Twenty-five years...
It hardly seems possible...
For those of us in the increasingly gray—or perhaps increasingly white-haired—crowd, September 11, 2001, does not feel like ancient history. I can remember where I was. I can remember what I was doing. I can remember the images on television. More than that, I can remember what it felt like.
And increasingly, I find myself thinking about my grandparents and parents.
My grandfather remembered the attack on Pearl Harbor in much the same way. His brother was a Navy corpsman there and helped rescue survivors from the fiery waters. To my grandfather, December 7, 1941, was not simply a date printed in a history book. It was something etched into his memory.
My parents' generation had November 22, 1963. They remembered hearing the news that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
As a teenager in the mid-1990s, I remember hearing people talk about the Kennedy assassination and thinking how incredibly long ago it seemed. I understood intellectually that it had been a traumatic moment in their lives. But it was history to me.
Now I understand...
My own children were born in 2011 and 2013. September 11 is history to them. They know it through our stories, videos, and documentaries that appear every September. They can watch the airplanes strike the towers. They can see the smoke rising from the Pentagon. They can hear the recordings.
But they cannot remember what it was like to live through it.
I can!
On September 11, 2001, I was attending college in upstate New York, just outside Albany, NY. I was also a volunteer member of the Civil Air Patrol, the civilian auxiliary of the United States Air Force. Much of our work involved search and rescue and disaster-relief missions.
But suddenly, an old mission that had faded with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War became relevant again:
Civil Defense.
For roughly the next two weeks, I found myself working inside the New York State Emergency Operations Center, a hardened facility beneath the state office complex outside Albany. I worked at the New York State Division of Military and Naval Affairs desk, served as a runner for the Adjutant General, and monitored high frequency radios intended to provide backup communications for FEMA and the military should ordinary communications systems fail.
I remember sitting inside that bunker the first night and having a disturbing realization.
If something even worse happened—if the unthinkable happened, we got nuked—I might survive down there.
My family probably would not.
I remember thinking that I didn't particularly want to survive if everyone I loved was gone.
Twenty-five years later, that memory strikes me differently.
Because underneath so much of what we experienced after September 11 was a question we didn't always put into words:
What can we actually trust?
And at a deeper level, who can we actually trust?
- The towers couldn't protect us.
- Our military strength couldn't protect us.
- Our intelligence agencies hadn't protected us.
- Our prosperity hadn't protected us.
- Even a hardened bunker suddenly didn't seem terribly comforting.
For one horrifying morning, and the days that followed, many of the things we had assumed were secure suddenly weren't.
And for a brief time, America looked upward.
Churches and other houses of worship filled in the days following the attacks. Gallup found weekly religious attendance rising from 41 percent before September 11 to 47 percent immediately afterward. Three out of four Americans reported praying more frequently and fervently than usual.
But it didn't last.
Within a few months, church attendance had fallen essentially back to where it had been before September 11.
I sometimes wonder whether those weeks represented one of the last moments in my lifetime when large portions of American society instinctively reached toward the Christianity that had shaped our culture for generations.
I don't mean that America ever was—or should have been—a Christian theocracy. Nor do I want to romanticize our past as though previous generations were somehow immune from sin. They most certainly were not.
But for generations, a large majority of Americans at least professed Christianity, and Christianity formed an important part of our life together. That foundation had already been eroding for decades before September 11.
Although, for a moment, catastrophe seemed to expose our need for something beyond ourselves.
And yet I remember another message from those days.
“Power of Pride.”
I remember those bumper stickers being everywhere.
My memory, it turns out, isn't exaggerating much. Lowe's launched its “Power of Pride” campaign after September 11 and distributed more than six million of those bumper stickers.
I understand what was meant by them.
It was patriotism. Solidarity. Gratitude toward firefighters, police officers, military personnel, and others who were serving their neighbors and country. Lowe's itself contributed substantially to relief efforts. There was much that was honorable in that sentiment.
But twenty-five years later, I find the words themselves haunting.
Power of Pride.
Scripture speaks rather differently about pride:
“Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
—Proverbs 16:18
Perhaps there is something worth pondering there.
From a Christian perspective, pride is more than thinking too highly of ourselves. At its deepest level, sinful pride turns the creature inward upon himself (incurvatus in se). We seek within ourselves what can finally be found only outside ourselves in God (extra nos).
- We are strong.
- We will rebuild.
- We will defeat our enemies.
- We will protect ourselves.
- We will overcome.
There is nothing wrong with rebuilding. Nothing wrong with defending our country. Nothing wrong with patriotism, courage, military service, police work, or honoring those who sacrifice themselves for their neighbors.
