September 16, 2001
2nd Sunday of Domiontide (CoH season)
Year C
Title: Beauty AND Beast (Broadway Series—World Trade Center
Bombing)
Theme: The events of the last week have reminded us that we are a
mixture of incredible goodness and unspeakable horror. Self-
righteousness can make us all beasts—and send us into the wilderness
until we are brought back home.
The events of the last few days have been a horror show, events that I
know most of us thought could never happen has happened have
happened, haven’ they? I keep thinking that we as a nation will never be
the same, that life will never feel as secure for us as it once did, though I
think many of you here can relate to being robbed of your sense of
security when Timothy McVeigh walked away from a Ryder truck full of
explosives in downtown Oklahoma City some 6 years ago. I wasn’t here,
of course, but I do remember watching the events unfold on a television
set one morning when I was a seminary student in Atlanta. Moments like
the bombing here 6 years ago and the horror of the past few days have
become etched in our minds as markers of time—there is a before and
there is an after. Time becomes divided from now on—Tuesday was one
of those days for all of us, I think. We will now forever trade stories of
where we were and what we were doing when we found out what had
happened in New York, in Washington, D.C, and Pennsylvania. And I
think the question before us is not so much the question of “why,” though
I think that such a question is a very valid and worthwhile question, but
rather the question before us is the “what” question, the “what shall we
do with this moment, what can we learn about ourselves as humans in
light of this madness, this insanity?”
This week we had scheduled Beauty and the Beast as the musical that
would tie into our Scripture for this week, but week’s events have shifted
the focus, though I think the Scripture before us and the musical Beauty
and the Beast still have something to tell us, especially in light of what
has happened. The Scripture especially reminds us that we humans
really are a mixture of incredible beauty, that we are so valuable to God
that God will take the chance of losing more sheep for our sake, that she
will seek us until we are found, until we are home. We are so valuable in
God’s eyes that God takes chances with us, that God takes chances in
his pursuit of us. But the beginning of this passage reminds us of the
shadow side of human beings, the sinful side of human beings, that side
of us that wishes to so easily divide up the world between sinners and
saints, between those who are in and those who are out. And this desire
to divide up the world leads to the sin of self-righteousness, to this
arrogance that says that “I am in and you, you are out.” It is the sin of
the Pharisees, who have so quickly decided that the people Jesus was
talking to were beasts of this world and they, they were, in fact, the
beauty of God’s creation, the righteous ones. But the harsh reality is
that we really are a mixture of beauty, of goodness, and beast, of
shadows and sometimes evil. The Pharisees didn’t get it—they thought
they were beautiful—which, in fact, they were, but where the Pharisees
went wrong was to think they were ONLY beautiful. They failed to
recognize that they too were as ambiguous as the people they
condemned, that they too were a mixture, an ambiguous mixture of good
and evil, light and shadows, life and death. Self-righteousness, that
arrogance that we are only light and that we are free of shadows, that
arrogance makes us into beasts, makes us into Pharisees, makes us into
ugliness itself.
You know, self-righteousness makes us do horrible, horrible things. It
makes extremists think that somehow, someway, it is justifiable to take
planes full of people and plow them into buildings full of yet more
people. It makes extremists think that their cause is so just and the need
for attention so important that they are willing to kill mothers and fathers,
grandfathers and grandmothers, brothers and sisters, and children, our
children. Self-righteousness makes the Pharisees think that they are
righteous and these tax collectors are sinners, that these people, these
nasty people, are not even worth being welcomed by Jesus. Self-
righteousness makes the physically beautiful young prince in Beauty and
the Beast sneer at the ugly woman at his door, only to find that real
beauty was within rather than without. Self-righteousness divides up the
world between good and evil and yet it fails to recognize that deep
division within each of us. Self-righteousness divides up the world
between “us” and “them” and fails so miserably to see that such division
doesn’t exist, at least not in Jesus’ eyes.
