How could God have let such a thing happen? That was the question on all our minds that Sunday, five days after the events of September 11^th, 2001. How could God have let it happen? Four thousand, nine hundred, and seventy-two was the last count of the missing that I had seen. It was incomprehensible. It had no framework of reference, especially not for those of us born during or after World War II who had no memory of the war or of Auschwitz, or Dresden, or Hiroshima, or Nagasaki. It was the enormity, I think. Five thousand dead or missing and presumed dead, the numbers were beyond anything we’d ever known: death, the annihilation of life and the institutions of life happening all at once, within moments, really. Sure, we had known about death, but usually it had been gradual. It had never been easy, but usually it had been anticipated, at least a little. How do you cope when it happens all at once and indiscriminately, through no fault of the victims other than they happened to show up for work on time that day and were being faithful to their jobs?

 

How would we reconcile what had occurred with what we wanted to believe about the universe and creation and the order of things was the question I thought I needed to address. How do you reconcile what had occurred with our need to believe and to proclaim that there is a loving, benevolent God who, like a loving father and a good shepherd and a mighty warrior and a wise and courageous captain is in charge ultimately and guides and protects us all the days of our lives, sets tables before us in the presence of our enemies, leads us beside still waters, and restores our souls? How could it have happened? How could a good and hard-working people have been attacked and damaged so grievously?

 

Both the ancients and the modern had struggled with the question and were struggling with it that weekend, prophets and presidents and priests and bishops, rabbis, and Muslim clerics, cathedral deans and Baptist preacher-evangelists, even the folk heroes of American culture. Billy Graham; somebody asked him how could God have let the attack on the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and airline industry happen? How? Dr. Graham said truthfully he didn’t know.

 

Among the ancients, the author of the Book of Lamentations had struggled mightily with the question. A rabbi that Friday had quoted Lamentations. “The Lord will not reject forever. Although he causes grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone.” It was almost that, for Jeremiah or whoever was its author, that the Lord God, being in charge, not only permitted, but caused it to happen. The assurance was that ultimately the Lord God will have compassion; ultimately the Lord God will be a loving and benevolent father.

 

I guessed that might be comforting for some people, but I feared that for the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and sons and daughters and friends and colleagues and mates of 4,972 still missing and unaccounted for people it wasn’t enough. I could say it was too little for one who grieved that morning for his daughter whose best girlhood, high school, and college friend Mary had apparently lost her husband and now suddenly was a widow with a 3-year-old daughter and a new baby to come in just three weeks. Lamenations was small comfort when Mary Christine had been like a god-child who ate with your family at your supper table and vacationed with you and you loved her. It was small comfort for many of us that weekend and for many of you as well, I suspect.

 

Ecclesiastes, the ancient preacher, helped a little, but only a little:

 

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up...a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; (I appreciated the fact that during the service in the National Cathedral, the television commentators made no comment.); a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.” (Eccl. 3:1-8 NRSV)

 

It helped, but only a little. Well and good, perhaps. But all, according to the preacher, is a vanity, turns out: Small comfort, if any at all.

 

And, ancient Job: he also helped a little, but only a little. Job struggles with theodicy, with discovering, pleading, arguing in court-like style with the Lord God prosecutor who is also judge. How could the pain that we feel be understood, dear Lord? How could you have let it happen?

 

Then, out of the whirlwind, at last, came an answer: “Were you there, Job when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements -- surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? Are you God, Job, that you shall know what I know?” Of course not! Job wasn’t, I wasn’t, the people of Desert Palms Presbyterian Church weren’t God. It helped -- a little -- to have it come crashing in on us. We might get confused.

 

Of all the ancients, though, it was one that was lesser known that had helped me in my lifetime the most. The name we know him by is Habakkuk. We know only a little about him. He lived at the time of ancient Israel’s darkest hour. God’s people were divided. The people of the Northern Kingdom, by late in the seventh century, had already been devoured by the armies of Assyria. Tiny Judah, God’s remaining people huddled around Jerusalem, was led by a puppet king Hezekiah. They had been subjects of the Assyrians and now the Egyptians and soon would be conquered by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar. Hope had diminished considerably for God’s people as Habakkuk stepped to the pulpit to do his job. The vision of God as loving Lord and leader was extremely dim. It was as though the orchards had gone barren, the flock and the herds had died, and the vines of life no longer could produce.

 

And Habakkuk, too, lamented the Lord God’s non-involvement. I read what what he had said:

 

“How long, O Lord, shall I cry for help, and you will not listen, or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save? Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise...Why do you look on the treacherous, and are silent when the wicked swallow those more righteous than they?” (Hab. 1:2-3, 13b)

 

I offered the opinion that the same questions were echoing from the television sets of modern America that week and were going round and round in our own heads: “How long, O Lord?” Did we not need that Sunday a vision for the appointed time that was ours? And did we not also need to hear the prophet’s answer to his own question?

 

“Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails, and the fields yield no food; through the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and makes me tread upon the heights.” (Hab. 3:17-19)

 

I had first become aware of Habakkuk and interested in it some years before that when I read a small commentary on the book by Donald Gowan, professor of Old Testament at Pittsburgh Seminary, and one of my favorite teachers when I was a student there. Dr. Gowan had talked about his motivations for writing the book in the first chapter.

 

“While a graduate student at the University of Chicago Divinity School, I recalled the suggestion of one of my seminary professors at Dubuque Seminary for a text for a Thanksgiving Sermon. I was still serving the church in eastern Iowa where I had worked during seminary days,” Dr. Gowan writes, “and one Monday morning in mid-November as I rode the train to Chicago (and needing a Thanksgiving sermon in a few weeks) I remembered and re-read Habakkuk. ‘But when can you preach such a text?’ I thought. ‘Will it make sense to people who are healthy, secure, and comfortable? Or is that exactly when they need it? Would it seem a mockery to people in distress to be told they ought to rejoice?’

 

“I still hadn’t decided, when the train reached Chicago, whether I could preach on that text or not. But when I reached my room at the university there was word of a telephone call from one of the elders in my church. He had called to tell me that the young woman in the church whom I had been dating (and who is now my wife, he adds parenthetically, thankfully) had been critically injured in a head-on collision that morning.

 

“I took the next train back,” he writes, “not knowing whether she would be alive when I reached her, and on that return ride I read the book of Habakkuk again. It meant something different to me then. During the week that followed, I found that my distress was shared by everyone in the little community where we lived, for not only had my future wife been seriously injured but the man whose car collided with hers, a young father who lived on the same street, had been killed instantly. Two weeks later I preached a Thanksgiving sermon from Habakkuk, and it seemed to make sense.”

 

Tuesday evening, September 11, 2001, I got my Bible out and read Habakkuk again. It seemed to make sense to me as well. I offered what I read that night to the congregation the next Sunday morning as a palliative that might at least begin to permit us to consider the horror that we the people of the United States had experienced that week. I also offered one other thought, the thought given all Christians by St. Paul, who sums up his theology of resurrection at the end of the 8th chapter of the Book of Romans. Laureen already read it, but let me re-read the concluding paragraph:

 

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom. 8:34b-35, 37-39)

 

“Neither hardship nor distress, nor persecution, nor famine, nor nakedness, nor peril, nor sword!”  Ten years ago on a Sunday morning I declared we can rejoice in the Lord! Always! I declare it to you as well. Amen.