God and Terrorism

a talk by Jon Schaff, a man about town

There is a story of a Canadian professor of political science who was very anti-American in his outlook.  During the cold war he was discussing in class his opinion that someday there would be nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States and both countries would be obliterated.  A student raises his hand and says, “Professor, you sound very pessimistic.”  The professor said, “That is because you don’t know the difference between pessimism and optimism.  A pessimist thinks things always happen for the worse.   An optimist thinks things happen for the best.  When I say the Soviet Union and the United States will be obliterated, I am being an optimist.”  Well we can share this professor’s analysis of pessimism and optimism without necessarily agreeing with his application of it.  When we consider the obliteration of the World Trade Centers and the more than 4,000 people who died on Sept. 11 as the result of a terrorist attack on our country we can be either a pessimist or an optimist.  Since hope is one of the great Christian virtues, it seems to me that optimism is almost always in order.  When we optimists think about how terrorism works in God’s plan, we don’t need to conclude that God wanted this attack to happen, or that he desired innocent people to suffer and die and the rest of us to live with the aftermath.  And like all bad things that happen, we don’t have to like it, but we do have to recognize that God has a plan.  And we Christians can apply our principles to the events of Sept. 11 and learn from it.  And in fact we must.  It is easy, especially for my fellow political scientists, to get bogged down in the worldly aspects of the event and me.  Who is to blame?  What will our military do to respond?  How is the war effort going?  How will the president react?  What new laws need to be passed?  How will this effect our economy?  And 24-hour news makes a constant drumbeat of these questions until we say “Bill O’Reily will you please shut up!”  These are important questions, and as citizens, not subjects, it would be wise for us to pay attention to these things.  But as people of faith we also need to ask, what does God want me to learn from this?  What is a Christian response to the attacks on our country?  Given the horror has occurred, what good does God want me to take from this? 

For instance, we need to take renewed appreciation for the presence of sin and evil in our world.  I don’t mean misguided people.  I don’t mean psychotic people.  I mean evil people.  I mean people who have the choice of life and death put before them and knowingly choose death.  We have whole academic majors dedicated to explaining how nothing is ever anybody’s fault, but Christians should know better. Christ recognized the presence of sin in the world and so must we.  Christians cannot be sentimental about the world.  It is true, God made the heavens and the earth, night and day, and it was good.  He created the sea and the land, and it was good.  He created plants, and animals, he made us in his image, and it was all good.  But for God to be God, he had to create a being with free will.  Not too far into the future we humans will be able to create robots that follow our every direction, do what ever we say, when we come home at night the robot could be programmed to say, “ I exalt you oh magnificent one.  I worship your very being.”  But God knew that in order for our love of him to be real love, it must be freely given, not programmed.  So he gave us the freedom to choose him or not to choose him.  Of course, over and over we choose against God.   And, again, given the sinfulness of man we cannot afford to be sentimental about the world.  Evil exists and we cannot be passive in its presence.  It is a paradox, but peace sometimes requires aggressive force.  As one source puts it: Peace is not merely the absence of war, and it is not limited to maintaining a balance of powers between adversaries.  Peace cannot be attained on earth without safeguarding the goods of persons, free communication amongst men, respect for the dignity of persons and peoples, and the assiduous practice of fraternity.  What this means, I think, is that if we live in constant fear for our personal security or the security of our loved ones, can that be called peace, even though there are no actual hostilities.  Would our lives be tranquil if we constantly worried about hijacking of airplanes?  Peace, unfortunately, often requires the threat and use of force. Governments, like people, cannot be denied the right to just self-defense.  In 1928 most countries of the world signed on to the Kellog-Briand act, which was an international agreement to end war.  So naturally we have had no war since then, correct?  Good intentioned pieces of paper don’t get you peace.  As political humorist P.J. O’Rourke opined, the US Marine Corp has done much more for world peace that all the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream ever sold. 

From human sin we get the problem of human suffering.  In a Simpson’s Halloween episode a few years back, Lisa Simpson creates a new world in a petrie dish for her science fair experiment.  She ultimately gets shrunk and transported into the petrie dish world where she is worshiped as their god, their creator.  They ask her to answer questions that have plagued mankind for centuries, such as, “God, why am I so fat” and similar things.  It does not take long for someone to ask, “God, why do bad things happen to good people.”  Christian writer Malcolm Muggeridge tells a story…

