The advances of medicine, science and technology have created for us a world of illusion. The illusion that is marketed to us by our contemporary age is that we are in control. That we slowly are conquering all those forces which would frustrate and dominate us. That illusion was shattered this morning when two aircraft plunged deep into the heart of the World Trade Center, another struck at the Department of Defense in Washington, and we waited all day for another shoe to drop. From the margins, from the edges to which we cling, we look into the abyss, and with Job, long that we might have our lives graven in the rock forever.
Christian hope is that they are.
At the moment we were baptized, God made a compact with each of us. It is as if that compact, that sacred promise, was written on stone, for it stands forever. God made that compact with the pilots and passengers who died in a fiery holocaust. God made that sacred promise with the firefighter struggling to breathe as he was eased onto a gurney out on the sidewalk by St. Vincent's. God made that sacred promise to the only man from whose gurney people stood back quietly, as I commended him to God through Christ our risen Lord.