|
"How
'Post' Is Post-9/11 America?" September
7, 2003 The Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower Let's pray together. Just as we are, without one plea But
that we know Your Word to be Our light, out life, our liberty, O
Lamb of God, we come. Amen. You may want to turn in your Bibles with me to Galatians
chapter 4. We're actually going to
begin with the verse at the conclusion of chapter 3. We're going to begin with Galatians chapter 3, verse 29.
I want us to think together about the question that I have for us this
morning, which is "Just how 'post' is post-9/11 America?" which is to
say, just how much of a difference in our national life did the attack against
America of two years ago make? It
was certainly the case that immediately after, I think many, many Americans felt
that surely this would bring a dramatic change in our national life together.
And on the day of, and the day after, and the few days after the attack
against New York City and Washington, D.C., the news commentators were all
saying, "This changes everything." Well, it has changed how convenient air travel is, you know.
There are definitely some things that have changed.
However, I think some of the things that we meant when we said "this
changes everything" have not changed at all.
And I was thinking about this a few days ago. I was watching one of the cable news channels.
This is a more liberal cable news channel, and the two talking heads that
were there were not coming from a conservative, a Republican, position at all.
They were definitely on the far left.
But they were both remarking to each other and discussing, "Gosh, I
kind of thought America would have gotten different." And in their mind I think the triviality of our popular
media, the silliness of what goes on television, and the grossness of some of
what occurs in the popular media--I think that though they were not making this
indictment from the standpoint that like James Dobson of "Focus on the
Family" or Pat Robertson of "The 700 Club"--they were not
criticizing America from that quarter, but they were saying things that you
might hear also said from that quarter, which is to say from the far-right and
the far-left, and presumably all across the spectrum, it is possible to sort of
look at our national life and remember that there was reason to think things
were definitely going to be different in America. And now to look back and say, "Well, you know what?
They're really not." And
so I want us to look at that. (And
you may disagree--you may think, "Oh, they're definitely, definitely
different." They're just not
different in the ways that some of us had hoped.) I want us to look at the fact that there are watersheds in
life. There are things that come
along in history that make a huge difference in that we can sort of divide up
history between everything before that and everything that came after that.
I'm thinking the American Civil War ought to be a viable candidate for
something like that. We talk about
"antebellum America," you know, America before the Civil War, and then
America after the Civil War. So there are things that make huge changes in our national
life. It's not that there aren't
those. It's just that maybe right
in the middle of things we don't have a perspective high enough to recognize
what makes for a big change and what doesn't. Now, with those considerations as our starting place, I want
us to look at our Scripture this morning because I want to say we need for there
to be a one major watershed that changes everything from before and after.
And actually, that's what we have in Jesus Christ.
I want us to look at the difference that Jesus Christ has made in history
and ask if that doesn't free us up in some ways when we look at the lesser
watersheds and the candidates for watersheds, whether they turn out to actually
be effective or not. Now here's
what Paul says in Galatians chapter 3, verse 29: If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's
offspring, heirs according to the promise.
[Now, chapter 4] My point is this: heirs,
as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves, though they are the
owners of all of the property; but they remain under guardians and trustees
until the date set by the father. So
with us; while we were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the
world. But when the fullness of
time had come--when the fullness of time had come--God sent his Son, born
of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law,
so that we might receive adoption as children.
And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our
hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!"
So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an
heir, through God. Now, we want to look at the specific context that Paul had in
mind. He's talking about the
difference that the coming of Jesus Christ makes in the world, in the entire
world, in everything about the world. And
what he says is that it's possible to be an heir, one designated an inheritor,
an heir of an estate, but if you are not yet of age, if you're a minor, if you
are young, though you are one of the heirs you end up getting treated just like
the slaves around the estate. And if not exactly like the slaves, well you are under the
tutelage of guardians and supervisors and ones who don't let you do absolutely
everything that you want. And he is
saying that apart from Jesus Christ, that's how you and I, that's how every one
of us, was. We were under the
oppression of the things of this world that God had put in place not because He
wanted to keep us oppressed, but He wanted to allow us to be brought to our
point of being adopted into the family and designated an heir and set free to be
an inheritor. And he's first saying, verse 3, "So with us.
While we were minors we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the
world, but when the fullness of time had come. . ."
The Greek word there is "kairos."
Greek has two words for time. "Chronos"
just means the sequence of time--you know, time marching along, with no shade of
difference from one second to the next. But
"kairos" has to do with seasons, with time and the changes that time
brings. So it's translated in our
English, "when the fullness of time came."
When "time that makes a difference" had come about, God sent
His Son to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption
as children. Now what happens because of Jesus Christ?
Prior, we were slaves. We
are adopted because of Jesus Christ. Because
of our adoption, God sends His Spirit into our hearts so that our spirits know
that we can cry out to God saying, "Abba," which literally means
"Daddy." In the Aramaic
of the day, to call out to God as "Abba" is not exactly to say
"Father," but to say "Daddy."
