By Todd A. Peperkorn
Everyone has events that define them. In a very rare case, an event may rise to define a generation. Pearl Harbor or the assassination of JFK both come to mind. These are events with a clear before-and-after, where it seems as though everything has changed and there is no turning back.
9/11 was just such an event.
I was a 31-year-old pastor at Messiah Lutheran Church in Kenosha, Wisconsin, at the time. My wife and I had been there for two years. We had a six-month-old daughter. It feels like a lifetime ago, because it was.
In some respects, we were far removed from the worst of the day. We didn’t live in New York or Washington, D.C., or out in a field in Pennsylvania. We were off in southeast Wisconsin, “safe” from terrorists and madmen.
It didn’t feel safe.
More than any other event before it, 9/11 was a worldwide trauma. It wasn’t just the continual coverage on TV and radio. It was cell phones and this newish thing that was already huge called the internet. Information and even emotion seemed to travel at a near-instantaneous rate. Today, that is just the way things are. At the time, this was a new phenomenon that we were just beginning to grapple with as a society. A whole country could feel the effects of a single event in a way it had never before. What had started as WWII reels a generation before was now commonplace. We could all feel like we were there, even if we weren’t.
At least, it felt like it to us.
Since that fateful day, I have spoken to several survivors in both New York and the Pentagon. I’ve heard stories of sights, sounds, and smells that would make even the most callous person retch. The haze. The smoke and smell of charred death. For the people who were physically there, there is a reality that still sits with them, sits in their gut, and will probably never go away this side of the Resurrection of all flesh.
What we have now is a world that is more anxious, more uncertain, and more angry than it was before. Does all of that come down to 9/11? Of course not. But in many respects, that is when this shift really started. I saw it for 20 years after 9/11 as a parish pastor, and see it now in our students at CTSFW. It is no coincidence that diagnoses of anxiety and depression went up like mad after 9/11.
Here is what I have learned. We each have our own burdens. We are each weak and sinful in our own way. The griefs that afflict us are common to all, even though they feel like no one else could ever understand. Finally, Christ covers it all.
Here are a couple of sermons I’ve preached in the past that are relevant to today. One of them was preached on 9/11, and the other at the 10th anniversary.
Be at peace.