The Promised land: you know where it is. Well, I suppose a few of us consider this Hub of the Universe the promised land: what with our autumn foliage, the duck boats and Fenway Park. But no. The land promised to Abraham and his progeny consists of a tiny corridor sitting right at the point where three continents meet: Asia, Africa and Europe. To the west lies the Mediterranean, to the East, a beautiful fresh water lake. Empires from the Babylonians to the British trampled that land; they imprisoned, enslaved, exiled or slaughtered its population. The promised land knows conflict, danger, chaos; it suffers turmoil; it is an unsettling, always threatened, "intersection land." Do you call that a promising land? Promised? With that kind of geography?

Indeed. Here is why. Divinely promised life, as the Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama tells us, divinely promised life means "intersected life." It is not something reserved for an isolated mountaintop or a sunset on the seashore. No way. You will find intersected life when Copley Square jumps, while Boylston Street hums, when Tokyo night life takes off. Our faith thrives on this promise of Intersected life. Why? Because first of all, the life of Jesus-the death of Jesus-takes place at an intersection. As Iona's George MacCloud reminds us, "Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a Cross between two thieves; on the town garbage heap, at a crossroads so cosmopolitan they had to write his title in Hebrew, Latin and Greek (or should we say in English, Japanese and Arabic); at the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where he died. And that is what he died about. And that is where church people should be and what church people should be about." Jesus lived and died at an intersection.

And that book you have in the pews? The New Testament itself? Forged right downtown: Rome; Corinth; Thessalonki; Antioch; Philippi; Ephesus; Jerusalem-cities speaking different languages, sporting different menus, sustaining different religions. Talk about intersected life! The New Testament bursts with it: we find encounter at Crossroads where conflicting ideologies, contrary cultures, antagonistic religions, adversarial politics confront and contend. Jesus and the New Testament, you see, are not immune to the fury, the strife, the combat, the wars erupting constantly at life's intersections. They were born there. They return there.

And today, as much or more so than ever before, Jesus and the Gospel are desperately needed at the imploding intersections of our shrinking world.

Shrinking world?! Do you know one reason we find ourselves numb here this morning after the week we have been through? Ronald Steel, writing in the New York Times, put his finger on it. "A barrier has been irrevocably breached; a barrier against the world outside. Until this week our enemies never seriously penetrated our continental shores. Our invulnerability lasted for more than 200 years. . .We grew rich and powerful, protected by vast oceans and great territorial expanse." This week those vast oceans vanished. We joined the rest of the world. Newsweek puts it more starkly: "September 11 ended the illusion that Americans could somehow float above the hatreds of the world." Isolation. Gone.

That shrinking world compels us already to anticipate radically "intersected life"-our new geography, our new demography. My soul! As Linda Stasi observed in Thursday's New York Post, "When the dead are brought out (of the wreckage), the extremists will see whom they are so happy about killing. Doubtless, many of them will be from their own culture, whatever their own culture is. There will also be countless victims who are Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Asian, European, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Saudi, Italian, Latvian, Indian, French, Canadian, rich, poor, white guys, black women, brown people, in-between people, skinny people, tall, short, rich brokers, middle-class moms, and poor delivery guys. You know, typical Americans." Of course. And the sea of hues and dialects who funneled into this sanctuary this week, who stroll past our front door at this moment; and, yes, representatives of the ends of the earth in this room this morning-all of this enables us as we pray and sing to share in what our God truly wants for the whole of the human family. . . what will we call it? Who are we this morning? Intersected life surrendered to the solidarity and mutuality annealed by Divine grace. This, friends, is the true geography and demography of the promised land.

Now then, living in this new geography with all of its possibilities and hopes, what is our creed? Where lies our hope? What ensign do we fly? What banner do we raise? How about the Stars and Stripes? Surely, a powerful, uniting symbol. Or a 100 dollar bill! Now there's a terrific confidence builder. No, friends, neither flag, nor a century note. Living in the new geography, our hope lies finally in the Cross of Christ. Hear that? Our hope, finally, lies neither in the flag, the constitution, democracy, and the Pentagon, nor in the 100 dollar bill, the three trillion dollar economy and the New York Stock Exchange. We discovered this last week that for all its promise, the shrinking globe carries great risks. It harbors terrible possibilities. Intersection life can be deadly, murderous, violent, chaotic. Sophisticated telecommunications, we discover, may not only glue a city together, they may blow a city apart. Sleek jet transports can get us from Boston to Los Angeles, but in angry, perverse and suicidal hands can become a guided missile driving what claims to be the sole superpower on earth, as they say, almost to its knees. How, in God's name, can this happen? On Tuesday morning, there stands our President before a gallery of Florida 8th graders closing his public remarks with, "God bless America." There he is again, at Louisiana's Barksdale Air Force Base, closing his comments with the affirmation, "God bless America." And yes again, in the evening, from the oval office, closing with "God bless America." And there, on Friday afternoon, on a mountain of rubble at the southern tip of Manhattan through a bullhorn, "God bless America." How can those Presidential prayers end up in such catastrophe and devastation? How, if the God whom the President invokes is really in charge, can our bothers and sisters, our cousins, our mothers and fathers, our classmates and partners and wives or husbands, those of one or six degrees away from us, how can they innocently perish in an inferno born of terror and visceral hatred? My God! Who is really in charge of this universe? How could God let this happen? Where was God on Tuesday morning?