As an old man Muggeridge wrote that the one thing he had learned in his long and adventurous life is that the only true knowledge comes from suffering.  Think of your school studies.  It sometimes is hard, painful work.  You get tired, frustrated, cranky.  Well few things valuable in life come without suffering.  I have college friends who have spent time in Kenya and Guatemala, and one impression they have of those poor countries is how strong of believers the people are.  Meanwhile, it is in the prosperous America and Europe where regular worship is low and, especially in Europe, religious belief is considered a characteristic of the weak and stupid and the backward.  It seems that there is something about suffering which brings us closer to God.  It is in our times of trial that we turn God most sincerely. And what is remarkable about our God is that he freely chose to suffer just like us.  When Christ was mocked on the cross and the soldiers said, “If you are really the Son of God free yourself,” does anyone doubt that if he really wanted to, Christ could have done it?  Just as when the devil tempted him to jump of the temple and let the angels save him, do you doubt Christ could have done this.  But he said no. And was Christ happy to suffer?  “Let this cup pass from me,” he said in the Garden.  From the cross itself he cried, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?”  God has taken solidarity with us in our suffering.  And look at the human love that has been the result of the suffering of Sept. 11.  The firemen and policemen, who proved that “no greater love has a man than to lay down his life for another.”  In the midst of the worst of humanity, the wanton killing of thousands of innocents, comes the vision of the greatest heroism of humanity.  As many have remarked, while thousands ran out of the towering infernos, the police and firemen ran in.  In the aftermath of the tragedy the nation has seen an overwhelming display of charity and love.  Before the National Press Club a few weeks ago, the first lady, Laura Bush, told this story: During the World Trade Center survivors’ memorial service at Ground Zero, Rabbi Joseph Potasnik shared a story with the mourners. He said that a few hours earlier he’d received a phone call from a woman who was going to give birth very soon. She said she wanted to name her child after a WTC victim who didn’t have a child. Before she hung up, she made a promise to the Rabbi. She said, “I promise that I will try to have more children because I know there are so many more names.”  Here’s a woman unconcerned about “overpopulation,” one of the great life hating lies of our time.  Perhaps the one outcome of the terrorist attack is a renewed appreciation for human life.  Pregnancies are up.  I don’t know how people know this, but I see it on the news all the time.  Marriages are up.  Divorce is down.  Church attendance is up.  Why is this?  Perhaps faced with the picture of terrorism and uncertainty people are becoming more serious in their lives.  How many of you have had this experience?  Your watching television.  Some show comes on and it has some extremely racy or violent context to it.  And you go, “Why do people make these shows?”  In the wake of Sept. 11, couldn’t these people put together a show a bit more serious, a bit more edifying, a bit more about the best of humanity, as opposed to the most vulgar and base?  I don’t watch a lot of television shows, the Simpsons being an exception, but I watch a lot of sports and movies.  And so I do see a lot of commercials for shows.  You’d be amazed how an unhip geek like me can stay hip to popular culture just by watching commercials for upcoming TV shows.  Or by watching MTV for 10 seconds while power flipping in a break from a Gopher hockey game on Fox sports.  Well I am watching the Vikings lose yet another game on Sunday, and they played on Fox network, a network that has a fabulously low regard for decency.  I see an ad for the show Boston Public over and over.  Now I have never seen this show, but by watching the Vikings on Fox all the time I know a lot about it.  The show this week was about a young student at the high school who has sex with an older man, thus statutory rape.  What is the position of the show: laws against statutory rape are old fashioned and bigoted.  It is made clear in this 30 second commercial that hey, they really loved each other, so what’s the problem.  The real problem is with the girl’s father, who thinks his high school age daughter having an affair with an older man might be problematic.  And so one of the hero teachers steps in to defend the girl against her narrow minded father.  Now, this whole scenario is problematic, but that would be the subject of another time, but I saw this commercial and just thought, “how do these people sleep at night.”  I think in the wake of the attacks on our country people are becoming more morally serious.  I hope shows like Boston Public go right into the toilet, of course in one sense they’re already there, but that’s just a bad pun.  For the last 30 years at least, our elites have taught us a quite toddler like view of freedom, that is the highest use of our freedom is the freedom to say naughty words and show our genitals in public.  But what does the sudden death of over 4,000 innocent people tell us but that perhaps the time for frivolity is over.  I know how the youth of America is just crazy about bluegrass music, I see it on MTV all the time, so let me work it in here.  If you don’t own Ricky Skagg’s Grammy winning bluegrass Gospel album “Soldier of the Cross,” go out and get it.  On this album he sings a great old Louvin Brother’s song “Are you afraid to die.” Before the song kicks in he has a recording of Billy Graham.  I can’t do Billy Graham’s voice, and I could listen to that beautiful South Carolina accent all day, but Billy Graham says this: “I believe the time for everyone to be born or die is in God’s hands.  If it is my time to die, I’m prepared.  I don’t know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future. I was asked by somebody today, are you absolutely sure you are going to heaven, and I said I am absolutely sure. Not because of anything I’ve done, I’ve sinned.  I am going to heaven because of what Christ did on that cross. And the fact that God raised him from the dead.  What about you?  Is there a doubt in your heart if you died at this moment you’d go to heaven?  Now is the accepted time, today is the day of salvation, come while you can.”

How many of the victims of Sept. 11 got up that day and thought that their lives would end that day?  Hopefully before they died they turn their minds to God and asked for forgiveness.  We know that the last words heard from the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania were the Lord’s Prayer, followed by “Ok guys, let’s roll.”  You know when you go to church on a weekly basis sermons can run into one another.  But sometimes we hear one that sticks with us.  When I was about 11, one Sunday we had the same reading that we just had this past Sunday: You do not know the hour?  When you least expect it?  Thief in the night?  I remember Father Sheehan asking at the very end of that sermon, “When do you least expect Christ to come?”  I thought about that.  And I thought, “Well, right now. Right now is when I least expect it.”  Scared the heck out of me.  I had always thought of the coming of Christ as something that happens “sometime then, in the future.”  Since then I have thought that the point of that piece of Scripture is that Christ is here now.  In high school my theology teacher said you could pare the message of the Gospel down to ten words.  “Reform your lives, the kingdom of God is at hand.”  I saw the other day a thing on TV, again while power flipping during a sports commercial break, of someone saying that this, that, and the other world event shows that the coming of Christ is near.  I thought, first, Christ says you won’t know the hour, so how do you think you can predict it.  But second, I think the point is that Christ is alive, now.  Reform your lives because he might be calling you anytime.  Those people who worked at the WTC or Pentagon went to work likely with the last thing on their minds being called home that day.  Another reading from this past weekend hit me because the phrase “but on the armor of light” is on the seal of my alma mater, St. John’s University in MN.  The time for Christ is now.  Every act of love, such as the heroic love of those policemen and firemen at the WTC, is evidence of his presence in the world.  The time for reform is now.  As Billy Graham says, today is the day of salvation.  I want to close by reading the last two paragraphs of Malcolm Muggeridge’s great book, Jesus the Man who lives, which is unfortunately out of print.  But I believe in miracles, so you never know. 

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