Stories of Love (Proper 19C; 9/11 commemoration)

 

 

Stories of Love
Homily delivered the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

(Proper 19; Year C RCL)
11 September 2016

 8 a.m. Said Eucharist; 10:00 a.m. Sung Children’s Eucharist
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)
Readings: Exodus 32:7-14; Psalm 51:1-11; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

If you wanted to tell a story about how God loves us, what story would you tell?  How would you tell it?

The Gospel reading today has two stories Jesus told:  the shepherd who loves a lamb so much that he leaves 99 others to go and find the lost one, and a crazy old woman who gets so excited over finding a lost coin that she throws a party to celebrate.  The epistle reading has St. Paul tell us his personal story: about how mean and rotten he was, but then how Jesus came and set him right despite all the harm Paul had done.  

The Hebrew scripture tells such a story in a very different way.  The storyteller could have simply declared that God never abandons his people, and that no matter what, through thick or thin, God blesses and defends us.  But he knows that sometimes bad things happen to us, and that this feels sometimes like we’re being punished.  So he takes a very different path to tell his story about God’s love.

He tells a story where the children of Israel have committed a horrible thing and deserve to be punished.  They have shown how little they love God: they made a golden calf and worshiped it, saying that it, and not God, had blessed them.  They did this because they got tired of waiting on God when Moses was up on the mountain talking to him.  Instead of punishing them, God lets them be, and blesses them.  That’s how much God loves us. 

But the storyteller wants to show us how deep the love of God is, not just say that this is so.  So he weaves a tale where God gets angry and wants to destroy the people, since that is what they deserve, after all.  But then the prophet Moses talks God out of his anger and desire to wipe out the people. 

Now somewhere along the line, there may have been someone who heard this story or even repeated it who thought that God getting angry and murderous was a perfectly reasonable way of describing God.  After all, God is in charge of everything, right?  And bad things do happen to some people.  So maybe God is punishing them because of what they did.    And that’s how we sometimes treat each other, isn’t it?  We get angry and mean, and then hurt each other. 

But do you think that actually describes the heart of God?  Does it describe  someone who would go out in the desert to search for a single lamb, or who is so overjoyed at recovering a loss that she throws a party?   Do you really think that God is so mean and touchy that Moses had to talk him out of killing everybody?

No.  God’s anger here in this story is not a literal description of what happened.  It is a story-telling device to let us know how steady God is, how the heart of God is loving-kindness, no matter what.  The person who first told this story, and the person who put it in the Bible understood that God is love.  We are foolish if we take it as if it told the story just as it happened. 

If you wanted to tell a story about how God loves us, what story would you tell?

The story I want to tell today about God’s love comes from a horrible thing that happened fifteen years ago today: the terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania that used airplanes as bombs, killing about 3,000 people and injuring more than 6,000.   Fred Rogers, beloved as Mr. Rogers to my children, when asked how to talk to children about such horror, said this “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” 

Welles Crowther and his mother Allison in 1999; 

photo: The Wells Remy Crowther Charitable Trust

I think God loves us like the people who helped others in the Twin Towers in New York: helpers like 24-year-old Welles Crowther, who was at work on the 104^th floor of the South Tower of World Trade Center when United Flight 175 crashed into floors 78-84.  Most people above the explosion never found a way out of the building other than leaping to their deaths: the fire and smoke blocked all exits.  But Welles Crowther found a single stairwell down.  Instead of fleeing for his life, he went back, again and again, to find other people and help them out.  Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal this week, tells the story: 

“As Welles went down the stairwell he saw what happened on the 78th floor…   It was carnage—fire, smoke, bodies everywhere. A woman named Ling Young …  sat on the floor, badly burned and in shock. From out of the murk she heard a man’s voice: ‘I found the stairs. Follow me.’   ‘There was something she heard in the voice, an authority, compelling her to follow’... Ms. Young stood, and followed. She saw that the man was carrying a woman. Eighteen floors down the air began to clear. He gently placed the woman down and told them both to continue walking down. Then he turned and went back upstairs to help others. Judy Wein … had also been in the 78th floor. She too was badly injured and she too heard the voice: ‘Everyone who can stand now, stand now. If you can help others, do so.’  He guided her and others to the stairwell.  Apparently Welles kept leading people down from the top floors to the lower ones, where they could make their way out. Then he’d go up to find more. No one knows how many” (Peggy Noonan, “Remembering a hero 15 years after 9/11,” WSJ, Sept. 9, 2016).  His body was found six months later in the rubble of the lobby area where the fire fighters had set up a command center.  He had made it down, but stayed behind helping the firefighters still get others out until the building collapsed.
      

Noonan interviewed his mother for her article, asking her how you raise a hero.  She replied that they taught him responsibility and honesty, but that courage seemed to be part of his nature from his earliest childhood.  Noonan continues, “It wasn’t us, she was saying, it was him. It was Welles.” Then she concludes, “The way I see it, courage comes from love. There’s a big unseen current of love that hums through the world, and some plug into it more than others, more deeply and surely, and they get more power from it. And it fills them with courage. It makes everything possible.  People see the fallen, beat-up world around them and ask: What can I do? Maybe: Be like Welles Crowther.”

If you wanted to tell a story about how God loves us, what story would you tell?