Editor’s note: The following homily was offered on October 3, 2001 at Methesco (the Methodist School in Ohio) using the lectionary readings Lamentation 1:1-6 and Psalm 137.

By rights, standing before you as a representative of SCUPE [Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education], I ought to handpick a text invoking the vitality of the city and provoking calls to ministry — or at least to taste and test such calls. Instead the lectionary, which so often astonishes in its providence, has set before us a stunning text of urban desolation and tears at a moment exactly thus.

I know that in the days since September 11, tears of grief have been freely shed in this place — and for that I give thanks. They are part of the church’s work, both pastoral and prophetic, which Walter Brueggeman calls "the public embrace of pain."

Those tears are not only or even largely for ourselves, but for others. They are tears of intercession. As Bonhoeffer writes in Life Together, to intercede is to feel another’s pain or need so deeply that we pray their prayer. From their place. In their stead. For their sake. They are tears which open for us the work of spiritual solidarity.

This attack connects us, as never before in the U.S., with others who have suffered. We are suddenly linked with those beneath bombs and subject to violence. The question is put: Can we look on the rubble of Manhattan and see Baghdad or Beirut or Ramallah?

It is an urgent pastoral (and perhaps as well political) insight to understand that suffering, especially innocent suffering, can be justifying. I use this word precisely in St. Paul’s sense of constructing a self-righteous idolatry. I think, for example, of the holocaust, a truly innocent suffering on a vastly different scale, but theologically edifying. So many of those who passed through that horror witnessed to a renewed vision of humanity, a moral passion on behalf of all those who anywhere suffer violence and injustice. But that same history, those same events, the same anguish of suffering, can also be invoked to sanction exclusion, demolition, assassination, air strikes, and Palestinian apartheid. The meaning of suffering and death is partly a moral choice, theologically put.

When I was ordained a deacon under the older process, I laid my hand on a Bible opened to Psalm 137 and was asked to receive authority to preach the Word and administer the sacraments. That Psalm, which also forms part of the lectionary readings this week, is indeed one close to my heart and ministry. And yet we rarely read it to the end, sparing ourselves the embarrassing scandal of its punchline: "Happy is the one who shall seize your children and dash them against the rocks." This Psalm among others articulates how grief may turn to rage. It is prayerfully honest, utterly so, about this connection. And we should be alert to it as well in the present moment.

Those who I find most thoughtful about recent events have begun to ask: What is the suffering behind the rage of which we are now recipients? This is a question no longer pastorally premature to a people in grief. In chapter one of Lamentations, suffering leads to self-examination in history and before God. It is timely for us to ask, what is the injustice of the global economy, for which the Trade Towers have become emblem to the world? What are the oil-based and cold war incursions, open and clandestine, which the U.S. has made over so long a time in the Middle East? And speaking of clandestine, can we acknowledge what does not appear in the easy histories portrayed in our national media: that the largest covert operation ever mounted by the U.S. effectively supported bin Laden’s terrorism against the Soviet Union, contributing to its collapse? Can we recognize our hand in the very operation which enabled the Taliban to take power? These are hard questions for us. And very hard to put in the present moment.

I can’t help but think today of Jesus’ tears for the city. I think of the form which his own lamentation over Jerusalem takes. I believe he foresaw the destruction of the city and grieved. Since the gospels were largely written after the destruction of the Second Temple, it is widely suggested that the gospel writers have filled in the details of his vision. Nonetheless, I’m convinced he foresaw it not so much in some omniscient sense, but in the manner of reading the signs of the times. He could see coming the violent uprising against the Roman occupation and against the injustice of Temple complicity in it. And once that, it didn’t take much to imagine the Roman boot coming down.

In that sense the kingdom movement, and finally the cross, signify a concrete historical alternative, the way to break a terrible cycle of violence. In the forgiving love of the cross, even the love of enemies, Christ broke that cycle. He broke the rule of death and so disarmed the powers.

Because of his, our tears are the very form of faith. They finally issue not in rage of vengeance, but in love — and so in hope for the city. Amen.