The week of September 11, I met a friend, a New Testament scholar, at a candlelight vigil for those killed in the terrorist attacks. He complained irately that he "couldn't listen to any more 'happy ending' sermons about the disaster." I thought this was a remarkably negative comment, coming from a man who spent his life immersed in the good news of the gospel! Yet I realized that I too was not ready for happy endings; the pessimism of the prophet Jeremiah suits me better. I worry that we have tried to heal our wounds too quickly. In another passage, Jeremiah warned us of false prophets: who are "greedy for unjust gain; from prophet to priest everyone deals falsely. They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying Peace, peace, when there is no peace." Of course we celebrated the extraordinary heroism that these terrorist events evoked. In firemen, police, medics, we have found new, working class heroes. (My son is a NYC firefighter -- he is my hero, for sure.) And we reached out to others -- as Daniel Schorr said, "Americans are discovering each other." But then we tended to lose ourselves in congratulation about how well we handled that horrifying day. And quickly we turned away from defeat to the distractions of war and its possibilities for victory.

In the process, I believe two facts about September 11 got left behind. One was simply that it WAS a defeat and not a matter for congratulation at all. I trust the words of a NYC fireman who was flown out to Phoenix to be an honored guest at the first game of the World Series. After acknowledging the cheers of the crowd of 50,000, Al Hogan told them, "This encouragement is what's keeping the Fire Dept. together now, because we took a beating, boy, and we took it bad." That, I think, is an honest description from a man who was there. Jeremiah took a beating too -- literally with the Babylonian army at the gates of Jerusalem, he would not stop his warnings that time was running out. His enemies beat him, imprisoned him, put him in the stocks, yet he would not be silenced. (I am mindful as I stand here of what happened to Jeremiah: you may well put me in stocks out in Chevy Chase Circle, for I too bring warnings!) We turned away from defeat so quickly that we may not have taken time to learn its lessons.

The urgent lesson of the terrorist attack, it seems to me, is to understand why they hate us so. Following Jeremiah's admonition not to heal wounds lightly, let us open that wound this morning to see what more we can learn. The first lesson I call "the connections between our greed and the world's need." Every year for about 15 years I have gone to Central America as a human rights observer. We stay always in villages and often in refugee settlements. The refugees are poor people who through armed conflict have lost what little they had. I go from my apartment in Manhattan sometimes to homes that consist of a circle of stakes in the ground - no walls, just a row of stakes, like in a pen for animals. There may or may not be sheets of tin overhead. When I enter, the mother of the family always makes this gesture ----- meaning, won't you have a seat. It utterly confused me at first because there was nothing to sit on. There was in fact no furniture at all. Still, she made the gesture of hospitality: "Please have a seat." So, I sit down on the ground. Meals are served on the lids of the pots that the food was cooked in; we eat with our fingers. After supper we sit in the dark while the family tells its version of wartime terror -- rape, or massacre, the poison spraying of their fields, of fleeing across mountains, of living for months in the woods with no shelter, not daring to come out. I sleep on the ground, listening to the family snoring and calling out in their sleep. The children, I remember, may have seen people killed before their eyes. Perhaps these horrors came into their dreams.

Then I fly back to New York. I call these trips my "reality check" because the culture shock is unbelievable, every single time. I call us the land of Gargantua, the country where everything is supersized, bigger than it needs to be. I call us the people of excess, of greed. Yes, there is another side to it -- I come back cherishing more than ever our public school system, our health care, our safe drinking water, our LIFE EXPECTANCY: in Haiti and Guatemala one doesn't see many people my age. But I also feel a deep unease: guilt of course -- I don't deserve my good fortune, any more than they deserve their early deaths. But mainly I feel unease. This is one reason why they hate us -- because of our undeserved, fabulous wealth. Things can't stay this way. We can't keep them in their place forever. And so it is my turn to sleep badly.

This problem of unfair distribution of resources, as we all know, is huge and complex. It intricately involves the global economy, the militaries, the politicians, and yes, the religious institutions of many lands. Many persons in this congregation have worked on it for years. Yet it is so huge that we may feel we can't do anything about it. This morning I want to suggest one part of it that we can affect, a key part -- our addiction to oil. The need to control present and future supplies of oil drives much of our foreign policy and political life. We Americans are 5% of the world's population yet we use 25% of the world's oil. We have no right to it. Environmentalist Rob Nixon claims that "the most decisive war we can wage on behalf of national security is the war against our own oil gluttony."

My proposal is simple and quite unheroic. I pledge to do the following:
1. When I am chilly, I will put on a sweater rather than turning up the thermostat.
2. Next time I buy a car, I will pick out the smallest one I can use.
3. I will no longer heat my summer home all winter, in hopes of spending a couple of week-ends there.
4. And if anyone offers a bond issue to develop buses and trains that run on electricity, I'm ready to vote for that. Will you join me? Our dependency on oil is part of what made us targets for terrorism.

LESSON II. But I have not come all the way from New York to urge us to conserve oil. We have known for a long time that we should do that. I'm thinking instead about how many things have changed, and what that means about us. On September 11 as the towers fell and fire still raged at the Pentagon, the TV announcers immediately declared that "America will never be the same again." I thought that that was hyperbole. But as time has passed I see that they were right. There is a look on my son the fireman's face that I've never seen before. We are asking questions we never dreamed we'd ask, like if it is still safe to live in New York or Washington. And on and on.

People are asking the big questions now. This is a Kairos time, a time given us by God for seeking some new understandings. I want to propose two of these big questions and suggest their message for Christians.

