“Picking
Up The Pieces”
Romans 13:8-14
September 8, 2002
St. Paul United Methodist Church
September 8, 2002
I do not know if the story that came
across my desk is true or not, but I suspect that it is. It is the story of a four year old boy who
loved to go to Vacation Bible School.
He loved to come to the Sanctuary as the children were gathering and to
sing the songs of the faith like, “Father Abraham” He loved to do the motions
that accompany that song. He also loved
to sing the “Hallelujah”song. He loved
to sing “Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah” while the rest of the children
sang, “Praise ye the Lord.” Actually
you do not sing that song. Generally
you shout the words of that song. The
four year old loved doing that. He
enjoyed going to the Bible story room
where he heard stories about Joshua, Moses, Jonah, Jesus, Paul, and Peter. He loved going to the snack room because
there he could eat cookies at 9:30 in the morning. His mother would never let him do that at home. But of all the rooms that he went to, his
favorite one was the arts and crafts room.
On the first day, the volunteer in that class said, “We are going to
make something everyday. But, we will
make a clay pot and you will work on it everyday. On Friday, you can take it home.
We will mold and shape the pot.
On Thursday afternoon, we will put
the pots in a kiln and fire them.
Friday morning, the pot will be ready to take home. The boy was excited about the project. He was so anxious to work on it. Everyday he would work on it. He would mold and shape it. He was so proud. And everyday at noon, when his mother picked him up, he would
say, “Mama, on Friday I am going to give you the best present in the history of
the world.” Some four year olds are
good at keeping secrets. He was not
good at that, but he had kept this secret all week long. Everyday he went to Vacation Bible School,
he sang the songs, heard the lesson, ate his snack, had recreation time, and
worked on the pot. And everyday at
noon, he exclaimed, “Mama, on Friday I am going to give you the best present in
the history of the world!”
On Friday morning, he arrived at
church. He sang the songs, he heard the
story, he ate the snack, he had fun in the gym. His last stop that morning was in the arts and crafts room. He reached for the pictures that he had
drawn and colored and he put them in his right hand. In his left hand, he put the prized pot. It was the most gorgeous piece of pottery
ever known to mankind. He was so
anxious to give it to his mother. He
ran outside the craft room. Did you
hear me say the word “run?” Some four
year olds are good at running. Some are
not. He was not! He tripped over his own feet. If you were there, you would have seen in
his right hand, all these papers and all these things that he had painted rise
to the heavens. They were flying in the
air. If you were there, you would have
seen the pot fly out of his left hand.
He lunged for the pot, but he could not catch it. It was just out of his reach and when it hit
the hard, tiled floor, it smashed into hundreds of pieces. Do you know what happens when a four year
old boy whose gift for his mother smashes on the floor? He cried.
He cried so hard that he could not catch his breath. The teachers came and tried to console
him. They said, “It is alright, it’s
okay, it was just a pot.” You don’t
tell a four year old who had made something for his mother that it’s just a
pot. Another volunteer said, “It’s
alright, it was nothing.” You don’t
tell a four year old that it was nothing.
A well meaning volunteer said, “It’s okay, we can make another
one.” It was three minutes until
noon. His mother would be there in
three minutes. She would be expecting
the best present in the history of the world.
There was not time to make another one.
His mother finally got there.
She arrived on the scene and saw what had happened. She ran to her son. She got on the floor with him and she held
him. She let him cry for a few minutes
and then she said, “Son, let’s gather up all these pieces, take them home, and
see what we can make of this.” And that
is what they did.
Could it be that it has been a year
since what was in front of us was not a pot in a thousand pieces, but buildings
in millions of pieces, and lives in thousands of pieces? My daughter will not remember September 11,
2001. She will read about it in her
history books. By the way, history
books produced this year already have the story of September 11, 2001 in them.
What I want us to think about this morning is what it means for us to pick up
the pieces of September 11th.
My guess is that you can remember where you were, who you were with, and
what you were doing when you heard the news of the terrorist attacks. In the days that followed, one of the things
that I did was to watch CNN for the latest information. I turned on my television one evening and
CNN was airing a worship service from a cathedral in Washington, D.C. There, standing in the pulpit was the Rev.
Billy Graham, one of my heroes of the faith.
