Sermon on September 7, 2025
“Choose Life, Together”
By: The Very Rev. Pamela Dolan
Twenty-four years ago almost to the day, on September 11, 2001, something extraordinary happened in New York City. I’m not talking about the terrorism itself, the act of destructive violence that led to so much death and devastation. Rather I’m talking about how the people of New York responded that day. They were magnificent. They were brave and kind and cooperative and self-sacrificing. Was it everyone? No, probably not. But as Rebecca Solnit explores in her essential book about disasters and resilience, A Paradise Built in Hell[i], the stories of how everyday people behave in times of crisis are largely ignored and misrepresented. While the media focuses on heroes and villains, public figures and outliers, a quiet but vast stream of kindness, courage, and resourcefulness flows by almost unnoticed.
In New York that day, before the geopolitical posturing and warmongering, beyond the unending replays of the planes hitting the towers, before even the heroic exploits of the firemen and police officers, ordinary people responded in utterly extraordinary ways. To borrow the words of Moses that we hear in today’s passage from Deuteronomy, they chose life. But not just their own lives. They chose life in the broadest sense, life with, life for, life together. It is worth quoting Solnit at length to illustrate this. She writes,
When the towers crumpled and people nearby were plunged into the pitch-black darkness inside the fast-moving cloud of pulverized buildings, many of them thought they had died. And even after the most unimaginable event possible, even after being showered with debris and immersed in midmorning darkness, after that vision of 220 floors, each an acre in size, coming down, after witnessing commercial airliners become firebombs, after inhaling that terrible choking dust that would damage so many permanently, people for the most part got back up and tried to take care of each other.
People got back up and tried to take care of each other. She gives far more examples than I can recount here, both of people in the towers who helped others and of people throughout the city that day and in the days and weeks following who chose life by choosing to do everything in their power to help others. There were 25,000 people who safely evacuated themselves from those buildings, despite the daunting physical challenge and the confusing and contradictory orders they got from officials. There were many thousands more who had to leave the surrounding area as the compounding dangers of those falling towers became apparent, and “a spontaneously assembled armada of boats conducted in a few hours an evacuation far larger than the fabled ten-day Dunkirk evacuation of the Second World War.” Solnit tells stories like that of a finance guy, a former college athlete, who could have been the first out of the building but instead kept looking back and slowing down to make sure that everyone from his office also made it out. Stories about a paraplegic who was carried down the stairs by a relay of coworkers and virtual strangers working together, and about a Pakistani immigrant who was rescued by a Hasidic Jewish man from Brooklyn, and about of a group of office workers who walked down 87 stories in a pitch-black stairwell, while the building collapsed around them, who all made it out okay because they formed a human chain, each keeping a hand on the shoulder of the person in front of them. That is what it looks like to choose life. Not every man for himself. Not survival of the strongest, fastest, or most selfish. But life with, life for, and life because of our fellow human beings.
Solnit’s book is about much more than New York on 9/11, and I want us to return to these stories and ideas, but first let’s look at today’s Gospel. It’s a tough one. At first glance it seems like the exact opposite of the message from Deuteronomy urging us to choose life. Here Jesus literally says that we’re supposed to hate other people and even life itself—what on earth can this mean? How can we square it with the good news of a God who joins up with our humanity in order to heal the sick, liberate the captive, and comfort the brokenhearted?
There is a bit of careful parsing we could do over that word “hate,” although I don’t want to spend too much time on it. A Greek scholar I trust says that the word is about preferences and priorities, not about feeling some sort of emotional loathing. Jesus is using as examples the things that generally matter the most to people, especially to good people, things like family loyalty and the gift of life, and asking if we could forsake even those important and precious things if it were necessary for some greater good. The hardest choices are not between good things and bad things, after all, but between competing goods, and that is where knowing our priorities and core values becomes so important.
When you think about the context, all these people crowding around Jesus, caught up in the thrill of the moment, certain that they want to be his disciples, his rough language makes more sense. Extreme as it sounds to our ears, what Jesus is saying is something like, “Y’all, this isn’t going to be easy. You’re having a good time following me now, but you haven’t stopped to count the cost, the price you’re going to have to pay that is right around the corner. Your family might not like it. Your social media followers might not like it. Your boss definitely won’t like it. If you have anything that is holding you back, anything that you can’t stand to lose, you’re not going to make it. You need to know that now, while you can still choose to turn back.”
Jesus is very good at using hyperbolic language to wake us up out of our timid and anxious everyday way of living. When Jesus says we must to give up our possessions and carry our cross if we want to follow him, scary as that might sound, he is actually offering us the same choice that God gave the Israelites in Deuteronomy: the way of life or the way of death. We get to choose either abundant life, life lived immersed in God and God’s love for the world, or else something that looks like life, might even look like success and achievement, but is in fact mere existence—shallow, fleeting, and unsatisfying.
Too often, we don’t realize that we have that choice until it is forced upon us, such as in moments of crisis or disaster. And yet, for better or worse, today we are living through what is in many ways a life-threatening, widespread disaster, but without the singular and urgent immediacy of a tsunami or a wildfire or a terrorist attack. There is the climate crisis, the democracy crisis, the inequality crisis, and more, all of it gathering steam and threatening to overwhelm us, and yet so much of it happening in so many places that it’s hard to know where or how to push back or resist or even escape. And so we end up feeling stuck, or avoidant, or despairing.
I think the way forward might be simple, if not easy. Jesus is right: we need to count the cost, and then we need to be willing to give up anything that is holding us back from taking the next right step, the step that will lead us, in all likelihood, to the Cross but that will also lead us, without doubt, to resurrection and new life. We have all the tools we need. We have countless examples of people who have found that, when everything is stripped away from them through loss or violence or calamity, what is left is their essential goodness and interdependence. Astonishingly, when we lean into that we end up in a beautiful, fruitful, flourishing place, a life filled with meaning and purpose and passion, not despite but because it is also without the security and safety we think we crave.
Solnit and others have shown that disasters bring out our latent, always available spirit of resilience and generosity and that so often what emerges is a surprising wellspring of joy. It is as if in giving so deeply of ourselves we realize that this is how we were meant to live all along—because it is! Human beings were created to care for one another and the world; we were created for interdependence and mutual care and concern. Our current way of life, to which most of us so desperately cling, actually works against those values. As Solnit says, it sadly takes disaster to make clear “how deeply most of us desire connection, participation, altruism, and purpose.”
And where better to find a life of “connection, participation, altruism, and purpose”—that life we so long for in our deep heart’s core—than right here? Right here in church, yes, with all our imperfections and fragility and ego and fear, but also with our empathy and creativity and faithfulness. And right here in this life of discipleship, of following the way of Jesus, of living more deeply into our questions and our hopes and our love for the beautiful world that God created. Right here and right now, in our little corner of the world at this very moment, we can begin to form that human chain, one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of us, so that we can walk out of the darkness together. We can commit to slowing down, to holding space, and to not giving up, so that everyone has a chance to step out into the light. Amen.
[i] All quotes and examples are taken from this remarkable book: Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (Viking, 2009).
