The Write Place

Revelation 1:17-18
¹⁷ When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. Then he placed his right hand on me and said: “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. ¹⁸ I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades.”

Everybody has days they can measure their lives by. Pointed moments where history happens in an instant. Where history speeds up and the world you knew dies. Every person has those moments, and every generation has at least one. Where the world you knew passes away in an instant.

It seems every time I hear the story told it starts off the same way. It was a beautiful, warm and sunny September day. Too nice for that time of year, or almost any really. I remember waiting for the bus that day and thinking that. Whether I knew it would be an important day or not I don’t know but I remembered it all the same.

It was my second week of Middle School. Mr. Curran’s sixth grade Social Studies class. He was nearing retirement but had not lost his step at all. Being a general Social Studies nerd and especially history enthusiast I liked starting off my day with him.

I remember around 9 when class was about to start, everyone was in their seats, he was behind his desk at the head of the small classroom. He leaned over his desk, and in the calm, but firm voice of a man with experience, told us that plane hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center.

I won’t tell you I saw everything clearly, nobody did. I didn’t live in New York, didn’t know the history of planes hitting high rises. Rare as it was New Yorkers tell me they’d heard of it beforehand. When he told me a plane had hit, I wasn’t certain it was more than a rumor. But one thing I told myself was that if it is true (and it could be), then it can’t be an accident.

I was the type to follow the news, even at that age. My interest in the world I lived in let me know about groups like Al Qaeda, their actions bombing the USS Cole and the American Embassy in Nairobi Kenya. I knew they had tried by bombing the World Trade Center before in 93, they would try again. they had been hijacking planes for decades too. I had been expecting more, I knew they were trying to get us big. Sitting there in class, more or less it occurred to me that they finally did.

I remember thinking to myself, here’s a teacher who has seen decades of history. He may have seen the news of Pearl Harbor, and WW2. He definitely saw Korea Vietnam, and the whole Cold War. Though he controlled himself and through experience, I could tell he believed it, and it was big.

The rest of the day in school mostly passed like a fevered dream. The hallways were always dark in our school, but everything seemed overcast. The whole day felt like a long slow walk through a gloomy, emotionally dead world. I don’t know when I heard both towers fell, or about the Pentagon, but I know it was when I was in school because when I came home, I was not surprised.

I felt dead inside, but not surprised watching the news. I found out during the day, I must have. The images were terrifying, horrifying. I remember feeling that these are the moments where you know you are living in history. I was 12, on the cusp of manhood, and the safe world of my childhood died that day.

I was 12, and I could not go to war. I felt the Godly rage of a man seeking justice against evil in this world. I asked myself the question, ringing over and over again in my head as I stared at those images. Every time I see them, I can’t help but feel that again.

My God, what have we done?

In every sense of the question. What has humanity done to this world you made so perfect. What horrors have we done that you would remove your hand from protecting us? I could count them all, knew the answers too but they could never be exhausted.

I didn’t go in the next day. It didn’t feel right. I felt bad about that for the longest time until I realized how it did affect me. Nobody I knew died, but the world did. A friend of mine heard why I wasn’t in school. He was surprised and asked with innocent confusion if that really affected me. I told him yes, and the look on his face showed, I think, he was starting to get it. The world we grew up in was gone.

The country rallied together like it had not in decades. For a brief moment we knew and even cherished the fact that we are America together. We knew that we have enemies, and our neighbors are our own. Support for the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban surged, people put flags up, our differences were set aside.

I asked myself, how long till we turn on each other?
How long till we get tired of the war? How long till we make a mistake, big or small and the other American isn’t just wrong, but evil?

Not long it would seem. There had been indicators of division before. I saw in movies and television people became more hostile to Christians especially. The villain was usually a pastor, backwards sheriff, conservative authority figures you could say, and the good president always a Democrat. Paganism and the sexual revolution were always portrayed apologetically. The Ghost of Vietnam never died.

Bigot, Homophobe, Fascist

I heard these before 9/11, but not long after…..

Bush made a mistake invading Iraq (which I suspect he assumed had weapons of mass destruction, and never found, having overcompensated for missing 9/11) and destabilized the region. People saw the mistake in going in and there was no discussion about how or when to get out, and of course it wasn’t a matter of disagreement. Pretty soon, it wasn’t your idea is wrong or how do we go forward together. It became always YOU ARE IMMORAL, you are the problem, and even the United States is the thing wrong with the world.

It had roots earlier, and it sure took off after.

“Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could – with no justification – shatter my body”
and
“All I saw was the system.”
Ta Nehisi Coates describing the first responders in his book Between The World And Me,

Now he learned these ideas from American institutions, but I digress.

Such ideas are not meant to reconcile but destroy and dehumanize, and this man is praised for it. They are unfortunately succeeding, promising all along the way a utopia at the end of some social program. A solution to everything wrong in the world, misdiagnosing the problem and applying the wrong remedy.

Maoism, Marxism had long been pushing us in that direction. Here was a chance to heal, ask who we are, and ask questions. And ask questions people did. People asked where God was, why these things happened, what to do now. People went to church. People asked how Islam would produce this. The churches largely failed to answer them. The long slow fall into self-destruction only continued. What the terrorists couldn’t do we have been doing for longer from the inside. After 9/11, it would bear ugly fruit.

They never said the terrorists were right by and large, but many reached the same conclusion, that the United States is evil and irredeemable. On point A there was agreement, we are the problem, and we must go.

I saw the right respond to identity politics with more identity politics, perhaps what’s worse than the response on the Left has been the failure of the Right to offer anything meaningful to right the ship. All the while, we have fallen apart since that day.

The San Bernardino shooting did not take me by surprise. In 2016, Islamists shot up the building where they worked. Immediately left and right started blaming each other. After an attack on all of us…. Fifteen years before, that was unthinkable.

Identity politics sped up again, everybody became infected with it. America is not perfect, it doesn’t have to be to be good, and who has ever been perfect? If it’s good it’s worth saving, and it is worth reforming.

Why would God allow this? 9/11, the things that have happened since then. Evil itself?

I can tell you one thing. I wouldn’t know God as savior. The God who used the greatest injustice in history in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, experiencing it in the second person of the trinity redeemed out of the creation that lusted after killing him, a people who had been lost in sin. He can, will and in a real way already has overcome the evil of 9/11, and every evil you have ever or will ever experience.

God overcame evil when he overcame sin and death in the person and work of Jesus Christ. The answer is simple, available, and personal.

We know what evil is because God judges so, and he has already provided the solution.

Revelation 21:1-6

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. ² And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place^[a] of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people,^[b] and God himself will be with them as their God.^[c] 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

God has to remove sin, all of it, for the perfect world he is creating. The warning (Revelation 21:8) is part of the invitation, not all who ever committed sins but who remains in them. He has already conquered sin and death through his own death in our place.

The horrific movements in human history like the ones we are experiencing today have tried to do this ourselves. 9/11 was the Islamists attempt to, Marxism and it’s Woke child is that too. All these sin laden movements and ideas can only produce more of the horrors we have seen in this world. But what Christ offers is sure, and free.

“⁵ And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” ⁶ And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment.”

The hope people looked for on 9/11, and 9/12 is the same that humanity has needed since the fall. The solution has only ever been Christ.

That’s why I can look on days like 9/11 and have a certain, not empty or foolish hope. I can have peace as much as I have a desire and will to act, because God has overcome. The days of such things are numbered, and my God cannot fail.

The one who holds the keys to death and hades has opened the way to life eternal, come all thirst.

The answer is that simple, the answer is also someone not something.
And it’s never too late.