Daily Lesson for September 11, 2015

Today's lesson comes from Psalm 40 verse 2:

"He drew me up from the pit of destruction . . .
and set my feet upon a rock."

The great Biblical scholar Walter Brueggeman says the psalms are written from a point of either orientation, disorientation, or re-orientation -- that is, either from a time when all in the world is well, or a time when all that we know about the world is falling apart, or a time when a new world has been pieces back together.

Fourteen years today on September 11, 2001 America and indeed the whole Western world entered into -- or, perhaps more accurately, was thrust into -- a time of great disorientation.

I lived in New York City from February to August 2001.  The summer of 2001 was wonderful -- hot and oppressively muggy in the city to be sure -- but also carefree. The Wall had come down in Berlin and we were under the impression the Cold War was over, Y2K had not killed us all, and no one had ever heard of Al-Qaeda, anthrax, Ben Laden, or ISIS.  In the afternoons I would run south alongside the West Side Highway in Manhattan, looking down towards the Financial District where the two twin towers rose over the City like the legs of the Colossus.  I don't know that I ever even once thought of terrorism that summer.

As I sat in my Dallas-bound plane that August, awaiting its takeoff and my return trip to Texas and then on to seminary, I wrote in my journal some final reflections on that Manhattan summer and ended with these now-hauntingly true words: "I can always go back to New York; but I'll never go back to right now."

We can never go back to August 2001; the world as we know it has changed. And truly, it is yet still too early to say if we are now in the time re-orientation or still, frighteningly, still yet just the early days of disorientation.  If the psalmist were alive today it seems doubtful that he would now speak of peace and tranquility and the calm after the storm.

But perhaps what the psalmist would dare to speak is a word about foundation and deliverance -- that even as yet in the midst of disorientation and even destruction we have a deliverer, one who has always and will always rescue us from the pit and place our feet again on a firm foundation.

In the grievous days following 9-11, a service of remembrance took place in the Washington National Cathedral and Billy Graham was the preacher. In his sermon he quoted lines to an old and familiar hymn:

"Fear not, I am with thee; O be not dismayed,
For I am thy God, and will still give thee aid;
I'll strengthen thee, and help thee, and cause thee to stared,
Upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand."

We know we cannot go back to the time before 9-11, and we are uncertain as to what time we are in now -- disorientation or re-orientation. But one thing is still sure, that all times are in the LORD's hands; and a second also, that so too are we.

This is the firm foundation which we stand on, and it shall never, ever be destroyed.