Sermon for St. Paul’s Episcopal Church                                 Bishop Bill
                                       September 11, 2011

To All Who Are not with us, may it be with the attact on our Country or
whom is fighting for our Country since 911.
                                              
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.
I am honored to be with you at St. Paul’s on this tenth anniversary of 9/11.  
On my first visit here last March your beloved previous rector, Mother Susan
Keppy, asked me to be here for this service, and today I am happy to be able to
fulfill this promise, also as a way to pay tribute to your former rector, who is a
great priest and served you and this diocese so faithfully, and to whom we all
owe so much. Mother Susan asked me to be here today because she knew that
I had written a book about the response of the Episcopal Church to the terrorist
attacks that had happened at this very hour ten years ago.  I was in and out of
New York in the days and weeks following 9/11 and just a few days after the
attack I walked down to ground zero with Bishop Paul Moore, the former
Bishop of New York.  Bishop Moore who was a towering figure, a former
Marine who had won the purple heart in World War II, announced at every
check point, “I am the Bishop of New York, and this is my assistant Bill, and
our people are down there.” And with his Marine bearing, the military let us by
through ten check points.  He was not the bishop of New York, he was now
retired, I was certainly not his assistant, but they let us pass, and we arrived at
the Pile of Ground Zero, which was still burning, and knelt down in the dust by
that burning fire, and I will never forget that smell, and the dust all over, me the
dust certainly which contained the remains of those who perished, and I picked
up this piece of wall board that had been part of the Twin Towers, and I have
treasured it ever since, and here it is a relic of that day, and all that it meant to
me personally.

A few months later the current Bishop of New York, Mark Sisk, asked me to
write a book about the way our Episcopal Church responded to 9/11, and
because of that experience of kneelilng by the burning pile, literally in the dust
of humanity, we gave the title to my book, “Will the Dust Praise You,” and here
it is ten years later.

I think it is the right title because dust is the most pervasive image even ten years
later of this day. That is why I choose these scripture lessons for this day.  “Will
the Dust Praise you” is take from our psalm today, psalm 30.
Everybody I interviewed about the day talked about the dust—the white pallor of
dust, like the pallor of death everywhere, the sharp crunchy particles that blinded
the eyes and irritated the nose and throat, the depth of the dust around the feet as
one fled across the familiar cityscape, the dust clogging the organ pipes in Trinity
Church and St. Paul’s Chapel, so that those organs could never be used again,
and they had to be replaced.

Dust was the meaning of the disaster this day, for the twin towers, the proud
embodiment of all that modern civilization had to offer, were literally turned to
dust.  The steel and concrete skeleton, the latest in office machinery and
computer technology, and the men and women whose work and dreams had
made these towers a true center of world trade—all reduced to dust in one long
moment.  As the rector of Trinity Church, a block away, said in his first sermon
after the event, “The dust fell all over the world on 9/11.  Not one inch of this
earth is without dust.  Little villages all over the world, people, and nations,
religious groups of all traditions, all faiths----everybody is covered with the dust
of the World Trade Center.”

Ten years later as I stand here as our bishop, not as a frightened, distraught
“assistant” kneeling by a burning pile, I am reminded that one of the models for
me of what a bishop should be, Augustine of Hippo, a bishop who served in
North Africa, what is today Algeria, a millennium and a half ago, turned more
than once to our psalm today that gave hope to congregations faced with the
destruction of the Roman Empire, struck repeatedly by violent invasions of
Goths and Visigoths. Where was God, the Christians of North Africa asked their
bishop not ten years, ago but 1, 500 years ago, where Was God when the
Roman world into which Jesus himself had been born was collapsing all around
them.

Augustine grasped a handful of dust and lifted it before the eyes of his people, as
I am lifting before you right now this piece of the Twin Towers.  This dust has
been a symbol of death,”dust you are and to dust you shall return” we heard in
our first lesson this morning.  Yet Augustine proclaimed with mounting emotion,
because God has raised Jesus from the dead, the dust of the descendants of
Adam will live again.  Christ’s resurrection brings hope out of the depths of the
most radical terror. “Will the dust praise you?” to Augustine means that faith in
the resurrection allows the People of God to take a heroic stand even when all
seems lost. Augustine preached that God gives us the choice to look down into
the pit of despair or up into the heavens with praise.

How can we possibly praise God when we grieve, are weary, our tremble.
Because Jesus Christ is our companion in this way, and he has gone exactly
there first and triumphed and so shall we.  I close with what another preacher ,
Mother Barbara Crafton said, after she saw the towers fall about this faith, this
simple faith that at this hour still propels us forward as we worry about the
growth of this parish, this diocese, this stalled economy, our children’s future—
“I see a crude drawing of the Twin Towers, with smoke and debris coming up
in a cloud from them.  On the top of the cloud are all these little figures. They’re
dead.  And above all this—is Jesus with his arms open in a wide embrace.  It is
very crude.  Hopelessly sentimental.  But actually, it’s the truth!  Boom!  Right
to Heaven they went.  Immediate.  I think that people, because they need to, are
grasping at the openness of God’s love, a childish hope of Heaven.  My hope of
heaven is very childish. It doesn’t differ materially from that crude drawing.
For us, death looks like the end. But I think that, when so many people have
died all at once, we are forced to ask ourselves,”Well, is it really the end?” Or is
it a moment along a continuum, a widening of a life that actually goes on.
And so, they are more present with us now than they were when they were
here. So you dream of them.  You hear their song.  You see someone who
walks like them. A million things bring them back, never, at least in the early
years, without a dagger through your heart,, but also never increasingly without
gratitude that you had them at all, and without the suspicion that they are with us
in some way.
And to me, more and more the older I get, the closer I get to going over there
myself, the more evidence, satisfying only to me, I’ll admit, but evidence I see
that life goes on.  Not this life. And we might wish it were.  But life, nonetheless.  
I believe it more and more.
The event of the resurrection is full of mystery and misunderstandings. We
can’t encompass a thing like that in the world of experience. But we do know
death.  We can talk about death.  We hang back before the risen Christ because
we do not understand him and because our sorrow blinds us.  The dust of it gets
in our eyes and in our mouths and throats and all over us so that we even smell
like it.  Our protective gear doesn’t really protect us.  “We are unprotected and
unprotectable,” a man told me the other day, and he was right.  And we linger
over the drawing of Jesus sweeping up the dead in his arms of love, thousands
of them, all at once, longing for it to be true.  I think it is true. I know it is.  I
know it.

In the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Saint Paul's Episcopal Church of Lewiston
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