Heaping Coals?

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

September 11, 2011

Heaping Coals?

Proverbs 25:21-22

Is there any adult,

any young person over the age of 15, 16,

who doesn’t remember where he or she was,

what he or she was doing

on that Tuesday morning

September 11, 2001?

I was at my office at the First Presbyterian Church in

Washingtonville, New York,

the church I had been called to serve as pastor

18 months before.

Washingtonville is a small town in the Hudson River Valley,

about 50 miles north of New York City.

        

I’d just sat down at my desk

when a member of the church called to tell me

that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

Ten years ago we still got most of our news from radio and television

rather than the internet and smartphones,

so I turned on the radio I had in my office.

Reception in that area was poor, though,

and all I got was static.

So, I called another member of the church,

a woman named Flo, who lived right across the street,

and asked her if I could come over to watch

the television news reports.

I walked into her living room a little after 9:00 am.

By then a second plane had hit the South Tower.

The images on the television showed flames

blazing from the upper floors of the two towers,

thick black smoke pouring into

the brilliant blue September sky.

If the assumption had been

that the first plane hitting the North Tower

had been a freak accident,

the second plane hitting the South Tower

confirmed our worst fears:

that this had been planned,

an attack.

Reporters began to use the word “terrorism”.

As Flo and I sat there,

transfixed by images of the burning buildings

there came still another report:

a plane had crashed into the Pentagon in Washington.

Flo and I looked at each other: what was happening?

Who could have orchestrated such horrific attacks?

And then, even as we sat there

stunned by the news of the widening circle of attacks,

the seemingly impossible happened:

The South Tower began to collapse,

floor by floor, straight down,

110 stories of steel and concrete collapsing

in a mammoth dust cloud that billowed up

the streets and avenues of lower Manhattan.

Thirty minutes later the North Tower collapsed

in the same awful, surreal way.

I sat there and watched it on television,

but I know at the time

I didn’t fully grasp what was happening.

It was as though the rational side of my brain

was saying to my eyes,

“what you are seeing simply cannot be happening.”

I walked back across the street to my office in a daze.

I was not aware of anyone in our congregation of 150

who worked in lower Manhattan,

but I knew that Washingtonville was home

to many New York City

firefighters and police officers,

including a few members of our church.

I spent the rest of the day making and taking telephone calls,

as we all checked in with one another,

asking about family and friends.

It was more than 24 long hours

before we were able to confirm

that we had lost no one in our congregation.

Our community, though, lost five men,

all firefighters caught in the collapsing buildings.

On Wednesday evening we had

a simple prayer service at church.

There was such a palpable feeling in all of Washingtonville

that we simply needed to be with one another,

to be in the same room,

to feel one another’s comforting presence,

as together we sought God’s reassuring presence.

Worship that Sunday was full,

as it was in many churches across the country,

more than a few new faces sitting in the pews,

women and men of all ages, all backgrounds,

perhaps looking for answers,

but mostly there for community.

The next week a box arrived at the church

with a return address from a town in Nebraska.

It was a box filled with quilts,

quilts made by a quilting group in a church and a town

none of us knew anything about.                                  

Apparently the group had heard on television

about our town losing five firefighters,

so they boxed up the quilts,

somehow got the address of our church,

and shipped them to us with a simple note

asking us if we would please pass the quilts along

to families who had suffered losses.

It was such an incredibly powerful,

deeply touching gesture.

Gestures like that continued to abound

as the community reached out to the families,

friends, and neighbors of the five men who had died,

Everyone in town seemed to know someone who had died,

either one of the men from our own community or

others from other towns or work.                                   

But then slowly the mood began to change,

the mood in our community

and the mood in our country

as the drums of war began to beat.

The perpetrators were Muslim,

and soon all Muslims became suspect,

Anyone who looked even vaguely “Middle Eastern”

was looked at warily.

Ignorance and brutal emotion were on the ascendant,

pushing out compassion and reason,

righteousness and justice.

Astonishingly, Christians were in the vanguard,

the bellows of men with names like

Falwell and Robertson and others

pumping out inflammatory words,

words of bigotry, racism, appalling hatred.

They showed no hesitancy to distort the Gospel of Jesus Christ,

distort Holy Scripture from both Old and New Testament

in jingoistic, chest-thumping triumphalism.

