Emmaus Walk 45

Twenty-five years ago today, I was in a small house on top of a hill in Chester, Arkansas. A technician had just left after installing my satellite television, and I turned it on for the first time a few minutes before nine in the morning. What I saw was the World Trade Center collapsing. For one confused moment, I thought it was a promotion for some new show. Then the commentator's voice broke through, and with it the panic, the disbelief, and the unfolding horror that would not let go of any of us for a long time. I did not yet know the fate of the people in those towers, or what was happening in Washington. I only knew that the world I woke up in that morning was not the world I would go to sleep in that night.
In that fear, I turned to Psalm 91. I am still turning to it.

Psalm 91 is one of the most beautiful prayers ever written for times of anxiety, stress, and the need for protection and guidance. I tell people again and again: when you are anxious, when your children and your family need God's guidance, pray this psalm. God is nearer than we imagine. But if we are not open to seeing God, it becomes hard to recognize the many ways God is already present, already at work, already holding us. This psalm does not promise that nothing bad will ever happen. It promises that we are never facing it alone. "He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge" (Psalm 91:4). I have watched that promise carry people through grief, through diagnosis, through war, through every kind of darkness. I could tell you story after story.

Today we remember the victims of September 11, and we remember rightly. But remembrance carries a responsibility. It is not enough to grieve what was done to us without also refusing to do it to others. No war, no act of terror, no atrocity against humanity can ever be justified — not the one done to us twenty-five years ago, and not the ones still being carried out in Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Ukraine, Russia, Sudan, and so many other places the world has grown tired of naming. There is no such thing as a just war, however much we long to believe otherwise. Every leader who wages endless war against any people, anywhere, stands against God's plan for us.

Our faith calls us to see the humanness in every human being — not their gender, their sexuality, their nationality, or their politics, but their belovedness, alongside the animate and inanimate creation we are charged to protect and provide for. In our baptismal covenant, we promise to "respect the dignity of every human being" and to "strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being." That promise does not stop at a border. The people we call enemies are still our brothers and sisters in Christ.
As Desmond Tutu once said, "My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together." That is the truth Psalm 91 quietly teaches us as well — that our refuge is shared, and so is our responsibility for one another.

The prophet Micah put it simply enough for anyone to carry: "He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8).

Let us pray Psalm 91 every day, starting today. And let us live it — with mercy, with justice, and with hope for every nation and every people God has made.