I was sitting inside a prayer chapel, trying to meet with the Almighty.

When we say where we were, we fold the world into our own stories, weaving it between the mundane and the miraculous as a way of making sense. It is a way of organizing things. And like the weather, the commonality of “where” gives us all a space in which we can meet each other, pause, and listen.

The significance of 9/11 could never be reduced to the role it played in our lives. The events of Iraq afterward, the expansion of the security state, the eagerness to sell homes to restart the economic machine–the gods returned to their struggles, and the momentary unity that emerged out of the horror and sacrifice slowly eroded.

But for most of us, those global events cannot be fully understood without also discerning the ways in which the contours of lives and habits of seeing and reflecting also change. We have heard the news anchors and the pundits, but we should not neglect its meaning in our own lives as well. That discernment begins in the memory, and memory is inextricably linked with place. The greatest theological biography of Christian history, Augustine’s Confessions, is tied together in part by the places that frame Augustine’s narrative. Carthage, Rome, Milan, Ostia: Geography and history are ultimately interdependent disciplines.

The pews in the chapel made prayer difficult, but the music from the trucks outside made it impossible.

Only two days before, I had led worship for Biola’s weekly worship service. A particularly special time. Confession and lamentation, followed by resting in the redemption we have in Christ and God’s providential care over his creation and ending by rejoicing that our mourning would become dancing. The moments singing are as easily recalled for me as any during that season. There is something to that story, and it framed the events of 9/11 for me. The God who laughs the nations to scorn will someday have his vindication.

The days following were spent talking of war and rumors of war, and of leaving behind our studies to serve our country, and of whether it was right to ask citizens to consume as their patriotic duty. We read “Learning in Wartime” and tried to remember with Lewis that 9/11 had created ”no absolutely new situation” but had “simply aggravated the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it.” And in large part, we were successful. We relished the luxury of our first-world education, recognizing its perilous condition amidst the fragility of the world, and desperately wrestled with the permanent things in hopes that any wisdom we acquired might someday help another.

The music from the trucks was interrupted by the announcer, and so I gave up my attempts to pray and listened.

The decision to reflect about events as important as 9/11 through our own experience borders on narcissism. But there are few moments in our lives that so obviously and clearly matter, when the day is filled with presence and the inescapable fragility of human life is made so tragically apparent. My friendships with many of the young men who I now consider brothers were then in their infancy, and the shadow of tragedy gave our conversations and relationship an urgency that many of us had never known before.

Most of us shrink, and rightly so, from attempting to cut through the complex character of that day and the world it created, and embark instead down the path of recollection and sharing. But that path, which begins in recalling a place and time, can lead to a civic friendship where we allow, if only for another moment, one thing we have in common overwhelm our differences and move us a step closer to the path that leads to charity and grace.

I slowly realized the music would not be returning, at least not for a while, and that my class would soon begin.

And so I knelt and mumbled the Lord’s prayer. Though we would later be told how much the world had changed, on that morning it was a matter of realizing that the prayer that we so desperately needed was still the one that our Savior had taught us to pray:

Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us,
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power,
and the glory
for ever and ever.
Amen.

Where were you?

The Bible makes it clear that self-righteousness is the premier enemy of the Gospel. And there is perhaps no group of people who better embody the sin of self-righteousness in the Bible than the Pharisees. In fact, Jesus reserved his harshest criticisms for them, calling them whitewashed tombs and hypocrites. Surprisingly to some, this demonstrates that unrighteous badness is not the greatest threat to gospel advancement. Self-righteous goodness is.
In Surprised by Grace: God’s Relentless Pursuit of Rebels, I retell the story of Jonah and show how Jonah was just as much in need of God’s grace as the sailors and the Ninevites. But the fascinating thing about Jonah is that, unlike the pagan sailors and wicked Ninevites, Jonah was one of the “good guys.” He was a prophet. He was moral. He was a part of God’s covenant community. He was one who “kept all the rules”, and did everything he was supposed to do. He wasn’t some long-haired, tattooed indie rocker; he was a clean-cut prep. He wasn’t a liberal; he was a conservative. He wasn’t irreligious; he was religious. If you’ve ever read S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders, than you’ll immediately see that the Ninevites and the sailors in the story were like the “greasers”, while Jonah was like a “soashe.”
What’s fascinating to me is that, not only in the story of Jonah, but throughout the Bible, it’s always the immoral person that gets the Gospel before the moral person.
It’s the prostitute who understands grace; it’s the Pharisee who doesn’t. It’s the unrighteous younger brother who gets it before the self-righteous older brother.
There is, however, another side to self-righteousness that younger-brother types need to be careful of. There’s an equally dangerous form of self-righteousness that plagues the unconventional, the liberal, and the non-religious types. We “authentic”, anti-legalists can become just as guilty of legalism in the opposite direction. What do I mean?
It’s simple: we become self-righteous against those who are self-righteous. Many younger evangelicals today are reacting to their parents’ conservative, buttoned-down, rule-keeping flavor of “older brother religion” with a type of liberal, untucked, rule-breaking flavor of “younger brother irreligion” which screams, “That’s right, I know I don’t have it all together and you think you do; I know I’m not good and you think you are. That makes me better than you.”
See the irony?
In other words, they’re proud that they’re not self-righteous! Hmmm…think about that one.
Listen: self-righteousness is no respecter of persons. It reaches to the religious and the irreligious; the “buttoned down” and the “untucked”; the plastic, “boardroom”, CEO Christians and the pious, coffee-house, artsy Christians. The entire Bible reveals how shortsighted all of us are when it comes to our own sin. Steve Brown writes:
You will find criticism of Christian fundamentalists by people whose secular fundamentalism dwarfs the fundamentalism of the people being criticized. Political correctness and the attendant feelings of self-righteousness have their equivalent in religious communities with religious correctness. If you look at victims, you’ll find self-righteousness. On the other hand, if you look at the people who wield power, they do it with the self-righteous notion that they know better, understand more, and more informed than others…arrogance, condescension, disdain, contemptuousness, and pomposity are everywhere.
For example, it was easy for Jonah to see the idolatry of the sailors. It was easy for him to see the perverse ways of the Ninevites. What he couldn’t see was his own idolatry, his own perversion. So the question is not whether you are self-righteous but rather, in which direction does your self-righteousness lean? Depending on who I’m with, mine goes in both directions. Arghhh!
Thankfully, while our self-righteousness reaches far, God’s grace reaches farther. And the good news is, that it reaches in both directions!