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September 16, 2001, Proper 19
The Rt. Rev. Catherine Waynick, Bishop of Indianapolis
Discernment and Formation; Learning and Doing God's Will

The people were afraid. Their leader had been gone a long time and they were feeling impatient. Wanting to comfort and calm themselves they did the only thing they could think of - they made a god for themselves. They fashioned a god out of their own possessions and their own desires. They made this god manageable and portable, and invested it not only with their hopes for safety in the future but with their worship for having saved them in the past.

The people knew they needed a god; but the God of Moses was too mysterious for them. Moses had learned at the burning bush that he would never fully know God's name.....but the people - those left waiting at the foot of the mountain - had not reconciled themselves to the reality that God cannot be fully known and certainly cannot be controlled.

I think it is safe to say that the people acted out of impatience and fear; and that they had not acquired the spiritual discipline necessary to keep them focused on the God who had truly saved them and was leading them to new life.

The same can be said of the followers of Jesus - those who asked him over and over, "When will we be restored? When will our enemies be defeated and Israel be returned to power? When will Jerusalem and the Temple be honored among the nations? When will we be a mighty kingdom once again?"

And Jesus responded to them by saying "The kingdom of God is among you and within you." And he told them parable after parable about life in the Kingdom of God. He told them about a shepherd who never gives up searching for a lost sheep, and a woman who leaves nothing undone to find a lost coin. When the people following Jesus looked to him for leadership and for answers he told them that they had to be prepared to pick up their own cross daily - that there was a cost in following him - he was very clear about that. They wanted easy answers and Jesus refused to provide them.

Everyone here this morning has seen over and over the images of airplanes crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. We all moved from shock and disbelief to gripping grief, to the heartbreaking realization that these were planned events - acts of determined hatred. Our longing to know that family and friends were safe was coupled with an angry desire to know who had done this and why. But the question that gripped me most immediately was "What will it cost us to be disciples of Jesus now? What will faithfulness require?"

Part of the answer was in the seeking of it, as prayer became the primary activity of every group I encountered. We offered prayers for safety, for mercy, for insight, for wisdom, for good news. We prayed in thanksgiving when good news came; and we prayed for comfort when it did not. We prayed in thanksgiving for all we have come to know of God's love, and for the ability to sustain hope.

Like the people who waited for Moses at the foot of the holy mountain we want to pray. We want to worship. But because we are human we run the risk of becoming impatient and fearful enough to begin fashioning our own god. In our impatience and fear we run other risks as well.... we run the risk of rushing to judgment, of striking out at others who have never harmed us. We run the risk of abandoning the disciplines of our faith, and of failing to enter into the discernment and prayer that alone can bring us to anything like holy wisdom.

Some have sent threatening messages to mosques, or directly insulted persons of Arab descent. Some have called for the immediate bombing of Afghanistan. Some, most notably the Religious Right here in the United States, have called for the scape-goating of homosexuals. It seems that part of our human response to these events is the felt need to fix blame, as quickly as possible, on someone - even if it means being wrong in our haste. The more quickly we can blame, and the more quickly we punish, the sooner we will feel satisfied that we have done all we can.

We run the risk of offering sacrifices of our own choosing before a god of our own making in order to feel we have regained control we never really had, in order to feel safe again.

The people around Jesus asked him, "When - when will we be safe? When will our enemies be defeated and we be restored?" And he told them that the kingdom was already among them and within them. There are people in Manhattan today who know what that means. I sat with other clergy in several different settings and listened to their stories, their fears, their questions, their rage, and their hopes. I heard their expressions of gratitude for those working to free victims from the rubble. These were people who expected to have God
meet them in their pain, and what they heard from us was the assurance of God's love and care for them now as in the past; that God's heart is breaking over the cruelty of these violent acts, and that God's wisdom will lead us to know best how to respond.

But we will only come to know God's wisdom in this terrible time if we ask to know it; and if we refuse to decide that we already have the answers.

The lesson from Exodus reminds us that we must be patient. If we move to put our national identity, our military power, our financial influence, or our righteous indignation in the place that belongs to God we will be trusting in idols that cannot ultimately save us.

The psalm reminds us that humanity is sinful; not one of us can escape that truth. Each of us needs at some time to pray "Create a clean heart in me, O God." That some seem to sin more gravely is not the issue; we are all capable of sin, and need to be forgiven.

