I mowed the grass Thursday.  It didn’t need mowing; I needed to mow it.  I don’t know why exactly.  Maybe I needed to cut on something, take a scalp or something.  (I set the mower blade real low.)  Maybe Thursday I needed to do something I could look back on and see it done.  Mostly I speak words into thin air and hope they fall into open ears; you don’t get to see the ears do the catching.

I don’t usually mow my own lawn anymore.  That’s why a man has sons, don’t you know?!  When Rhett came home from school, he was his father’s son—diplomatic but on point.  Dad, did YOU cut the grass?  I wanted to  say, Yeah, what’s it to you?  Thanks, Dad.  He let some time pass and then came back: Dad, uh, I really appreciate it, but … why does it look so bad?  Well, truth is, it does look bad.  About halfway through the cutting I couldn’t figure why it looked like the haircuts my dad used to give me in the basement with those home barber kits.  I wanted to cry the same way I did back then.  I stopped and put the mower on the sidewalk.  I noticed it wasn’t resting on all four wheels—had a kind of catawampus look to it.  I had adjusted all the wheels before I started, but it seems I made a mistake and moved the right rear wheel the opposite way from the others.  So the cut was brutally uneven.  I set it straight and tried to return to normal, tried to go back over it all again, but the damage was done. 

Anybody else felt like that this week?  We’ve tried to return to normalcy, but nothing seems normal.  The world stopped after Tuesday—or tried to.  Baseball, football, stock market, all kinds of things closed down.  In the ministry things go the other way at times like these.  Peter Jennings and I were keeping similar schedules.  I did two funerals on the day of the tragedy.  There have been prayer services, and meetings to prepare for them.  There have been statements and columns and sermons to write, news media to answer, Bible studies to lead, budgets to work on, e-mails to answer about the crisis, and Muslim friends to reassure.  There has been marital counseling, and, thank God, a wedding last night.  Some of us spent Friday and Saturday in a strategic planning retreat looking toward our church’s next five years.  I am about out of words, so I am asking you to listen more closely than usual for the Word himself behind the words.

I wonder if beneath the radar of my consciousness I needed to mow the grass to fulfill something like the command to Adam in the garden of Eden that he till it and keep it.  It’s hands-on work God wants of us.  This is our human vocation.  And thinking about our vocation—about what we are to do and not do—might be just the thing we need most today.  I thought about scrapping this new sermon series I started last week called What’s the Story?  At first it didn’t seem like the text fit.  But it’s kind of like a spider web—the Bible: touch it at any one spot and you’re caught.  The Divine Webmaster moves in on you one way or the other and gathers you to the point. 

So follow along.  God created the world and called it good.  God put us in a garden that would meet our needs for food and oxygen and the joy of life.  But we aren’t just to sit back passively and watch it work for us.  It waits for us to work with it and for it.  It has a prowess of life built into it, waiting upon us for its progress.

Work is not a result of sin; it is a God-given calling that comes from the goodness of creation.  When we put our hands to the task, when we get our fingernails black in the dirt, when we labor in the good earth, life has a chance to be what God intends it to be.  When we take shortcuts and prefer leisure to labor, when we neglect our calling to till the earth and keep it, we open the door to all kinds of evil.  We are called to act in the interest of life.

Our vocation as human beings is a hands-on calling to promote and protect life.  And that involves enormous PERMISSION.  God gave us every tree in the garden to feed and nourish us—except one.  Lots of people dumbly think religion is all about what you cannot do, what you should not touch, what freedom you have to give up to please God.  But it’s just the opposite.  God did not put us in a garden and say, Keep your hands off everything except that one tree you can eat from.  God gave us unbelievable freedom and latitude and choice.  We can act with an amazing range of possibilities—all within our God-ordained human vocation.

But yes, there is PROHIBITION with permission.  You shall not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die.  Which means…?

It does not mean God wants us to be ignorant.  It does not mean God wants us to remain in the dark about what is right and wrong, about what is good and bad.  It’s not a moral statement at all.  Of course God wants us to know the difference between good and evil, right and wrong.  Good and evil is a Hebrew way of saying everything: God does not want human beings to act as if we are omniscient, as if we know everything.  God does not want us ever to forget that we are not God.  The moment we think we know it all, we begin to take liberties that are not ours to take.  We begin to violate creation and one another, thinking we know enough to judge, to settle scores, to do what’s best for others. 

There is hands-on work for us to do, and there is hands-off work, too: permission and prohibition.  There is the active work of promoting and protecting life, and there is the work of refraining from acting when we cannot know enough to act in ways that will heal instead of hurt.  The first principle of the Hippocratic oath in medicine is, Do no harm.  This is an echo of the command in the garden not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

But isn’t that just the kind of sin we have seen this week?  Instead of promoting life and protecting it— which is the true vocation of all human beings—some people thought they knew enough about justice, about how to set the world straight and even scores, that they took thousands of innocent lives in the name of God.  They overreached their humanity and in doing so slithered down the chain of life to the level of beasts.

Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote an open letter to the terrorists this week.  [Seattle Times, Sept. 13, 2001]  I can’t use all his language in the pulpit.  Here’s some: Did you want us to respect your cause? You just  damned your cause. Did you want to make  us fear? You just steeled our resolve. Did you want to tear us apart? You just brought us  together. 

Allow me to chime in.  Yes, you have some grievances against America that fueled your rage.  We are not always right or righteous.  It is true we have sided often with Israel against the Palestinians in ways that have not been compassionate to Arabs.  It is true we have propped up puppet rulers, like the Shah of Iran, and other oppressive governments in the interest of cheap oil.  We have sometimes been insensitive to the interests of the people on the ground in Third World nations, the way we pursue our business and political interests.  We are also capable of repenting our sins and living differently.  But what you have done has only cut the heart out of all desire to learn.  You have fueled our rage now.  You have unified a nation capable of striking back with might in ways that might even take the lives of some we wished to spare.  You have raised the stakes.  You have declared a war we are all too eager to enter.  And make no mistake, we aim to win this war by defeating you, and not likely by understanding you and seeking peace. 

This, my friends, is the way of the world when it eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  In the moment we do, we are on the path of death.  But we don’t have to be.  We can choose otherwise, as Billy Graham said at the national memorial service this week.  We can choose to promote life and peace instead of being just as omniscient and dealing more death.

Many Americans have heard Christians say these things this week and made us feel un-American.  We are flanked today by two flags in this sanctuary.  Some of us are all draped in red, white, and blue.  We do not stop being Christians to be Americans, nor do we stop being Americans to be Christians. 

Someone wrote in the dust on a window near the site of the rubble in New York: Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.  Someone else came along and struck through the word not and wrote: Kill them all!  I heard a radio guy say, There’s a place and time for all you religious people preaching peace, but this isn’t it.  You people need to just back off and let the military do their duty.  So what? It’s the job of religious people just to come along after all the killing and bury the dead and comfort the bereaved?  Is that it?  Does anyone think maybe we might have something to say ahead of time about the role of faith in restraining violence in the interest of life?

But here’s the other side: that does not mean justice should be neglected.  Part of our calling, part of God’s command to keep the garden involves protecting life as well as promoting it.  Stopping terrorists from killing people —sometimes maybe even by the use of force that takes life in the doing— this can be a promotion of life too.  We have already bit into the fruit of that tree, and there’s no way of getting the rottenness of the apple out of our systems entirely.  We live on this side of the sin of Adam and Eve, and when we act we will never have the luxury of pure hearts or clean hands. 

That said, there is still no excuse for us to forsake our true calling to promote and protect life.  We ought to exercise every bit of judgment and restraint in pursuit of justice, so that we don’t just ratchet up the killing to make ourselves feel better by being avenged. 

If you want to weed your garden, you don’t go at it with a Rototiller and a blindfold.  You’ll make mistakes.  You can’t help it.  Neither do you spray Round-up on the whole thing, lest you end up killing your precious petunias, too.  And if you want to get the snakes out of your garden, you don’t kill the worms in the process just because they look kind of like snakes.  You don’t profile everything that looks suspiciously like a snake and take it out.  You know what I am talking about.  We must not suspect every Arab-looking person or condemn all Muslims.  We must proceed with patience and care, as our president has said this week, even as we pursue with passion those who did this to innocent people.

The real models for us should be those heroes in New York and D.C. digging in the rubble night and day with bare knuckles, patiently and prayerfully looking for life and doing what they can out of love.  They are determined to salvage life rather than savage it.

We must leave room for the wrath of God, Paul says in Romans, knowing there is only One who is all-knowing, and God will repay.  We may try to rid the world of this evil of terrorism, but we will not rid the world of evil altogether.  Even God does not seem to be moving to rid the world of evil the way we want to.  Just look at Jesus on the cross and you will see God’s way of suffering love.  Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. … Do not repay evil for evil but overcome evil with good.

This is a time when we want to draw together as a nation behind our president, George W. Bush, regardless of party politics.  We are all Americans now, if not New Yorkers.  And we are all bruised if not bereaved.  We are a strong and resilient people, even if now we know how fragile and vulnerable we are, too.  We want something done to answer this evil done against us.  Fine and good.  Let’s go get them.  But let’s not become like as we do.  Let’s be world leaders, but let’s lead the world to a new wave of peace.

In our prayers for our leaders, we can ask God to give wisdom about what kind of response will promote life and not destroy it, and that we will do things that will restore freedom and chase away fear. 

FDR said, The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.  The Bible trumps that: I John says, [Only] perfect love casts out fear. [1 John 4:18]And the poet W.H. Auden applies the exclamation point: We must love one another or die.  [“September 1, 1939”]

What’s it going to be, America?