world and in that world God created beings in God's own image.
Why? So that there could be a community of beings in relationship.
But for God's image to be genuine in us,
and for the community of relationship to be authentic,
human beings must be free to choose such relationship and equally free to reject and destroy such relationship.
In that sense, yes, God does allow evil,
but God allows evil for the whole world system,
not selectively for this event and not for that event.
So when God came among us in Jesus,
God chose to be just as vulnerable to misfortune and evil as you and I are.
More than that, God risked everything in Jesus:
life itself, and even the very nature of God as faithful and good,
for if Jesus had chosen otherwise - and he could have, though he didn't - the very nature of God could have been compromised.
"My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?"

So the story of God with us is continuous with the story of this week,
not some airy, idealized story that cannot touch or be touched by the pain of this week.
Are you shocked? Jesus was shocked.
Do you feel yourself faltering? Jesus felt himself faltering.
Do you feel vulnerable? Jesus was vulnerable.
By the light of that story, we know that Jesus weeps through our tears,
Jesus grieves through our mourning,
Jesus shares our frustration.
As God lived in solidarity with us through Jesus,
we know that God lives in solidarity with the suffering of this crisis.

In that confidence, perhaps we can better hear three directions from our other three scriptures this morning.
First, repent.
"I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me," says the psalmist today.
Do we know our sins as a nation?
May this crisis prompt us to search our souls about our global impact as a nation,
even as we seek the perpetrators in order to protect not only ourselves but the rest of the world as well.

Second, rebuild.
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me," says Isaiah, "because the Lord has anointed me . . . to bind up the broken-hearted . . . They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations."
Through reflection and shared wisdom, each of us can contribute to building up our shaken national life.

Third, hope.
In a passage often read at funeral services, and always read at any funeral service I am leading, Paul writes to the Romans,
"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 loves us.
"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, not things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Christ has been there, so indeed, nothing can separate us from Christ.
Bind that assurance close in to your spirit.
Take that assurance as bread for the journey.
Eat it and be nourished by it, both now and always.