Celebrating Unity: A 9-11 Sermon

​Thank you, Chief, for the invitation to be part of this celebration again this year.
Thanks to all of you who are here.
Thanks especially to you first responders
for your brave and faithful work every day of the year.
And thanks to any veterans here for your service to our nation.
 
This is a day for people like me,
who benefit so much from all that you do,
to express our gratitude.
That may be the most important thing I say this morning.
 
I’d like to begin with a prayer:
Gracious God, we remember before you with grateful hearts
the men and women who venture much for the life and liberties we enjoy.
We commend to your gracious care and keeping
all those who encounter danger as they work to keep us safe,
both at home and abroad.
 
Help us, inspired by their example,
to see your presence even in those who differ most from us,
and fashion us into one united people
committed to each other in truth and in justice.
In your name we pray. Amen.
 
Last week, my wife and I were blessed
with a visit from our twenty-seven-year-old son.
He lives in Chicago, so we don’t get to see him very often.
 
With this ceremony in mind, I took the opportunity to ask him
if he remembers the day of the terrorist attacks.
He was four at the time, so it was just possible,
but he told me he did not.
 
He told me his earliest memory of 9-11 comes from a year or so later,
when a friend showed him a children’s book about what happened.
He remembers that conversation,
not the day itself or anything my wife or I said to him about it.
That was a little humbling for this father to hear!
 
Because he does not remember 9-11, my son will never know,
I mean know on the inside,
what that day felt like,
or the days that immediately followed it:
the gradually unfolding horror;
our grief for the victims;
our anger at the perpetrators;
our gratitude to those who responded so heroically;
our wounded but shared pride in our nation.
 
My son didn’t feel any of that on 9-11.
For my son, September 11 is more of a day from history
than a day he lived through.
For him, September 11 is a little bit like Pearl Harbor is for me.
 
But, of course, my son knows what happened that day and that month.
So, I asked him what 9-11 means to him now,
as an adult more than twenty years later?
What this day means to him and to the people he knows who are his age.
It took my son a minute to come up with an answer.
But after a minute, my son said that to him, 9-11 stands for national unity.
 
My son grieves the victims, as we all should.
But for him, more than any other single thing,
9-11 was a time when, at least for a while,
people were Americans first
and whatever else they might be second.
People might be rural or urban, southern or northern,
rich or poor, Black or white, old or young,
liberal or conservative, or whatever else might divide us,
and yet we all came together, for a little while, after 9-11.
 
I asked my son if he could think of any time in his memory
when we as a nation were comparably united.
Unfortunately, he could not.
Neither could I.
That is a shame.
 
 
Whatever else it may be, I have come to think of this day
as a time to celebrate the national unity we felt in 2001,
and to commit ourselves once again to the ideal
of one nation, under God, indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
 
The fact that we are so divided right now
makes celebrations like this one more important than ever.
Now more than ever, we need to remember
that we are all in this together,
that we need each other,
that we are supposed to be the United States.
 
My wife and I had this conversation about 9-11 with our son at the end of his visit,
on the way to dropping him at the Hartford airport.
But that wasn’t the end of the story.
 
On our way back home, my wife and I were startled to notice a car on fire
across the highway on the shoulder of I-91.
 
We worried about the driver, who was nowhere to be seen,
and about what might happen if the fire weren’t put out quickly.
 
Two minutes later, we were relieved to see a firetruck hurrying to the rescue,
and we breathed a sigh of relief.
Once we knew the firefighters were on it,
we assumed everything would be OK.
 
We took a moment to give thanks for the first responders
who do so much to keep all of us safe.
And we prayed for their safety, too.
 
In that moment, watching the fire truck drive by,
I also experienced a little surge of hope.
 
When the fire department received a call about the car on fire,
I am guessing they didn’t waste a lot of time
learning details about the driver,
who he was, where he came from, what his politics were.
They just responded to a human being in need.
 
And I realized that, despite the many divisions which beset us as a nation,
First Responders carry forward the spirit of unity
I have come to associate with 9-11.
You continue to respond to people
with courage, compassion, and self-sacrifice,
no matter who they are.
 
And so I say again, thank you all for what you do,
and also, even more, for the spirit in which you do it.
My prayer is that we can all learn from you
the values of self-sacrifice,
of commitment to the common good,
and of generous love for our neighbors.
 
Let us pray:
Grant, O God, that your holy and life-giving Spirit may so move every human heart, and especially the hearts of the people of this land, that barriers which divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace. In your name we pray. Amen.