Between Sundays
Twenty-five years.
I teach this event now, in my US Modern History class at Stevenson. And every semester I have to stop and remind myself of something. My students were not there. They were not even born yet. They have lived their entire lives in a post-9/11 world, in the after, with no memory of the before. To them, September 11th is history, a chapter in a textbook, footage on a screen. To me, and to many of you, it is memory, still tender to the touch.
Each year we watch that footage together. The second plane. The second tower. The moment the whole watching world understood at once that this was no accident. And I watch my students take it in, this thing that shaped the entire world they inherited, and I realize they are meeting for the first time what we can never unsee.
The truth that day taught us was a hard one. The safety and security we had always known, and if we are honest, taken for granted, turned out to be far more fragile than we believed. In a single morning, it was devastated. The ground we thought was solid gave way beneath us.
I carry that lesson with me still, sometimes in ways my own kids find a little much. My youngest now lives and goes to school just a block from where the towers once stood. And so, the summer before he moved in, I made him walk the Brooklyn Bridge with me on foot. He thought I had lost my mind. But I had a reason, one only a mother shaped by that beautiful, crystal-clear Tuesday in 2001 would think of. I wanted him to know how to get out of the city on foot, if he ever had to. That is what that day did to us. It rewired how some of us love the people we cannot bear to lose.
So, let’s take that morning, and everything stripped away, and place it next to the words of Psalm 46.
“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change.” ~Psalm 46:1-2
The psalmist knows exactly what it feels like when the world comes apart. He writes of the earth giving way, of the mountains shaking and falling into the heart of the sea, of the waters roaring and foaming. He is describing creation itself coming undone, the most solid things we know crumbling into chaos. Anyone who watched those towers fall knows something of that image. And yet, right in the middle of all that collapse, the psalmist plants his feet and says, we will not fear. Not because the danger is not real. Not because the loss does not hurt. But because there is a refuge deeper than any tower, a security that cannot be toppled, a God who is a very present help in trouble.
This is the hard and holy thing our faith offers us on a day like this. It does not promise that nothing will ever fall. We know too much about that. What it promises is that when everything we built for safety proves fragile, there is someone who does not. Towers fall. Empires end. The ground we trusted gives way. And still, God is our refuge and strength, present in trouble, holding us through the very worst of it.
So, today, we remember. We remember the nearly three thousand souls who did not come home. We remember the wives and husbands and children and parents whose world split in two that day and never fully mended. And we remember the helpers, the firefighters and officers and ordinary people who ran toward the danger while everyone else ran away, who laid down their lives for strangers. Jesus said there is no greater love than that. We saw it, in the smoke and the ash, with our own eyes.
And to everyone who still carries fear from that day, or grief, or a worry that rewired how you love, hear the last word the psalm gives us. Be still and know that I am God. Even now. Even here. Even in a world that split in two. God is our refuge, and God is not going anywhere.
May we never forget. And may we never stop trusting the One who holds us, whatever falls.
Until Sunday, and all the days between,
Dr. Hutton