These are good gifts.
But gifts make terrible gods!
And perhaps that was the deeper question September 11 placed before us.
Because after the smoke came the questions.
Where was God?
- Why would God allow this?
- Why did nearly three thousand people die?
- Why did one person escape while another did not?
- Why did firefighters rushing upward die while others were running downward?
- Why did Christians perish alongside unbelievers?
Christians have wrestled with questions like these for two thousand years. The theological term for the problem is theodicy: How do we speak of a God who is both almighty and good while confronting the undeniable reality of evil and suffering?
Lutheran theology does not answer that question by making God smaller.
If God is truly transcendent—if He truly is almighty—then September 11 cannot somehow exist outside His providence. We cannot get God “off the hook” by pretending there are corners of creation over which He simply has no authority.
That makes the question harder, not easier.
And this is precisely where Martin Luther's distinction between the hidden God (Deus absconditus) and the revealed God (Deus revelatus) becomes so important.
There are things about God's hidden counsel that He simply has not revealed to us.
- Why this person?
- Why that moment?
- Why did God permit this evil?
- Why did He intervene here but apparently not there?
We desperately want to climb into heaven, peek behind the curtain, and demand that God explain Himself.
But He has not promised to meet us there.
Instead, God directs us somewhere else.
To where He has revealed Himself.
To Jesus Christ.
And ultimately to the cross.
The Christian answer to suffering is not finally an explanation.
It is Jesus!
God does not answer every one of our whys. Instead, He enters our suffering.
The Son of God takes human flesh. He knows betrayal. He knows injustice. He knows violence. He knows grief. He knows abandonment. He knows death.
And upon the cross, He bears the sin of the world.
Then on the third day, He rises.
That does not tell me why one person died in the World Trade Center while another made it down the stairs.
It tells me something greater.
It tells me what God has done about death.
And that brings me back to September 11, twenty-five years later.
What did we learn?
- We learned that civilization is more fragile than we ever imagined.
- We learned that buildings collapse.
- We learned that airplanes can become weapons.
- We learned that military strength cannot eliminate evil.
- We learned that prosperity cannot guarantee tomorrow.
- We learned that someone can leave for work on an ordinary Tuesday morning and never come home.
For a brief moment, we seemed to understand how little control we actually possess.
And then life resumed.
The churches emptied again.
The flags eventually came down.
The bumper stickers faded.
And the long erosion of our collective Christian faith and the moral framework it provided continued.
Perhaps, then, the question on this twenty-fifth anniversary isn't simply:
Do we remember September 11?
Of course we remember!
The harder question is:
Have we remembered what it taught us?
I also don't want to romanticize September 12, 2001.
Yes, there was extraordinary courage. There was sacrifice. There was patriotism. There was prayer. Strangers helped strangers. Firefighters and police officers ran toward dangers from which everyone else was fleeing. Americans rallied around one another in ways that seem almost foreign to us today.
But there was also fear, anger, hatred, confusion, and sin.
September 12 was not our salvation either.
So perhaps “Never Forget” needs a little more explanation twenty-five years later.
- Never forget the people who died.
- Never forget the families who kissed someone goodbye that morning without knowing it would be the last time.
- Never forget those who climbed the stairs while others fled down them.
- Never forget those who answered the call to serve afterward.
- Never forget how fragile this earthly life really is.
- Never forget what sinful human beings are capable of doing to one another.
- Never forget that even the mightiest nations cannot promise tomorrow.
But above all, never forget where our hope actually lies!
We honor those who died and those who still carry the wounds of September 11 by remembering them in our prayers. We honor them by loving the neighbors God has placed around us. We honor them by teaching another generation what happened that morning.
And as Christians, we have something even greater to give our children and our neighbors.
We can speak Christ into a frightened and uncertain world.
- We do not have to explain the senseless before we can have hope.
- We don't have to discover God's hidden purposes before we can trust Him.
- We don't need to pretend that evil isn't evil, suffering doesn't hurt, or death isn't terrible.
Instead, we cling confidently and boldly to the faith once delivered to the saints.
Because twenty-five years after September 11, the fundamental human problem has not changed.
Neither has God's answer.
Our hope is not in the strength of our nation.
- It is not in our prosperity.
- It is not in our ability to protect ourselves.
- It is not even in the strength of our own faith.
And it certainly isn't in the Power of Pride.
Our hope rests entirely outside ourselves.
In Jesus Christ, crucified for sinners, risen from the dead, and coming again.
Twenty-five years after September 11, perhaps that is the most important thing we must never forget.