Forget, “Blessed are the peacemakers”;

(Matthew 5:9)

Forget “But I say to you, Love your enemies”;

(Matthew 5:44)

Skip over the Proverb from our lesson.

        

Pay no attention to the fact that

Paul thought the Proverb so foundational

to Jesus’ teaching that he reinforced its lesson

in his letter to the church at Rome,

his most deeply theological letter, writing:

“Do not repay anyone evil for evil,

but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.

… ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them;

if they are thirsty, give them something to drink;

for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’

Do not be overcome by evil,

but overcome evil with good.”

(Romans 12:17)

They turned the meaning of the curious phrase

“heap burning coals on their heads”

upside down to make it sound like

God approved of violence against an enemy,

paying no attention to the fact

that the phrase is metaphorical,

much like our contemporary saying,

“to kill with kindness”.

In “heaping burning coals” on the head of your enemy,

the heat of the burning coals

becomes “the burning shame of remorse”

(N. T. Wright)

burning out hatred and evil.

And so we chose our path, the path of war,

the path of wars,

wars which have cost us well over a trillion dollars,

wars which will cost us well over $3 trillion

when everything is finally accounted for.

We’ve never been on alert to the threat

the terrorists we fear and fight made back in 2004

that they would ruin us financially,

“bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”

More than 6,000 men and women have died in our 10 years of war;

that’s just American men and women;

more than twice as many as died in the original attack.

Well over 30,000 American men and women

have been maimed, crippled, and permanently injured.

And those are just the physical injuries.

How can we possibly hope to count the injuries we cannot see,

the injuries to the mind, the psyche, the spirit?

Why is it that we never talk about the civilian casualties

among Afghan and Iraqi children, women and men,

those killed or maimed?

The numbers are surely in the hundreds of thousands.

Dare we as disciples of Jesus Christ

dismiss them with that utterly heartless, faithless term,

“collateral damage”?

Writing in the Washington Post,

interfaith leader Eboo Patel has said,

“Faith can either be a barrier of division,

a bomb of destruction,

or a bridge of cooperation.

Our job is to make it a bridge of cooperation.”

(4/25/2011)

Patel was speaking as a Muslim,

but his words should be our words, as well,

we who follow Jesus Christ.

Our faith should never be a barrier of division,

much less a bomb of destruction,

but should lead us in every part of our lives

to build bridges of cooperation,

now more than ever with the more than one billion Muslims

with whom we share this planet. 

After all, we Christians worship the same God as Muslims,

the God of Abraham.

The Qur’an, the Holy Book of Islam, says just that:

“God is our Lord and your Lord;

We have our work and you have your works;

There is no quarrel between us and you;

God shall gather us together to Him

in our homecoming

… Our God and yours is one God”

(29:46, 42:15)

Yes, there have been and will be Muslims 
who will distort the Qur’an

for violence, vengeance and power,

just as there have been and will continue to be

Christians who distort the Bible,

for violence, vengeance, and power;

but that’s no reason for us to pursue any path

but bridge-building, cooperation, reconciliation.

On this anniversary of such a tragic day,

what is the legacy we want to leave to the men and women

who died in collapsing rubble in New York and Washington

and in a field in Pennsylvania?

Not just the firefighters and emergency responders,

but the secretaries, the computer technicians, the sales managers,

the custodians, the receptionists,

the accountants, the engineers,

the staff sergeants, the captains:

the men, the women from almost 100 different nations,

Jews, Christians, Muslims,

all who were simply going about their business

that beautiful Fall morning?

What is the memorial they would want from us?

“surely something more … than war.”

(G. Niebuhr, Beyond Tolerance, 192)

For, as the novelist John Williams once wrote

“A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand

or a few hundred thousand young [soldiers].

It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back.

And if a people goes through enough wars,

…soon all that’s left is the brute...”

(Stoner, 36)

Surely the best memorial,

the best legacy we can offer all those who died

is to live our lives as Christ calls us to,

as God wants us to,

hopes against hope we will:

giving our enemies food when they are hungry,

water when they thirst,

“heaping burning coals upon their heads”,

living and working to burn out hatred

through reconciliation,

their hatred and ours,

the consuming fire coming from

the one power,

the only power,

that is unconquerable:

the power that is love,

the power that is God.

AMEN