"A Hot Wind": Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost Year C 2010

A Hot Wind

When the first plane hit the tower nine years ago yesterday, I was attending my last meeting as pastor of Our Saviour's Lutheran Church in Dorchester. One of my oldest friends had become an associate of the bishop's and he was attending the meeting with some of my colleagues from the urban churches of Boston. He came in with one of the early reports, having heard it on the radio, and thought perhaps that a small plane had lost control and hit one of the towers. It was on my way home from that meeting that I heard the terrible news about the coordinated attack.

Liz and I drove to Deltaville, Virginia around October 1 of that year, and as we passed through New York, signs asked us to light our headlights to honor the fallen. The busy highways were a sea of bright headlights.

You sometimes hear people talk about a disaster of biblical proportions. And by that they probably mean something like the flood or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah or the Red Sea waters crashing down on the Egyptian army.

No one at the time identified the attack as a disaster of biblical proportions, but I can't imagine people weren't thinking it. But I believe they dismissed the notion because, well, because I knew perfectly well that no one in those towers deserved what had happened to them. None of the heroes who went into that horror to try to save lives deserved to lose their lives in doing so. And for whatever reason, I have this idea that a real biblical disaster is only visited on those who deserve it.

But don't we wonder about the flood. Was it really true that every single human being in the world except Noah and, surprise of surprises, his whole family, was righteous? I mean didn't Noah's family get involved in some kind of sin in the midst of that story as well? And what about all the animals? Did all the animals have to die just because human beings were sinful?

And what about the Egyptian army? Do we think that all the Egyptian soldiers, who were just out there doing their job, deserved to drown? Not to mention the thousands of first born children in Egypt. What had the first born children done? It was Pharaoh who was hard-hearted. Why did his probably innocent people have to suffer for his sinfulness?

And hear we have Jeremiah, telling us God's word, God's threat. A hot wind will come, says the Lord, on my poor people. My poor people. Even as God threatens to destroy, he actually expression compassion for those he is destroying. How weird is that?

And God goes on to say that not only will the people be destroyed, but it sounds like a lot of the creation, the living things, the plants and animals. What had all the little animals done? It was the people who were unfaithful.

But it's this very metaphor that bears some attention if we are to get at the answers to these questions. Jeremiah, or perhaps God through Jeremiah, reminds us of the creation and our place in it. The human creature, humankind as a whole, was made, Genesis says, in the image of God. In the ancient world, an image was a statue or picture of a deity. You've heard of "graven images," right? But the human creature is different because this image is one that a true and living God has made, and the human creature is therefore a true and living image. This is in contrast to graven images, which are of dead stone or metal and therefore, in Israelite thought, represent dead gods.

Forward to the New Testament, and we have Jesus, whom Paul and the Gospel of John say bears the fullness of Godhead in his physical human body, and further that he is the firstborn of a new creation, one that presumably fulfills that Genesis purpose, to be the image of God in the world.

I want to say this morning that whether we have ever heard of God or not, whether we believe in God or not, whether we have the right ideas about God or not, we are, from the biblical point of view, collectively the image of God. Think about that for a minute. The whole of humankind, all the nations and peoples, considered as one body, is the image of God.

There's a brilliant book I'd recommend to anyone about the twin tower attack, called "The Looming Towers." It has earned universal praise from all sides of the political aisles and from the whole of the journalistic community. The book never excuses the attacks and if anything we come away all the more convinced who is culpable for them. But the book does a brilliant job of pointing out the insidious and terrible way evil has of manifesting and growing and feeding on itself.

There's another book by Hannah Arendt, which I would only recommend to the very serious reader, called "Origins of Totalitarianism" that does a similar job of explaining the forces that came together to create the terrible holocausts of the early twentieth century in Germany and the Soviet Union.

I don't for a second believe that natural disasters are as some have called them "acts of God." But when human beings in large groups engage in systemic kinds of evildoing, there is a way in which these forces begin to fester and spread like some kind of disease. The disasters that come out of them are out of all proportion to the seemingly inconsequential sinfulness that began them, and thousands if not millions of more-or-less-innocent people suffer. A hot wind blows on God's poor people.

It seems perhaps crazy to suggest that my striving for a good and honest and loving faith in a true and living God could really do anything to stem the tide of such evil. And I assure you, other disasters like the twin towers are in our future. It may even be that even as we strive to have such faith, we ourselves could become victims of such disasters, just as the crucifixion of Jesus was an example and forerunner of the widespread destruction of Israel and Jerusalem some forty years after his resurrection.

The evil that spreads throughout the world and comes back with insane and overwhelming destruction begins in seemingly small and insignificant sin in individuals and then coalesces and grows into something out of all proportion to what it started as. And many of the innocent suffer; it's the nature of evil and, yes, the judgment of God. For the judgment of God is built into our very creation, our very natures. If any group of us rejects the will of God, the whole of us grow sick. Heaven grows black, and the hot wind comes. And not only we, but the whole of creation we were created to care for, are in jeopardy.

But thanks be to God, there is hope in Jesus Christ, who came to save sinners. And it is because the tremendous power even one person has to turn the tide away from God's judgment and toward God's mercy, that there is such rejoicing when even one repents.

It is in our very nature to embody God. What shall we embody? Shall we embody the hot wind that comes to tear down and destroy? Or shall we embody the streams of living water, that come to build up and renew? Will the heavens grow black because of us, or will there be a party there today?

Amen.