The Massive Search Matthew 18:1-14
Rev. Anne Grant
Trinity United Methodist Church, Providence, RI 02907
Sunday, September 16, 2001 (following 9/11/01 attacks on World Trade Center and Pentagon)
For the rest of our lives,
we will remember what we were doing on September 11th.
Phil and I had decided to stay home and do our work there
side by side on our computers,
so that we could work all morning, have lunch together,
work through the afternoon, and have dinner together,
and then take the evening off
because it was our 36th wedding anniversary.
Those plans like everyone else’s were changed in an instant.
On the day that we were giving thanks for our own love story,
thousands of other love stories came to a violent end.
In the days since then,
we’ve been taking quantum leaps of consciousness.
As a nation we are struggling to comprehend all the reasons
why we were hit in such a skilled and savage way.
We also see that it is not just our sworn enemies,
like Osama bin Laden,
who are enraged at the arrogance of power
that this nation represents,
but even our sworn friends and allies have been angry at us.
Maybe they’re not angry this week.
This week they are stunned and grieving with us.
But for many weeks before this, they have been angry at us.
People around the world have been horrified
by our country’s decision not to cooperate with the Kyoto Protocol
under which more than a hundred nations had already agreed
to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases
that contribute to global warming.
Within the nations allied to us there are many who
have been dismayed by the U.S. insistence on
making more and more money at the risk of the entire planet.
In recent weeks, we have seen enormous demonstrations
against the United States among our friends
who are also horrified that we are unilaterally breaking
the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that for thirty years
has protected the world from escalating the nuclear arms race.
As if those unilateral decisions didn’t do enough damage,
we withdrew from the World Conference on Racism
where we could have addressed our own signature sin as a nation.
Why do they hate us? One commentator asked that yesterday and
observed that the United States is exporting a kind of worldliness—
a cultural imperialism that is dehumanizing and deeply offensive
to many people around the world.
Here’s a quiz:
Can you guess what the most watched TV show in all the world is? From the slums of Brazil to the
Bedouin tents in the Arabian desert,
what television show is watched the most?
Take a guess.
[Baywatch.]
I’ve never even seen Baywatch, but I’ve read enough about it
and the characters in it to know that I don’t want to see it.
Many of you find your children completely enthralled with
the mindlessness of television
and the seductiveness of its consumer values.
And we feel so helpless.
We don’t know what to do, because we have to work.
We feel like there’s no way to control what our children
And their friends are watching when we’re away from home.
And they start mimicking what they see and hear—
We can see them practicing,
Wanting to strut their stuff like the MTV stars--
Becoming totally absorbed in themselves.
The rest of the world looks at American television
And they think this is really us.
The very poorest people around the world
Who may have no food, no clean water, no health care,
certainly none of the freedoms we flaunt.
They look at Baywatch and think it
Really is the way we live in the United States.
If we feel helpless against the onslaught of commercial television
With such dehumanizing values, can you imagine what
the vulgarity of those shows creates in
a culture where parents are trying so hard
to teach their children a high sense of the holiness of Allah?
Trying to teach their children modesty in regard to their bodies?
Trying to teach them respect for others?
From the deserts to the slums,
hundreds of thousands of satellite dishes
receive programs from America that poison their children’s minds
and pollute their spirits.
And to many of them—that is an act of war.
The United States is harboring the terrorists
Who threaten to bring down their whole way of life.
Here’s another quiz:
Do you know what the number 1 favorite name for baby boys is
in Moslem countries? [Mohammed.]
Do you know what the second most favorite
name among Moslims is for baby boys? [Osama.]
NPR/SATURDAY /010915
[Yusef Podansky, author of Osama bin Laden, the Man Who Declared War on America, quoted on National Public Radio, 9/15/01.]
Why? Because Osama bin Laden is seen
as a fearless freedom fighter—
fighting to set their culture free from Satan—
from the far-reaching tentacles of western ways
from all the sins of Baywatch, from capitalism, profanity, and greed.
Many of us, too, feel like rampant commercialism,
With its sex and violence--free enterprise, that is
always watching for new markets
and eager to produce anything that sells,
is invading our living rooms, taking our children hostage,
devouring our lives with the same finality
that the earth itself devoured those powerful buildings
and everything in them and everybody in them was turned to dust.
"You want power? The terrorists said, "We’ll show you power."