Now hear this: friends the clue to the presence of our God in catastrophe of this depth, horror and apparent meaningless, the clue to the presence of God for us can be found at the foot of the Cross. For there horror strikes: there hatred runs amok; there injustice snuffs out life; there innocence gets bloodied up; there terror rampages; there cold, calculating, perversity becomes the order of the day. At the Cross decency, goodness, kindness, grace, love and peace bleed to death and die. If we are shook up and find our faith shattered, our hope lost in Trade Center wreckage and wonder where God was on Tuesday morning, we dare ask the same question in a similar circumstance: so where is God when Jesus dies? Up in the sky? Out to lunch? Indifferent? God doesn't give a damn?

Hardly. In faith; in hope: we confess God was there all the time. God's power resides not in preventing these terrible events, not in intervention, not grasping Flight 11, Flight 77, Flight 911, Flight 175 by the tail with the Divine hand and gently guiding them to the nearest airfield, disarming the hijackers, saving the passengers Bruce Willis style. Not on your life. The power of God we see at the Cross of Christ is exercised through the Divine presence itself undergoing the terror of the Cross, experiencing fright, pain, torture, mutilation, death. God knows first of all, what it is like to be you and me. You will find God in the wreckage. Talk about solidarity! Where was God on Tuesday morning? God was there all the time.

But more. The power of God at the Cross we see expressed not only in presence, but also in transformation. I worry about glibness here. I worry about a formula, a paradox easy to articulate, yet in the pain of the moment difficult to appropriate. Please hear me out. At the Cross we see terror, hatred, mutilation, murder. At the Cross we confess these do not have the last word. If they did, this Cross would not hang at the head of our nave. What do you see here? Terror? Hatred? To be sure. But they are not ultimate. This Cross graces our nave because it radiates-what? Love. Hope. Peace. Grace. Forgiveness. Justice. Solidarity. Friendship. Community. How come? Power! Transforming Power. Amid all that would wreck and destroy community-and those forces are relentless- not only the blinding obsessions of the terrorist but just look at the victory won by the terrorists in the last week: blanketing our city, nation and world with virulent mistrust, racial and religious profiling; fear of one another; blood-curdling manifestoes and fist-raising cries to "kill the bastards" and "bomb them into basketball courts" they have succeeded in turning some of us into their mirror images. Yet amid all that would wreck and destroy community, the power of God works actively to bring out of evil, good; out of terror community; out of hatred, love.

Will this power be active in what President Bush yesterday described as war, as conflict "that will not be short," "nor easy," over a "course to victory that may be long?" God help us. We need be saved from the demons and furies such violence looses. The laws of unintended consequences do not follow straight lines. And we need be sensitive in this matter of guerrilla and terrorist violence that we are not totally off the hook ourselves. The experts tell us, even as we witness the meltdown of the Trade Center Towers and the incinerating of innocent life, that the fanatics who perpetrate these acts do it with skills, weapons and obsessions we Americans provided them during the 1980s when we used them as pawns against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Remember? The Mujadiheen? Our boys. Their Jihad? Our war. And we catch this terror partly as pay-back for US forces in the course of the Gulf war killing thousands of Iraqi civilians, and casually labeling them, "collateral damage." In any case, our nation's involvements in Palestinian-Israeli conflict, arms sales, and support for feudal regimes does not mark us as an innocent. But this side of heaven no one is innocent, and we dare not make this a matter of ethical and moral equivalence. Surely, a carefully designed, long haul effort must be mounted to quell the bloody consequences of this demonic movement, an effort, obviously, reversing our nation's recent penchant to go it alone on the environment, missile defense and racism-a reclaiming of global interdependence, collaboration and coalitions-and yet a mastering of the rage, anger, revenge that leaves no less a bloody mess and carnage among those stricken by vengeful retaliation, suffering again as "collateral damage." God forbid. God save us!

So as we venture as Christians into what we know now is a new era, but no less than the old an era of misjudgments, arms buildups, elusive, evanescent adversaries, and an inevitably wounded humanity, our faith and hope lie even yet in the Cross of Christ. Indeed, remembering last Tuesday morning and perhaps anticipating what lies ahead, we join in that great rhetorical question of the Apostle Paul, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall terror or fire or bombs, or misseled aircraft, or tower implosion; shall urban devastation, or the destruction of national symbols, or a suicidal assailant or the worst things we may do to one another-shall these things separate us from the love of Christ?" And answer with Paul: "No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loves us. For I am persuaded that neither death-Neither death-nor life, nor fear, nor war, nor national chauvinism, nor religious fanaticism, nor an adversary's hatred, not military vulnerability, not this shrinking, volatile, churning, diverse, beautiful yet warring world, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." Amen.