But it's "Abba, Father." Then
he sums up and says "You are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child
then also an heir, through God." He's talking about a watershed in history that would make the
difference between you being forever a slave and you being, and me being,
eternally a child of God, set to inherit everything that the estate of God has
designated for us. And he's telling
us about that one change in history that Western Civilization used to recognize
as so significant that we had everything "B.C." and "A.D."
Now we don't need to go into this, but designating everything
"B.C." and "A.D." has sort of fallen on hard times.
But Western Civilization was smarter when we realized that, yes, you can
take time and you can divide it into a "before Christ" and an
"after Christ" period, because this is the one most important
thing that has ever come into history. It
makes an eternal difference in your life and in my life. It makes such a huge difference that any of the other things
that we might look to as having significance in life, they just sort of fall
away. They fall away into
insignificance. But, it's very important that we have things in life that we
can point to as making all of the difference in the world because if we
don't--and now this is going to sort of lead us into, you know, our question of
how "post" is post-9/11 America.
If we don't have something in life that makes all the difference in the
world, then life becomes forever meaningless.
Life starts to look absurd. Life
starts to look like nothing really matters.
What you and I experience every day is such a chaos of good and bad
things all jumbled together, life just brings us ups and downs, and we want for
something to help us make sense out of the jumble of life.
And if we can't find something in life that makes sense of the jumble, of
the chaos, then life just starts to look meaningless.
Life starts to look like there's nothing rational about it.
And it's very much like this: You know the difference between dog-paddling in a swimming
pool and not having any side of the swimming pool to push off of, not being in
the shallow-enough area to reach down to the bottom. You know what it feels like to try to dog-paddle in a
situation like that and to try to begin to swim versus when you're close enough
to some side or the bottom of the pool and you can push off. You know how much propulsion that gives you.
Well, we need things in history that we can sort of push off from so we
can sense ourselves moving in a particular direction.
Otherwise we can be sort of floundering around and say, "I don't
know if there's a direction to my life or not."
The problem is sometimes we push off from things that are no
more substantial in the water than we are. I mean, you know, if there's a little rubber duck toy that you
push off from in order to give yourself a surge, you see that little rubber duck
toy floating away from you and you go, "Hey!
My life has direction now!" Well,
no, it doesn't. I mean, you pushed
off from that thing that is lighter in the water than you are, and so, no,
there's not going to be a directionality to you in the swimming pool from that. You understand, I'm not belittling the tragedy of the
atrocity of what America was dealt two years ago. I don't mean to belittle it.
I just mean to say that it does not seem like it gave our country
something to push off from in a way that has unified us with regard to a
direction because, yes, we launched attacks against Afghanistan and then began
the war against Iraq. But it
doesn't look to me like the country is unified behind the administration in
that. Now, maybe I'm mistaken, but
it does not seem like we are responding to life now in a unified way like
America has in the past. After 9/11
there were all sorts of comparisons between that attack against America and
Pearl Harbor. And people were
saying, "Oh. OK. We are going
to unite as a nation now just like we did after Pearl Harbor.
After Pearl Harbor, you know, the nation came together, the
factionalities ceased, and that's what's going to happen now." You know, it's very, very interesting.
Sometimes things that look very substantial, that look like we can
push off from them, that look like they're going to bring direction, and
purpose, and meaning back into our lives, turn out not to do it.
And it's frightening, actually, to admit that in public and to say,
"Well, what would it take? My
gosh! What would it take?"
But the more important point is you know what?
It's not our call whether this thing I'm going to push off from is going
to turn out to be the side of swimming pool or is just going to be a little
swimming pool floaty toy that's not going to do me any good.
God is the One that brings those things into our lives by His mercy, and
not we ourselves. And I guess we
should go ahead and admit it. You
know, there are those times in the life of a nation where we feel like we need
direction. We feel like we need to
come together as a country. We feel
like we're floundering around and the silly and gross things that the popular
media kind of set before us to try to attract our attention--we need to leave a
lot of that behind and become more meaningful, and deliberate, and united as a
nation. We feel like that's true,
and then we push and we don't seem to be able to do it.
And those things that we thought were going to work, you know, don't come
through for us. What does that tell us about being a person in a world
created by God? Well, it tells us
that we're not God. And that
knowing that we need help is not the same thing as being able to reach out and
find help, and seek help, and determine help.
Let me give you a parallel. Was it 1988? The
northern California earthquake that was sort of, you know, a major thing at that
time. I lived in northern
California at the time, in Hollister. And
I'll tell you, the city of Hollister was very, very close to the epicenter of
that earthquake. Our house was
damaged physically by the earthquake and had to be repaired. Our house came through better than some.