Maybe they thought they were bombing
Baywatch back to the Stone Age.
But revenge doesn’t work that way.
The whole world can see so clearly why they
chose the airplane industry, with its power to circle the globe
and the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon—
turning the symbols of U.S. power against our own people
in such a shocking and devastating manner
so no one can miss the message we’ve been avoiding.
So now our country is more preoccupied than ever
with our own sense of power.
Jesus had something to say about this:
Our scripture reading is from
MATTHEW 18 verse 1: At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, "Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" 2 He called a child, whom he put among them, 3 and said, "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5 Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.
6 "If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea. 7 Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks! Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!
Verse 10 "Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones. . . .
Today, there is a massive search underway
to find as many of the people responsible for this attack
on the United States as possible.
To find out what organizations and what nations
may have helped them.
Thousands of investigators around the world—
even satellites above the earth—
are working at this massive search,
bringing in the information every minute,
every hour, every day, every night.
And at the same time, there is another massive search going on.
This is the search that Jesus told us about
when he said that he had come
to seek and to save that which was lost.
And he said this:
Matthew 18:12 What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? 13 And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. 14 So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.
I used to think that sheep was like the one
in our Berasalucci stained glass window—just a tiny one,
a lamb, that could be so easily victimized by vicious predators.
But now I see that sometimes the lost sheep may be the offender, the terrorist, the oppressor, the sinner who has gone astray,
the one who is lost, who Jesus came to seek and to save.
For a few weeks, we have been talking about the difference between Retributive Justice and Restorative Justice.
The retributive justice model is the triangle,
with the judge on top, and the victim and offender
locked in an adversarial battle.
[Diagrams available from Trinity375@aol.com]
But many people of faith are finding new hope
in another model called restorative justice,
where offenders and victims and their families or friends
will come to the table and reach a new understanding
of the needs of the victim and the obligation of the offender
and what it will take to bring real healing.
We see the importance of bringing people to the table
to talk together before true healing can come.
I don’t want to give the impression that Osama bin Laden
is likely to come to the table, or if he did,
that we could trust anything he said.
For many years, we tried to convince the courts
that mediation does not work where there is domestic violence
or any other imbalance of power or any kind of terrorism.
That batterers need to be arrested,
and maybe in confinement, once the violence is stopped,
there will be safe space for the restorative work to begin.
Even if bin Laden is killed tomorrow, there will be
thousands of Palestinian refugee children
and thousands more malnourished Iraqi children—
malnourished by our own sanctions
and aggressive embargo against the people of Iraq.
And they will have leaders among them
ready to replace bin Laden,
unless we reach out to the children and their parents
in the refugee camps who feel helpless and lost.
The African American novelist James Baldwin wrote
That the most dangerous [person] in the world
is one who has nothing to lose.
We have hundreds of thousands of people
growing up who have nothing to lose
and a lot to gain if they can bring down
the spiritual forces that our country represents to the world.
Our nation is grieving and angry and remarkably united
in its desire for justice.
But we need to repent as a nation and
look at the deeper issues of justice.
Last week one of the young men here
who leads the Liberian youth soccer team
was shot in the back repeatedly.
As he comes out of intensive care,
everyone is concerned about how the youth will respond.
Will they try to take revenge?
What kind of example will our nation give them
for handling their own very significant crisis
in the streets of Providence?
And we, who know the dangers of
driving while Black,
will we tolerate racial profiling when it now
becomes dangerous to drive while Arab?
This week a young Afghani living in Cranston
had his tires slashed.
And when Providence police, making racist remarks,
removed a sheik wearing a turban
from the train, onlookers cheered.
We must not tolerate any kind of racism in ourselves or others.
A lot of people today are feeling lost,
that they’ve wandered off from the fold.
Some are victims, some are offenders, and a lot of us are both.
So God invaded our world
and a massive search is underway
to seek and to save those who are lost,
to find them, to reach out, to bring them back
into the healing community of faith.
That’s what the good shepherd is doing,
Are you ready to help in the search?
Let’s pray.
Holy Spirit, show us how we have lost our way,
show us how we can reach out to the part of others
that is feeling lost today,
that has wandered away from the sheepfold--
whether we are victims or offenders—gather us back
and restore us to wholeness with
our sworn enemies and our sworn friends
because you have come to seek and to save
all who are lost. Amen.