1. Has war changed?

Is it possible that we have gone to war on the basis of an outmoded paradigm for war? My research on violence against women in war indicates that we may have done so.

One statistic tells it all: In WWI, the ratio of soldiers killed to civilians was 8 soldiers to 1 civilian; in WWII, 1 soldier for every 1 civilian. In the many small wars in the last half of this century, the ratio is 1 soldier killed to 8 civilians. The ratio of civilians killed in the recent attack was far higher even than that. This means that the victims now are women, children, the elderly, unarmed men.

We question uneasily if our usual methods -- heavy bombing and land mines, which inevitably kill civilians -- can ever bring down a terrorist network. Civilians have little or no say about starting wars and stand to lose everything and win nothing in the conflict, yet we do not consider that we should have a voice.

Since the nature of war has changed, we must ask different questions before we go to war: Who will the victims be? What are the long-range goals?

I don't hear the word "civilian" used much in the vast discussion since September 11. We civilians had better get into the debates about war, at crucial levels, unless we want to continue to furnish the overwhelming number of victims -- and then not even be mentioned.

2. Are there alternatives to war?

I am an historian. For years I taught about the wars that swept over Europe, and I taught a course entirely about peace and war. I soon learned a valuable lesson: that my students believed that war is inevitable, and that peace is a communist word. The word "peace" has no real meaning for us. I struggled against these beliefs but I lost. The students WANTED war. After all, don't wars take place in other countries, and don't we usually win?

I realized with horror that in their minds there were no alternatives to war. It is little surprise, therefore, that 90% of Americans recently told pollsters that they "wanted war" against the terrorists. One woman said, "I feel like I can't talk about nonviolence -- I'm afraid it will be perceived as un-American." I know what she means. No matter that the barbarism of September 11 was a crime, carried out by a terrorist network, not a nation's act of war against us; was a judicial matter to be punished in court, not on the battlefield. But because we don't have in our minds, categories such as international courts with criminal jurisdiction, we cannot conceive of any response except a military one.

At this point we Christians must stop and ask: why not? We are the people of the New Testament, which calls us NOT TO VENGEANCE but to the transformation of our hearts, away from the endless cycle of violence, towards the way of Jesus, which was the way of peace. We are admonished to do a very hard thing -- to love our enemies; to stop them from violent acts and to punish them, yes, but then to LISTEN TO THEM, which is what loving is. The terrorists don't deserve our ear, but they are saying something about us that we need to hear.

What has happened to the New Testament messages of: not being overcome by evil but overcoming evil with good -- that's from Romans; blessed are the peacemakers -- that's the gospel of Matthew; Always bearing in mind Martin Luther King's admonition, that without justice, there is no peace.

Do we accept these sayings and teach them to our children only in times of peace? Do we reject them the moment we are attacked? If so, we can claim no moral high road, for we too are guilty of perpetuating the cycle of violence.

I'm talking about revising our view of the world, from one that sees other countries as something to exploit, to one that shares with them. The day after September 11, the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship offered this statement on its webpage:

"We have great wealth and power. Only by sharing these gifts can we live in peace with the rest of the world.... Shaken as we are by the terror of September 11, tempted as we are to rage and retribution, let us pray God to turn us toward the hope that is offered us by the Prince of Peace. Let us become builders rather than destroyers. May God have mercy on us as we work to heal our wounds and learn the ways of peace."

What does "becoming builders" mean today? Considering alternatives to war -- diplomacy, economic sanctions, building a circle of alliances through the United Nations, reducing stockpiles of weapons, giving aid to the huge refugee populations whose poverty is a breeding ground for terrorists, and especially to give up some of our own sovereignty by not acting unilaterally.

These methods require the patience of Job, and courage. In 1934 Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked, "How does peace come about? Through a system of political treaties? Through arming so strongly that one 'guarantees peace'? Through none of these, because all of them confuse peace with safety. Peace must be dared. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to mistrust, and this mistrust in turn brings forth war." He called for a universal religious council, a peace council that would challenge all aggressors to lay down their arms.

This may sound utopian to our ears. Considering that WWII killed 20,000,000 people, including Bonhoeffer, however, was he utopian to call for this in 1934, or was he prophetic? Even Jeremiah the pessimist heard God when God offered a New Covenant if people would change their ways.

Time is running out for us. We have the resources either to fight a big war OR TO SHARE OUR RESOURCES with the countries mired in poverty. I believe that we Christians must be the alternative voice. Even if we are misunderstood, called un-American, etc. I will end with words written after the attack by Christian ethicist Richard Shaull, a man who spent years working among the poor in Brazil:

"Now suddenly our eyes are opened to see the vulnerability of our modern society to its own inventions.... Our hope lies in a radical conversion on our part: to dedicate our energies with a passion comparable to that of the suicide bombers, to use our material wealth to respond to the suffering of [despairing] people....

The real challenge ahead is to accept the new vision that God is offering us: to perceive that we can no longer take into our own hands the responsibility of ordering the world [by using our military power and political clout to monitor and dominate the world]... and to dare to use our tremendous economic resources to meet the most basic and urgent needs of the world's poor."

Shaull is telling us to do what my conscience tried to tell me each time I came back from trips to Central America -- to change our priorities. To remember, the next time we buy a car, to go for the most gasoline-efficient model. It seems not so hard to do now -- now that the beautiful cities in which we lived out the American dream are now wounded, changed forever. It is time now that we get serious about changing ourselves. May God have mercy on us as we work to heal our wounds and learn the ways of peace.