Those images by now are edged into the subconscious of most of us.  One of my editors for Cambridge U. Press was right down the street when all Hades broke lose above his head.  Many weeks later, he was still shook up.  Indeed, many of us who were nowhere near N.Y. at the time were shook up.   If this was a wake up call, it was also a nightmare.  It was many things to many people.

As for me, the weekend after 9/11 I was scheduled to do a revival, and do it I did.  There were many people in church who might not ordinarily darken its doors, even in Garrard County Kentucky.  Though I was not holding a traditional Kentucky snake handling service, if you looked into the eyes of many of those who came forward to the altar at the end of each service, they certainly looked like they had seen huge poisonous snakes and had nearly been bitten by them.   They were afraid, they were praying, they were deeply disturbed, and they were turning to God to find solace, sympathy, or some kind of explanation.  They wanted to get right with God, before they, or at least their country, got left by God. 

As a student of church history, I was not really very surprised by this response to a major unexpected disaster of this sort. The record of history is clear—- after every major ‘act of God’ (though such disasters really ought not to be called that) people have repented, have turned back to God, have at least temporarily tried to be better persons, or to  get themselves saved.  So it was in Garrard County Kentucky the weekend after 9/11.  Though the old adage was ‘sin in haste repent at leisure’, when a major disaster happens, its more like ‘repent in haste, stop sinning for a while’.

While I am always glad to see people turn back to the Lord, whatever it is that prompts them to do so,  the dark side of post-9/11 was of course the virulent reaction of many, including many Christians, to Muslims and Islam in general.   There was even a fundamentalist minister on the West coast who on the Sunday after 9/11 said from the pulpit— ‘I m an American first and a Christian second’. No forgiveness for those terrorists— bomb ’em back into the stone age’.’  When the minister, was questioned about this after the service, with one church member asking— ‘You meant you are a Christian first and an American second—right?”   The minister, so to speak, stuck to his guns (or in this case his right to use them to retaliate) and said “I said what I meant, and I meant what I said.”    Those were dark days, to say the least, and the Lord was not honored by such vitriolic remarks.  What is true of course, is that a major crisis scratches beneath the surface of our consciousness, and reveals what our real default beliefs are, what our real feelings are, when push comes to shove. It was the beginning of a long dark road where fear-based thinking was to dominate our national decision making, and frankly I don’t think we’ve have gotten beyond such thinking yet.

You see the whole point of terrorism is not to wage open war with a larger and more well equipped foe.  The point is to strike fear into the heart of one’s enemy hoping they will colossally over react, and waste their precious blood, money and time chasing ghosts, at home and abroad.  We are still busily doing that in various ways.  On that showing, 9/11 was an enormous success for the terrorists.  We ended up striking an enemy in Iraq that had nothing to do with Al Quaeda or Osama bin Laden, was nowhere near his lair, and had no weapons of mass destruction, as it turns out. 

And here is the problem with fear based decision making and enormous reprisals—- you become what you despise.  Your behavior is little better than those who attacked you.   And such behavior is in no way Christian, frankly.   The right response to 9/11 was indeed to repent of our own sins, get our house in order, and be better than our enemies.  Indeed, the Bible says we should overcome evil with good, and even love our enemies.  I like the bumper sticker that says—- ‘Love your enemies—- it will confuse them’.   The difference between Christians and followers of some other religions should be that we leave vengeance in the hands of the Lord— indeed the Bible is emphatic about this—- ‘Vengeance is mine, says the Lord,  I will repay’. 

These are the kinds of lessons we should have learned from 9/11, but frankly I don’t think we have much learned them. And as a result we as a nation are generally no closer now to the God who revealed himself most fully in Jesus Christ than we were nine years ago.