I thought to myself, “Yes!” I
got a pen and a pad. I knew that I
would be preaching in a few days. I
knew that Billy Graham would have inspirational words. I knew that he would have an answer to the
questions that everyone was asking.
Billy stood in the pulpit and he said, “The whole nation, the world, is
asking the question of why this happened.”
I was ready. My pen was there; I
had a backup pen just in case I ran out of ink. Billy Graham said in front of everybody, “I don’t know why this
happened.” I don’t know, Billy Graham? You don’t know? And if Billy Graham doesn’t know then I am sure that I do not
know either.
Not long ago, I attended a funeral
for a friend of mine who died suddenly.
A friend of mine performed the service.
Both he and I had known this man for some time. While they planned the service, the man’s
wife said, “My husband died so suddenly and I just want to know why?” Why, not as in, “What was the cause of
death?” But why as in “Why now?” In the
funeral service, the preacher stood up, and said, “The question of ‘why?’ is an
appropriate question to ask this morning; we all ask it so many times. But this morning I want us to ask the
question of, ‘what now?’” As in, what
do we do now? Given that the
anniversary of September 11th is only three days away now, I want us
to ask the “What now?” question of us
all. As in, “What do we do now?”
I want you to know that for weeks I
have struggled with what to preach this morning. I thought, “What do we say?
What scripture lesson do we use?”
Bryan Gray and I talked about a lot of possibilities. Last year, following the tragedy, CNN and
other networks interviewed family members who were looking for loved ones. In each of the interviews, the family
members held up pictures and said that if anyone had seen their family member
to please call the number of the pamphlet.
Did you see those interviews?
Did you see the faces of those who were missing? I was so touched by those, that if I had
preached last year on the Sunday following the eleventh, I would have found a way to shoot those images on a
screen. CNN replayed some of those
interviews yesterday and I watched them again.
The suggested lectionary lesson for that Sunday was the fifteenth
chapter of Luke’s gospel where Jesus talks about things that are lost. He begins by talking about a lost sheep,
then he talks about a lost coin.
Finally, there is the great story of a son who is lost. If I had preached on the Sunday after
September the eleventh, last year, I would have said that no one is lost to
God. No one! And then Tuesday, I said, “Bryan, what do you think about
Sunday’s epistle lesson as the main one to use? After reading it together, Bryan said that I had to use these
words of Paul. I did not want to. Do you know why? Because Paul says, “That above all the commandments, above all
the things we do, love is the greatest.”
And he says that “love does no wrong to a neighbor.” I thought, “Are you kidding me! Love does no wrong to a neighbor?” In New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania,
that day was all about wrong that was done to neighbors. That day was about hate and evil and yet I
am supposed to say something about love?”
Well, what happened after the
buildings were bombed was love. Did you
notice that? People responded in love
and they did great things. Paul says,
“Owe no one anything, but to love one another.” The leaders of Paul’s days, as Liz alluded to a few minutes ago,
starting with the Ten Commandments, made the commandments hundreds of
rules. These leaders wanted to make
sure that all of the circumstances that people find themselves in were
covered. But Paul approached the
commandments from another venue. Paul
said, “Love is the greatest commandment of all.” Then the apostle turns and says, “Do you know what time it
is? The day of your salvation is closer
today than it has been before. Those
who worked in the World Trade Center towers, those who worked at the Pentagon,
and those who boarded airplanes did not know that their day of salvation was so
close. The truth is that our salvation
is close. That makes perfect
sense. And Paul says because it is we
ought to live a certain way. He says
that the light is dawning. Are any of
you up when the sun comes up? I try not
to be. But when the sun comes up, it is
a wonderful thing. When the sun comes
up, it is a wonderful thing, and we are different. We take off the night things and put on the day things. Paul says that we are to live honorably, as
in the day, not in the way that some act in the night. We are to live honorably in the day. Paul says that we are to put on light. Paul says that we are to live in this great
way. John, the gospel writer, has a
wonderful first chapter. There we find
these words, “In Him was life, and the light shines in the darkness and the
darkness does not overcome it.” Let us
then lay aside the works of darkness and turn over the armor of light. Let us live honorably in the day. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, says
Paul. How did the words of the hymn
that we opened with today put it? “Goodness is stronger than evil, love is
stronger than hate. Light is stronger
than darkness.”
