a public statement about public statements

It has been common, perhaps since the advent of print news media, for religious leaders to publish meditations or words of comfort or exhortations in response to national (or local) crises or on national (or local) commemorative days. As you may have noticed, I am not one such religious leader. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that I don’t really consider myself a “religious leader”; I am neither a pope nor a bishop nor a Martin Luther King, Jr., Billy Graham, or Barbara Brown Taylor. Secondly, the internet has democratized the practice of making public statements, so we are now, after every event and on every occasion, swimming in a cacophonous sea of pronouncements and meditations—some more insightful than others—clamoring to be heard. Do we really need more commentary?

But more to the point—as an Episcopal priest, my calling is first and foremost “to proclaim by word and deed the Gospel of Jesus Christ . . . to preach, to declare God’s forgiveness to penitent sinners, to pronounce God’s blessing” and to administer the sacraments (BCP 531). And the calendar of commemorative days that I am called to keep is issued not by the State, but found in the Book of Common Prayer.

To be sure, our liturgical calendar does include two national holidays: Independence Day and Thanksgiving. But is it really necessary for me to proclaim publicly how fortunate we are to live in the United States—how rare the freedoms and relative widespread prosperity that our nation enjoys are? And is it really necessary for me to point out the obvious fact that our nation is far from perfect, that throughout its history we have on numerous occasions failed to live up to our ideals?

Last Friday, the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey issued a message on the 25th anniversary of September 11th, and I commend it to you. If I were to offer my own statement, it would begin by acknowledging that the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 innocent Americans on 9/11 were horrific acts of evil, and that—as did the attack on Pearl Harbor—they completely changed the world as we knew it.

But what else can one say? The lectionary readings from this past Sunday contained Jesus’ command to forgive those who trespass against us—not seven times, but seventy-seven times, reminding us that we are to love and pray for not only our friends, but also our enemies. Does this include Al Qaeda? The Old Testament reading was the climax of the story of Joseph, giving us Joseph’s famous words to his brothers, who had sold him into slavery, “You intended it for evil, but God intended it for good.” It is the Christian hope that through Christ “all things work together for good”—that out of unimaginable evil, such as the murder of an innocent divine man on a cross, God can bring new life. But this hope doesn’t ease the pain of tragedy and atrocity or make them any less horrific.

From a Christian perspective, one of the purposes of solemn commemorative days is to remind us that the apocalypse is now, that every day, someone is experiencing their own world-changing 9/11. In other words, this very minute, somewhere, an innocent human being, created in the image of God, is being murdered—perhaps in a crime of passion or by a brutally oppressive government or in the ongoing wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and Myanmar.

And in response to this—in response to the realities of Auschwitz, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and all the mass killings that have taken place throughout human history—it is the Church’s mission to bring hope to this hurting, war-torn world. Which leads me to what I had initially intended to write about today: Why Church?

A very practical response would be that the Church is the last best hope for restoring some semblance of harmony in our deeply fractured society.

But to make social cohesion the ultimate end of our mission is to misunderstand the Gospel. Yes, our hope is that one day “the nations will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” But the establishment of peace on earth—“of each sitting under their own vines and their own fig trees”—is not the principal reason for which we were created. The shalom that we all long for is good and glorious. But for it to last, for it to be real, it must be a byproduct, a consequence of the fulfillment of our true purpose: which is to know God.

Therefore, the Church exists to be a living temple of God, the community in which the deepest longings of the human heart might be satisfied, where, together through word, sacrament, music, fellowship, and service we might “behold the beauty of the Lord” (Psalm 27:4) and “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8).

May we all live into this purpose.