Remembering September 11 09/10/2011

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September 2011...
 
I had resigned my teaching position the previous spring as my new wife and I were making plans to move to the Philippines.  I had taken part-time positions at our Kuna branch as their worship director and also at a local Indian restaurant where I mostly made sure the lunch buffet was operating smoothly and enjoyed a free lunch on the days I worked.
 
On September 11 I had the day off.  It was morning and my wife of 8.5 months had already left for her job as 4th grade teacher at Shadowhills Elementary in Boise, Idaho.  Sitting down to begin working on some assignments for a distance learning class I was taking through Fuller Theological Seminary -- Introduction to Islam -- I decided to turn on the TV.  What I saw was a large building with billows of smoke spewing from it.  I listened for awhile and the commentators mentioned that a plane had flown in to the building, but they seemed quite confused about the details.  Just as I was about to turn the channel all of the sudden right there on live television a second passenger jet flew into the World Trade Center in New York City. 
 
I saw it.  You saw it.  It changed us.
 
The Indian Sihk cook at the Indian Restaurant was beaten up on his way home because he wore a turban on his head.  Our ignorance as a nation was on full display.  But what disturbed me most was the attitude displayed by friends in the church--those who claimed to know the "amazing grace" of God and live according to the teachings of the Word of God and, more particularly, the teachings of Christ.
 
Love your Neighbor...
Pray for those who persecute you...
Return evil with good...
 
You get the picture.  I was wanting to send out a September 11 email but then got way too busy to get it done.  Then this morning--September 10th in Asia--I read this article and decided to sit down and send this message.  I hope you'll read it and think about it as you remember September 11th on this 10th anniversary.  Let me summarize briefly from the article the four ways that we can remember:
  
1. Historical remembrance--This is an important form of remembering that "places the event in context and refuses to easy labeling of one party or another as good or evil, or of thinking that this was an event that 'changed the world' when in actuality it only gave us Americans a reality check about the suffering going on throughout the world on a daily basis.
 
2.  Cultural remembrance--This is where we who share cultural and national identity remember those who were victims.  This can be appropriate as well when accomplished through humility and prayer and being mindful of the rhetoric coming from various places in society that might require us to contradict our identity in Christ and the attitude we are to have as his disciples.
 
3.  Relational remembrance--This is the memory of specific people that we knew, families that suffered and the personal and emotional connection we had to the event.  This is Job's friends sitting with him in silence as he mourns the loss of his children.
 
4.  Delightful remembrance-- This is a "deliberate remembrance of the evil of the event...not a remembrance of delight--rather a perversely enjoyable remembrance of an evil done to us, remembered because it nurses our contempt for the perpetrators and simultaneously infuses us with a sense of mission, namely the perpetrator's destruction and our own triumph over them."  This is the form of remembrance that makes us forget to pray for our enemies--for their welfare and spiritual condition and not about their eternal damnation.  We easily forget that Christ spilled his blood for them, saying, "Father forgive them..."
 
This form of remembering is sin.
 
Regardless of what we've been told by our news media, by the multitudes of books that have been published, by well-meaning friends and by pastors from their pulpit (or on television for a select few of our Christian religious leaders), one things in certain--God loves our Muslim Neighbors!  They are so much closer to us that you might ever know or imagine. 
 
Let's remember together.  Let's cry together.  Let's pray together--for our nation, that we would turn back to God and become Christlike disciples in our own nation and throughout the world; and for our Muslim Neighbors around the world, that they, too, would better understand and know the Messiah that is introduced to them in their own Book and seek to follow him.  May the day come when we walk this road together.
 
Do Everything In Love...

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