Some houses were actually thrown off of their foundations.
It was kind of an exciting thing to take my two little kids with me and
just walk over to downtown Hollister, because entire buildings collapsed out
into the main street of town so that you could not drive up and down. So the town was very, very badly damaged.
This was a big, big deal. But, the other thing that happened is electricity was knocked
out for three days. So for three
days, I didn't know that a freeway in San Francisco had collapsed on top of
itself. I mean, all of the things
that you probably all knew, and that people all across America knew, all of the
things that people all around the world knew about how big the devastation of
this was, I didn't have a clue! I
was very, very shocked. I had a
friend who, for me, made a videotape of the news from that first day and he was
showing it. I remember watching Dan
Rather and I thought, "That's what I went through?
That's the earthquake that I was in?" Well, I was right in the middle of it. I knew what it did to my little town. I had no idea, you know, how much of northern California was
without electricity. And what I want to say is, I think right after 9/11, you and
me, our television commentators, all of us--we're sort of just like I was after
that earthquake--where the electricity is blocked out so not only did we not
have television reception, but the people up and down my street that had
batteries for their radios, well that was fine except for none of the radio
stations were broadcasting, either, because they were all damaged.
So we had no information about the wider context.
We knew what we had experienced--we were very dramatically impacted by
what we experienced. And I see Americans two years ago as just like that.
We all knew what a big deal we had gone through.
But we were really not in a position to say, "and this is what this
is going to bring about." "This
is the difference this is going to make."
"This is going to be the side of the swimming pool we have needed to
push off from." You know,
"We're not going to have the squabbles between Democrats and Republicans
after this any more." [laugh]
We were not in a position to know what the aftermath of this
was. And that's a point that can be
made in any context. If you make it
in a Christian context, what we want to do is connect that with our belief that
God is the Sovereign, that God is in control, that God is in charge.
And God sends us the things to push off from when He determines
that the time is right, not when we determine that the time is right.
But whether we have something substantial in our national life to give us
guidance and direction--and now, this is the specifically Christian point that I
want to make this morning: It
really doesn't matter, because God has given the entire world that one,
absolutely determinative thing that makes all the difference in the world when
we push off from it, and that is the sending of His Son Jesus Christ.
No, it is not the case that life is absurd, that there's no
way to discriminate between the good and the bad of life, that life just keeps
unfolding day after day and nothing that takes place in life makes any
difference. No, that's not true
because, see, God didn't shout down from heaven that He thinks that we should
get our act together. Instead, He
sent His Son into this world with all of its chaos, with all of its problems.
And so, to stay with the swimming pool analogy, it's like
we've got a life guard in the pool with us, so that even if I can't push off in
order to go the direction that I need to, there's a life guard with me in the
pool and that life guard can embrace me and can move me in the direction that
God wants me to go. Now, who is
that life guard? That life guard is
Jesus Christ, sent by God down into the place where the problems are. So, number one, Jesus Christ saves us from the threat of a
life that would otherwise seem meaningless because there's no direction in our
lives. Jesus Christ saves us from
that. He saves us also from the
frantic need to say, "Well, we've got to find something for America to push
off from, because, I mean, my gosh, look at how bad-off we are! Look
at the tragic state that we seem to be in, the terrible hole that as a nation we
keep digging ourselves deeper and deeper into."
There can be a frantic "looking for something to push off from"
that God also saves us from when we realize: "Do you know what? If the life guard is here in the pool with me, then maybe I
don't need to find the side of the pool. Maybe
I can let the life guard find the side of the pool." Maybe my
assignment is not to save America from its silliness, right? Maybe my assignment is to let the life guard save me and the
rest of the nation along with me. Maybe
pushing off from the side in order to give me direction--though there's a place
for that--if it's driven by a frantic nervousness that, "If I don't do
this, I mean, all is lost!" That's
a sign that I don't have faith that God has already guaranteed that no, all
can't be lost. From the time that
the Son was sent into the world--from then until now and forever, we have a
guarantee that life will not be overcome, and swamped, and lost under the
meaninglessness of the random things that come our way.
And so I'm inviting us--Myself, I'm kind of disappointed that
our nation now two years later is not more different than it is.
And to the extent that any of you sort of share my disappointment, I'm
inviting us all to look again at the Word and say, "You know what?
The Word tells us that watersheds are very, very important.
And God gave us the one watershed that we need:
Jesus Christ." Let's pray. Dear
Heavenly Father, we ask that if we have questions, concerns, disappointments,
Lord, that you would guide us as we open your Word. That you would allow us to find in your Word the light, and
the release, and the grace that we need. And
it's in the strong name of Jesus that we pray.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Will
Eisenhower Interim Pastor Faith Presbyterian Church Minnetonka, Minnesota [Transcribed from an audiotape of the 9:00
a.m. worship service on September 7, 2003.] |
|
|