A Hard Look

This is what following the lectionary does to you sometimes.  On the thirteenth anniversary of 9-11, I had to write a sermon about forgiveness.  Specifically, I had to deal with the parable that Jesus tells about the unmerciful servant, and the injunction that if we don't forgive others then God is rather likely to hold that against us.
I thought about where the journey of vengeance has taken us over the past dozen plus years, and I came to the rather un-shocking realization that our quest for vengeance has really only made matters worse.  We haven't really solved any problems long term.  We took out Osama and Saddam, and now we have ISIS and only the extremely naive believe that the Taliban in actually defeated.  The middle east is a mess and most of the world, including our some of our "allies" pretty much blame us for it.
Well played Al-Qaida, well played.
But we didn't have to take the bait you know.  We could have thought things through a little longer, we could have been a bit more, I don't know, diplomatic, in our response.  If we had just exercised forbearance, not even honest to goodness forgiveness, we could have held on to something very important, much more important than the spurious "victories" we have won in the "war on terror."
In the wake of 9-11, we had the sympathy and good will of the world.  For those brief moments that we mourned, the majority of people, Muslim people especially, I seem to remember, mourned with us.  We could have made meaningful progress on so many fronts, we had credibility and gravitas, and we could have become a voice of reason, but we didn't, and the world has paid the price.
There's this scene in A River Runs Through It, where the two brothers are fighting, and one of them accidentally knocks their mother over, and they both realize that they were being stupid.  We had a chance to be the mother, and to use our pain to heal, and speak a word of sense into a crazy, violent world, but we didn't.  We didn't live up to our self proclaimed status of being a Christian Nation, we became a vengeful nation, we went on the warpath, we became the savage, violent, imperialist power that our attackers claimed we would be.  We waded into several quagmires, just like they wanted. We have made a generation of new martyrs to feed the flames of extreme fundamentalism, just like they wanted.
The really peculiar thing about all this, is we knew that's what they wanted.  They stated their goals, in writing and on video, they told us exactly what they expected us to do, and we freaking did it.
It was absolute arrogance.
It was unrepentant violence.
It was a pervasive taint of greed.
And it was a total lack of forethought.
In short, it was the worst elements of Christendom that responded to the attack by the worst elements of Islam, while in the background, the best elements of both were in the background saying, "Hey, um guys, can you stop punching each other for just a second, we've got another idea."
I'm not sure how it felt to the moderates on the Muslim side, but on the Jesus side it felt like getting told to shut up and get out of the way.  All of that peace, love and forgiveness is a nice idea, but now Jesus wants us to bomb the living snot out of some brown people, because "Hoorah."
I have to think, that whatever else Jesus might think of the USA, he would have to question whether we actually understand what we're praying when we say, "Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us."
I think that if we had been a the Christian Nation we sometimes claim to be we could have actually created a world where things like 9-11 never happen again.  Instead, by being violent and vengeful, we have created a world where they're almost inevitable.  All of our efforts to enforce our way to a safer world, just seem to have made the world a more hostile place, not to mention hamstringing our economy with the massive cost of war, and allowing fear to polarize and paralyze our whole political system.
I know forgiving seems like a crazy idea, but why don't we try it sometime?