The Rev. Dr. John Tamilio III

I remember the events of September 11^th as if they happened yesterday, which mystifiers me knowing that tragic day unfolded twenty-five years ago.  That’s a quarter of a century ago!  My daughter, Sarah, was in kindergarten.  I had just dropped her off at school.  As I stopped to get gas on the way to my office (at the time, I was serving my first church, which was in New Hampshire), I heard that the first plane had hit one of the Twin Towers in New York City.  Like many people, I thought it was an accident involving a small plane: maybe the pilot was drunk or had a heart attack.  When I got to the church, I turned on the news.  By that time, the second plane had hit.  Like the rest of the world, I knew that this wasn’t an accident.  I knew we were under attack.  The world, as we knew it, changed in a split second.

That night, I was able to organize a worship service where people from the church and the community at large were able to gather to pray, to cry, and to be with one another at a time of absolute uncertainty.  At that moment, we did not know who was responsible for this horrific act and whether or not more violence was on the horizon.

And the pain is still real — it is still fresh.  I delivered a prayer at the 9/11 Memorial Service the other night here in Canton.  The community laid a wreath in honor of Michael Ulinao who lost his life that day.  They also honored Shane Cabino who died in the war that followed.  The sister of Michael received a copy of the banner that will soon be displayed downtown.  When I looked at her face, as she held the banner, you could see pain — an emptiness that I am sure mirrors what she felt twenty-five years prior, when she got the news that her brother died in New York City that morning, trapped in one of the upper floors of one of the Twin Towers.

Members of the generation before mine remember where they were when they heard that President Kennedy was assassinated.  My generation will always remember where we were when we heard that the world stopped turning, as country singer Alan Jackson described that terrible day.  The pain is fresh.  And so is the fear.

I remember, after 9/11, people saying that the terrorists wouldn’t win.  We wouldn’t let them.  Well, they did.  They did win.  Whenever you go to an airport and pass through TSA screening, you think about 9/11 — we all do.  Those thoughts will always color our experience.  We also live in fear that it could (and probably will) happen again.

For this, and several other reasons, we live in a different world.  The latest threat is AI.  I truly believe that once AI develops a will and is able to self-power, we will be in big trouble.  We will be in the age of The Terminator.  The funny thing about that movie is that it was made in 1984, but shows what will happen in 2029 — only three years from now.  How prophetic!

Fiction is sometimes stranger than truth, especially when it becomes truth.

The saying “violence begets violence” dates back to the early nineteenth century.  The earliest recorded mention of it is in an 1834 article in The Times of London.  It’s still true today.  In his 1988 song “Fragile,” British singer-songwriter Sting captured the same essence:

Perhaps this final act was meant

To clinch a lifetime’s argument

That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could

Whether it was said in 1834, 1988, or today — it still holds true.  Violence breeds violence.  Gandhi said that “an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.”  Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”  Dr. Martin Luther King said, “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”

And yet it seems that this is all we know: when someone strikes, we strike back.  Where has that gotten us so far?

We need to not only read the Scriptures, but we have to take them seriously.  Chapter two from Isaiah contains one of the prophet’s most quoted passages.  He invites all nations to the mountain of the Lord, where they are to “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”  The vision he offers is one in which “Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.”  John F. A. Sawyer reminds us that Isaiah is showing us a possibility: “a world without war.”[1]

Granted, that is a vision: a vision of the world that God intended.  But we’ve gotten it wrong — quite wrong.  Maybe it is part of our broken nature.  Maybe we’ve always been this way.  The opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey shows two tribes of monkeys vying for a watering hole.  The scene is called “The Dawn of Man.”  Once one of them casually discovers that he can use a bone for a weapon, we have our first war: his tribe, fully armed with a variety of bones, clubs the leader of the other tribe to death.  Not much has changed since then, except that our weapons are now more advanced and there is more at stake.

It’s been 25 years since 9/11.  Do you feel any safer?  Are we any closer to the world of shalom that God intended, any closer to attaining Isaiah’s vision?  We know the answer to that rhetorical question, but that does not excuse us from trying.  As the late theologian John Howard Yoder told us, the church is to be now what we want the world to (eventually) be.  We are to embody the peace we want to see.  It won’t happen overnight.  It may take several lifetimes.  Isaiah wrote his text over 2,700 years ago.  The purpose of the passage we read this morning, according to Bible scholar Gene Tucker, is to present a vision that has “international political dimensions…it is universal in the expectation that all nations will come to Jerusalem to know the one true God, and the result will be peace.”[2]

Well, we haven’t made it yet.  And we probably won’t.  Not in this lifetime.  Not on this sphere of existence.  But we can still try.  We can still live as if the kingdom of God has come — as if we have made the trek up Isaiah’s holy mountain, where we are in the presence of the Prince of Peace who will guide is to all that is good, all that is righteous, and all that is harmonious — where the wolf will live with the lamb, and the leopard will lay down with the goat, as Isaiah also envisioned.

May the Lord give us the wisdom and the conviction to live the life he has shown us.  Amen.

 

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© 2026, John Tamilio III

[1] John F. A. Sawyer, Isaiah, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984), 24

[2] Gene M. Tucker, “Isaiah,” from The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. VI (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), 69.