This day shall be a day of remembrance for you.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Please be seated.
So, it was this weirdly cool September morning, and we were in class. I was in an English class—I think it was Ms. Romero’s class, maybe. And like any good teacher who has a class that starts at 7:50 AM, we were watching Grammar Rock from Schoolhouse Rock! I was fourteen years old, and we were watching it on the TV.
As the video ended, it went to what it always did, which was whatever TV channel had been on. And it appeared we had been missing a really cool action movie. But as many of you know, that was no action movie.
For this was September 11th, 2001. I was a fourteen-year-old in school in suburban Houston, and there was some horrific, horrific violence on that TV that I can tell you our twenty-something teacher was not prepared for when Grammar Rock switched off.
I looked it up; it actually was an unseasonably cool, completely clear morning in Missouri City, Texas, even—about fourteen hundred miles from here. And I know here in this city, in this state, in this region, no one needs various television specials or otherwise to tell us every year when we approach September 11th.
No, we feel it turn. We feel this turn in the air. I noticed that my first fall here in ’22, for I’d never lived anywhere near where these horrific actions occurred, and I was only a child when it happened. But I learned so much from these New Yorkers that I was surrounded by over the last few years.
For here, twenty-five years does not make a distant memory. It's not an anniversary of when grief occurred, but rather a reminder that grief is still there. For grief never truly disappears, does it? It only changes. It evolves. But it doesn't disappear.
As you know much better than I, there are empty chairs at tables around the city that will never be filled, and families whose homes were permanently rearranged on that Tuesday morning. Grief is not linear. Grief does not just simply get solved by the ticking of a clock. Sure, time does heal wounds, and yet the scars are still there.
Today we read Exodus 12, which, if I'm going to be honest with you, in previous times of reading this, I've always thought, What a boring thing to preach on. Because it's so instruction—it’s like an instruction manual of how to deal with the Passover. And it truly is an instruction manual, for this is how the Passover is celebrated.
When we read the story of this first Passover, we must remember that it's not triumphant from the other side of the sea. No, Israel is there in Egypt. They're still inside their homes. They're sitting in the dark in fear, in persecution, in terror.
And God gives them strange—very strange—specific instructions. As we heard read today, they are to take the blood of a year-old lamb and strike it on the doorposts and on the lintel. They are to eat a meal in haste with their sandals on their feet, their staffs in their hands, their cloaks on and ready to go. Outside, a terrible cry of grief is going up across the city of their captors. The night is thick with tragedy, for this is the passover of the angel of death.
Right there in the middle of this terrifying night, while the air is so heavy in grief, God spoke these words to Moses and Aaron and said:
“This day, this day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall keep it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.”
Notice that God commands them to remember. And God commands this not years later, not once trauma may have faded, generations had come and gone, and it had become an abstract story. No, God institutes the memorial before all the smoke has cleared. God knows that collective catastrophe marks a community permanently.
To be human in this fallen world means that we cross thresholds from which there is no going back to the way things were before. The Israelites would never be the people they were before that night in Egypt, and New York will never be the city it was before that September morning.
God did not institute the Passover to soften the terror, to pretend it may have never even occurred, to declare that those tears were no longer permitted for that was the past. No. No, God designed Passover to hold the memory of the catastrophe within God's abiding presence.
Every year, when an Israelite family killed the lamb, tasted the bitter herb, and remembered the blood on the doorposts, they re-entered the sorrow of their history. The bitter herbs tasted bitter every single year; they never sweetened. They still haven't sweetened. For that taste does not sweeten with time. And they remember the cries in the dark, the fear of death at the door, the fragility of their children sleeping under that marked roof, trusting that God would keep God's promise.
For the purpose of biblical remembrance is never to rush past the sorrow. The purpose is never to forget to go through Good Friday and Holy Saturday to reach Easter Sunday. No, I think that the purpose of this type of remembrance is to ensure that our sorrow is held by God rather than be weaponized by the world.
Unsanctified trauma turns humans' hearts to stone. It makes us build emotional fortresses, and it whispers that because we are wounded, we have a right to wound. It tells us that our pain is an excuse to view every stranger with suspicion.
But look at what God did there with Israel's memory. God took the memory of their ultimate vulnerability and forged it into this bedrock of a covenant. Over and over the Torah commands: You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. God told them: Let the taste of the bitter herbs make you tender toward anyone—anyone—who weeps. Let the memory of the night death hovered near your door make you defenders of life, protectors of the fragile, and a refuge for the vulnerable.
And I think here in New York, I've learned that that is one of the holy vocations of this city. In the days and months following 9/11, New York showed the world what community looked like at its most sacrificial.
From afar, we saw on TV the off-duty firefighters jumping into their trucks. I remember sitting in my living room and watching these videos of long lines of ordinary citizens wrapping around blocks and again and again just to give blood that was so desperately needed. We saw in this city neighbors who were truly checking on neighbors, strangers handing out water, ironworkers sifting through the pile, and candlelight vigils being held on street corner after street corner, refusing to let the darkness swallow the tenderness.
Perhaps this is what Paul is reaching for in Romans 13 when he writes to a vulnerable congregation living in Rome, a violent capital:
“Owe no one anything, except to love one another... Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law... It is now the moment for you to wake from sleep... Let us lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”
The sleep that Paul warns about is not grief. For to grieve deeply is to love deeply. There is nothing sleepy about a broken heart. The sleep Paul warns against is that cold, cynical slumber that says violence and division are all this world will ever be. The sleep Paul warns about is the numbness that lets grief sour into permanent hostility.
And I don't think the armor of light means putting on a brave face and pretending we do not hurt. No, I think the armor of light is the courage to keep loving in a city that knows the full weight of human cruelty. It is the refusal—the refusal to let the horrors of twenty-five years ago dictate who we will be to our neighbors today.
In Exodus, the blood of the lamb marked the threshold between life and death. And for us who gather in the name of Jesus, that blood points us directly to the cross. On the night Jesus was handed over, He did not call down wrath. He sat with His friends, broke the Passover bread, poured the cup, and gave Himself over to absorb the full, devastating brunt of human violence.
The scars remained on Christ's body even after the resurrection. When Jesus appeared to His frightened disciples behind the locked doors, He did not erase His wounds. He showed them His hands and His side. His scars were not gone, but they were no longer bleeding. They had become holy signs that death does not get the final word.
Christ is not distant from our remembrance today and this week. He was not absent twenty-five years ago either. He was present in every stairwell, with every chaplain, beside every worker, and holding every hand in the quiet darkness.
And He is here now, right now, among this gathered community. For when two or three are gathered, Christ is there also, bearing our continuing grief in His own wounded hands.
So today, today we do not say that mourning is finished, the twenty-five years of grieving are up, and it's time to party. No. No.
Today we bring the full, unvarnished weight of our memory to this altar. We bring our tears, our lingering anger, our empty chairs, our persistent love for the people we miss. We bring the bitter herbs of our city's history, but we also bring our sandals and our staff.
We remember that the God who watched over the houses of Egypt walks in New York still.
May God comfort every heart that still aches. May God grant rest to the souls of the departed. And may God give us the grace to put on that armor of light: loving our neighbors fiercely, holding our grief with reverence.
And may God walk with us into the enduring mercy of Jesus.
Amen.
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