The letter to Timothy is a plea from Paul to claim the power God has to use even sinners; to remember all the faithful work that he, Paul, has been enabled to do in the name of Christ even though he once sought in rage to destroy the followers of Jesus.

And the Gospel offers us the wonderful reminder that God searches for us until we are found; the way a shepherd seeks a lost sheep or a poor woman a lost coin.

If we ever needed to read and hear lessons as if they were meant directly for us, it is now. The story of impatient, fearful people in the wilderness is our story. The plea of a penitent to be forgiven and restored is our own plea. The hope of being brought out of rage and anger to be used for God's purposes is our own hope, and the promise of being sought out and brought home is God's promise to us.

We can claim that promise with confidence. But we must also remember the cost of claiming it - I would say that at the least the cost is learning what it means to truly love. Putting God first, trying to recognize and dethrone any idols we have cast in our lives, and striving to love neighbor as self are things we aren't born knowing how to do. We have to learn these things, sometimes painfully.

One of the people I was with in New York this week was Archbishop Rowan Williams, Primate of the Church in Wales. In a brief conversation he asked me to consider that this might be a bitter gift - not a gift designed and intended by God, but a terror transformed into gift by grace. In this experience those of us living in the relative freedom of the United States have an opportunity to become newly aware.

As I reflected on the archbishop's words I recalled that our President had said of the attacks on Washington and New York, "This is the first act of war in the new century." I had cringed when I heard it because it seemed to betray a lack of awareness and sensitivity that there are people around the world who live in fear of acts of terrorism every day. That this was the first such action directed against US may be true - but it was not the first act of war in the world in this century...

The "bitter gift" in this may be the opportunity to enter more fully into the ongoing suffering of those around us - brothers and sisters in the Middle East, in Sudan and other African nations, in Eastern Europe, in Northern Ireland, in Malaysia - anywhere there is daily uncertainty, where loved ones are lost or missing, where no easy answers can be found.

This is the gift God gave to us in the Incarnation – the willingness to enter fully into human life - to encounter all that human sinfulness can accomplish, and to transform it by grace.

When I speak to groups about stewardship I sometimes ask them to consider the command to love others as we love ourselves. If we identify certain things as essential to our lives - things such as adequate housing, nutritious food, good education, health care, access to honest work and a decent living wage, then to be faithful stewards we must certainly claim those same things as essential for everyone – even if it means that we do with less in the way of "extras" in order that everyone might have them.

In the same way, if we count freedom to worship, freedom of movement, and respect of the rights of individuals, as basic and essential to our lives - must we not claim them as essential for every human being? And if we do make this claim, (as I would say we do every time we renew the Baptismal Covenant) what are we willing to do – what are we willing to strive for in making such things real for all our brothers and sisters? Perhaps at the very least we must be willing to raise our voices when we see these essentials being denied to others.

And if we are feeling uncertain about what else we might do, we can always turn to the God who is forever seeking us. We can return again and again, as we are doing this morning, to the disciplines of our faith; to prayer and worship, to seeking forgiveness for our failings, to receiving the Body and Blood of the God who lived and died as one of us in order that we might be given new life to serve the world around us in the name of Christ.

There is an image I will always carry from this tragedy. It is the scene - being broadcast live - of a camera moving backward, as quickly as possible from the Trade Center - smoke billowing from the crashing buildings. People were running away as fast as they could, past the camera, with terror in their faces. And then into the shot came another group - firefighters running toward the catastrophe, into an inferno that would eventually claim more than 300 of them in death.

It occurred to me that these persons had been thoroughly formed in their vocation as firefighters. They had been instructed and trained, they knew what they were expected to do, and they were on their way to do it.

I think we must begin to seek just as thorough a formation in our lives as Christians - as disciples of Jesus. We need the discipline not to become impatient and fearful. We need to acknowledge our need to be found by God. And we must offer ourselves to be transformed and used by God in faithful service to the world around us. In all of this we must be in prayerful discernment about what God would have us do.

The Good News is that when we ask God will answer - and will always be with us. Whatever is required of us, God will give us the ability to accomplish. My fervent hope is that we will have the holy patience and perseverence to continue in prayer and discernment until we hear God's voice. In doing what we are formed to do we will find holy joy.

May it be so.