This sermon was preached on the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, September 12, 2021, at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Christ the King in Pawling, New York.

“Never forget.” These are the words that we hear so much around this time every year. and most especially now as we look back a full twenty years to the events of September 11, 2001. “Never forget.” But what is it that we are never to forget? Is it the lives lost by those working in Lower Manhattan and in the Pentagon on that bright Tuesday morning? Are we never to forget the passengers on the planes, especially those on Flight 93 who managed to stop one plane from reaching its intended target? Are we never to forget the bravery and self-sacrifice of all those emergency workers, especially the firefighters who ran into burning skyscrapers, knowing full well that many of them would not run out again?

Or are we never to forget something else — something about ourselves that we encountered in that moment? Every time we look back to the horrors of that day, we encounter the memories of what happened afterward, too — the idea that people were more united than they had ever been in living memory on September 12th, that the divisions that divided us didn’t seem to matter nearly so much in the aftermath of such devastation. People will talk about how the churches were suddenly full to bursting the following weekend. Are those the things that we are never to forget? That is, at least, closer.

Perhaps what we ought to never forget about that day is what Our Lord is expressing in today’s Gospel, which is a profound change of pace from what we are used to. He says, “Do not worry about your life - what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”

In our day-to-day lives, that’s what consumes a great deal of our time and attention. Worrying about our lives, about how we look to others, worrying about how others think of us, worrying about our clothing and our vehicles and our homes, the way it all looks, the appearance of our life on social media, worrying about what our neighbors think, trying our very best to fit in and to just be normal, whatever exactly that means.

We worry about a lot of things - a lot of things that suddenly lost their color and their value and their taste in the aftermath of that day in 2001. In today’s Gospel, Our Lord is not saying that there’s anything wrong with planning ahead, with going to the grocery store and knowing why you’re there and what you need to pick up to eat in the days ahead. The word that is translated as “worry” in this instance has undertones of being “pulled apart,” of being divided, of being pulled every which way by different cares and concerns so that you’re torn into pieces. That’s what He warns against. And following that day, many people found that the things that had been pulling and tugging them apart in every direction had lost their pull. Suddenly, seemingly everyone seemed to understand instinctively that life is more than a rat race for food and clothing — that all of those things we had bought and surrounded ourselves with, that we filled our lives with, all our money and possessions could not keep us and our loved ones from harm and could not give us any answers, could not give us any hope, any way to move into the future after what we had just seen. Because we all — all of us who were living and were old enough to remember that day — we all saw it. We saw it from work and from home, we heard it on the radio and we watched with our teachers from classrooms a thousand miles away. And as we watched, we saw every certainty that we had collapse in on itself. We saw all those things that we had counted on as being strong and stable disintegrate, we came to the realization that we did not understand and could not control our world.

And that is what we remember again and again, every year, this year more than most. We see those striking images again, images that show up in the news and on social media feeds.  Photos of the moment when the second plane hit just after nine in the morning, the now unforgettable image of a man who chose to jump rather than be caught in the fire engulfing his building, or, the ones I find most haunting, the photos of thousands of people crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on foot, with a cloud of smoke and dust billowing up behind them, and they themselves covered in white ashes, the remnants of not only the buildings, but the people in them. Throughout Lower Manhattan, we saw people running into storefronts and restaurants, closing the doors tightly behind them, trying to keep out that impenetrable cloud of death.

There was nothing in this world, no eating or drinking or buying that would ever be any help after living through that. And so, what we ought to never forget, in addition to those lives that were lost, both victims and volunteers, is the anchoring reality of that day, and of the time immediately following. A time in which we all knew, at least for a little while, that nothing in this life is certain or safe, and this brought even many who were less than religious back to darken the door of a church, because there was nowhere else that had any sort of answers, any sort of hope.

This Gospel for today would, in fact, have been read the Sunday just before. It was read on September 9th, 2001, and would have been the last words from Scripture heard by a number of those people before their death.

These words continue to speak to us today. Do not worry, do not be pulled apart, do not go to pieces about what you eat and drink. Don’t be loyal to mammon, to your money and possessions and all of these things, because you know full well that they do not matter, even if the rest of the world only sees it clearly when disaster strikes, whether it was in 2001 or during the events of the last year and a half.

Our Gospel today concludes with these words: “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all of these things shall be added to you.” Seek after Him first. People who have no hope for eternity, who have no grounding reality other than what is here and now, they seek after all of that nonsense, chasing social media trends, political fads, trying to be popular, trying to impress people and build up a self-image that others will find attractive and respectable and enviable. But that’s not you. You know better. You know, every day, just what so many people came to realize that day of tragedy and in the days following. That all the things that money can buy, all the respect that you can earn in your life — none of it matters in the face of tragedy and death.

Only one thing does. Only the kingdom of God, only the presence of God has anything to offer to people who are covered head to toe in ashes and death. May we always remember, and may we never forget, now, as then, to always seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and everything else will fall as it will. Because everything else will, in the end, fall.

But God will not. Even when you are covered in ashes and death, He covers you with His own holiness and with eternal life. While your food and drink will always disappoint, He gives food and drink that bring you into His kingdom, food and drink that are a reminder that He never forgets. And that is the most important thing: not that we never forget Him, but that He never forgets us. Not now, in the midst of confusion and controversy, and not then, even when nearly three thousand had died, when a place that seemed like the center of the world was as silent and ghostly as a cemetery. So never forget. Not today, not ever, never forget that God has never forgotten you.