Now my question this morning, what I
want you to go home with is simply this.
How are we supposed to live in these days? In light of what we know, what we have experienced, in light of
our anguish and our pain in watching the events of September the eleventh, how
are we to live? On my computer Friday,
my home page had a link where you could see the faces of those who died in the
hours following the terrorist attacks.
You could also see the video of the second plane hitting the second
tower. I cannot seem to get that image
of the second plane going through that building out of my mind. I watched it again three or four times on
Friday. Now, how are we supposed to
live a year later?
I want to be very practical today
and offer you three things. The first
is this, what we can do is to be together.
One of the first things that happened on September 11 was that my wife called me. She was home sick and she said, “I am going to get Annie
Grace!” Annie was at daycare. Susie wanted all of us to be together. On the evening of September 11, 2001,
churches, like this one, gathered for worship.
In part, they worshiped because they wanted answers from preachers like
me. In part, they wanted to be together
because they felt safety in being together.
A widow buried her husband on a Friday.
On Sunday morning, she was back in church. The preacher saw her coming and said, “I didn’t expect to see you
today.” She said, “Where else would I
be? Today I need the church more than
ever.” We need to be together. That is the first thing that I want you to
hear this morning.
The second thing is this. Something that we can do is to pray. Go to a web site or two today and see the
faces of those who died a year ago.
Each picture represents a family.
For some, more than one family member died. Think about these people and now their families as the struggle
with the anniversary date of their loved one’s death. What we can do is to pray.
On Wednesday, in this sanctuary, we are going to offer you the chance to
pray. I want you to come and to pray at
the altar. There will not be a worship service. But on the altar, there will be a prayer that I hope will guide
your thoughts. Please feel free to take
the prayer home. If you want to be here
at the minute that the first plane hit a World Trade Center tower, then I
believe that that time is 7:45 a.m.
Please come and pray.
Finally, let me say this. I think that the world has been different
since September the eleventh. I think
people have been nicer. Do you know
that hate crimes in New York City are down significantly since this time last
year? Do you know that people are
acting differently? Max Lucado is one
of my favorite authors. He wrote these
words after September 11: “Four
thousand gathered for mid-day prayer in a downtown church. A New York City church filled and emptied
six times last Tuesday. People stood in
lines to give blood, in hospitals to treat the sick, in sanctuaries to
pray. America was different this
week. We wept for people we did not
know. We sent money to families that we
have never seen. Talk show hosts read
scriptures. Journalists printed prayers. Our focus shifted from box scores to
orphans. We were different this
week. Hands are out. Knees are bent. This is not normal. And I
have to ask the question, “Do we want to go back to normal?” Are we being given a glimpse of a new way of
life? Could this unselfish
prayerfulness be the way God intended for us to live all along? Maybe this, in His eyes, is the way we are
called to live. And perhaps the best
response to this tragedy is to refuse to go back to normal. Perhaps the best response is to follow the
example of Tom Burnet, a passenger on flight #93. Minutes before his plane crashed in the fields of Pennsylvania,
he reached his wife by cellular phone. ‘We're all going to die,’ he told her,
‘but there are three of us who are going to do something about it.” Now we can do something about it. We can resolve to care more. The kingdom of God is at hand; do you know
what time it is? We can resolve to care
more, to share more, to pray more, to live as people of light.
Do me a favor. Go back to the halls of the church where the
four year old boy is. Reach down to
him. Pull him to yourself. Pretend he is your son or your
daughter. Hug him. And say, “Let’s pick up the pieces, and see
what we can make of this.” In your
minds and in your hearts this week, think about other for whom they are older,
but still need to know how do go on.
What do we do now? Let us pray.
(Special thanks to Brian Kelley
Bauknight for the idea for the opening story.
I have expanded a version of it that he included in his book Gracious
Imperatives, page 46. Special
thanks to James A Harnish for his story about the widow who returned to
church. This story can be found in his
book, Jesus Makes the Difference , page 50. Special thanks to Max Lucado for writing about the things that
happened to all of us on September 11th. I have included parts of his article entitled Is This Normal? You can find the entire article on his
website, www.maxlucado.com. Simply
click the link, “Is This Normal?” to read the article in it’s entirety)