Today is September 11. It is hard to believe that it has been 19 years since that beautiful Tuesday morning in 2001, when our lives were changed, and nothing has been the same since. As we relive that day in our minds and through the many pictures and images on television this week, I am sure that every one of us remembers where we were and what we were doing when America came under attack. As news of the tragedies broke over the networks, and we watched the horrific events unfold before us, I don’t think we were really able to absorb the magnitude of what we were witnessing, - the destruction, the devastation, the smoke, the fire, the loss of lives. I know for me, no matter how many times I saw the video of the two airplanes flying into the World Trade Center, I still couldn’t believe it was happening, - and that it was real. And I had the same feeling when I went to Ground Zero shortly after Christmas that year. It was a place where I had worked for 4 years, and it literally didn’t exist anymore, but instead was now a burial ground for over 3,000 people.

Before 9/11, the single greatest loss of lives in American history occurred on September 17, 1862, during the Battle of Antietam in the Civil War, - with approximately 7,000 Confederate and Union soldiers losing their lives in battle. For those of you a little older than me, you had not experienced anything like 9/11 since Pearl Harbor in 1941, when 2,388 Americans lost their lives. And if there is one question that most likely arose in 1862, 1941, 2001, and perhaps, you still have on your mind today in the midst of COVID-19, -- it is, “Where is God in all this?” Friends, the answer has always been the same. Jesus is there already. He was not sitting indifferently above and beyond the destruction. He was in the offices that collapsed down upon each other as the towers crumbled to the ground. He was under the rubble where the dead and wounded lay buried. He was in the planes filled with terrified passengers that called on airplane phones to warn what was happening, or to say goodbye to their families. And yes, he is still in the midst us, and among those who are sick, isolated, and afraid.

As the cross of Jesus Christ proclaims, God can always be found in places of suffering. He’s not there just to comfort, but to lead us to resurrected life, so that we can have Easter in September. When we fall into the pit of pain and the abyss of agony, Jesus is there already. There are things that have happened to us in this past year that we never would have believed. You may have been someone who felt like you were on top of the world, flying high and fancy free. And you were thinking, “I was on cloud 9, - when all of a sudden, the bottom dropped out and I sank so low. I was in a pit, - in my job, in my marriage, in my mood, in my health.” And yet no matter how far we fall in life, Jesus knows right where to find us. Jesus knows what it is like when we cry out, “God, it hurts down here!” Because he can say to us, “Yes, I know. I’ve been there.”

Pastor John