In fact, Jesus, I think, tells a little story of how God pursues the lost, how
God will leave the “righteous” to find the lost. This is a story of how
much God loves us, but it also a story told with the express purpose of
slapping the face of the Pharisees, because I think Jesus is being a little
bit sarcastic here. I don’t think he really believes that the world is divided
up between righteous and unrighteous and that he thinks that the tax
collectors and sinners are the only ones who are lost and the Pharisees
are really the righteous ones. Rather, I think Jesus is being very
sarcastic here so that he can point to the fact that those who realize that
they are in need of grace, that those who know of their need to simply
say, “I am sorry,” both to God and to others, that they are the ones who
really get it. Jesus knows that these Pharisees need to repent as well,
especially of their arrogance, but, because of their self-righteousness,
they cannot recognize the beast within, and so for them it is so easy to
divide up the world between us and them, and because the world is so
easily divided up between us and them, they can do all sorts of things to
those they have decided who are evil, to those they have decided are
the “them” of this world. Certainly that is what the hijackers did on
Tuesday—they did not recognize the shadow side of themselves OR
their cause, whatever it was, and so they could find justification for
erasing the lives of others for their own self-righteous reasons. They
have failed to recognize their own need for grace, their own need for
healing, their own need for repentance, their own need for recognition
that the beast resides within each of us, and how it can make us do such
horrible, horrible things to each other. The truth is that the hands that
shoveled the bodies into the ovens at Auschwitz and Bergenbelsen
during the Nazi Holocaust were the same hands that tucked children into
their beds at night. It is a failure of self-recognition that causes hijackers
and Pharisees and even us, to do the horrible things that we do to each
other sometimes.
The scary thing for us right now is that we may, in our just outrage at this
horrible, horrible event, that we will fail to recognize that beast within and
we too will be overtaken by our own self-righteousness. I heard from the
lips of Colin Powell this week that it was time to do away with our policy of
worrying about “collateral damage” in our military retaliation to these
terrorists—collateral damage, in military terms, is the death and killing of
men, women, and children who are accidentally killed in a military action.
Actually, that is the same mentality that justifies what those terrorists did
on Tuesday—their self-righteousness justified the “collateral damage” of
those people in the Pentagon and in the World Trade Center in the war
they think they are fighting with us. What has made this country great is
that we do care about people—that “collateral damage” is not how we
refer to other human beings—or should ever refer to other human
beings. We must seek justice, not revenge, no matter how instinctual
that desire for revenge is, no matter how the beast within us feels
justified to treat our enemies the same way that we have been treated by
them. This past week an Islamic mosque in Dallas was attacked, and
one of the people who did this misguided act of revenge towards a
people who were not at fault, said that he hated Arabs and he always
had. Hate gathers a mob and attacks innocent people, saying self-
righteously, that whether or not they did it personally, they, they—
remember how self-righteousness divides up the world, us and them—
they must pay for it. It sure sounds exactly like the self-righteous
justification of the terrorists who did these monstrous deeds on Tuesday
morning, doesn’t it? The question is whether or not we will decide to
return beastly behavior with beastly behavior or whether we will choose
the path of Jesus and choose what is most beautiful about us as God’s
creation—which is that incredible capacity for justice and mercy at the
same time.
I also want to say that I think that this is one of most difficult moments in
the history of this country, and I think it will show forth the kind of people
we really are. We must bring the people who did this to justice, no
doubt—that is the righteous and just thing to do. But let’s not become
self-righteous, let’s not do what the Pharisees did in this passage, when
they failed to recognize the beast within, when they failed to recognize
their own capacity to do such horrible acts of hate and destruction.
When we choose to be a people of beauty, when we choose to be a
people of love—yes, yes, an incredible thing to say at this moment—we
break that endless cycle of hate and retribution, something the people of
the Middle East have spent hundreds of years experiencing and
suffering from, when we choose love and not revenge, when we choose
justice and not vengeance, we can transform the world. And I also don’t
want us to ever forget that we are also good, that we as God’s creation
are capable of incredible, incredible beauty and goodness. You see that
in the people’s reaction and their willingness to help in anyway after this
horrific series of events—and you saw that goodness here 6 years ago
during the aftermath of the Murrah bombing. You know, Jesus in this
passage reminds us that we are worth so much, even in our ambiguity,
even in our personal mixture of good and evil, and that we are worth
taking a huge chance on, both on a cross, and as a single sheep
valuable enough to take the chance of leaving 99 others unattended so
that we can be found, so that we can come home again to our tribe, to
the other 99. If we want to be righteous, if we want to be truly good
people, we must recognize who we really are—our beauty, our incredible
beauty, and we must be able to recognize the shadows, the deep
shadows within us, that make do horrible, brutal things to each other.
The good news is that God has seen our hearts, our ambiguous,
tortured hearts and said that all of us, ALL of us, are worth taking a
chance on. Amen and amen.
