Twenty-five years. A quarter century has passed since that clear September morning became a wound in the memory of our nation — the towers falling, the Pentagon burning, a field in Pennsylvania where ordinary people became extraordinary in their courage. Today we hold that morning again, not to reopen grief for its own sake, but because love does not let us forget those we lost, nor those who ran toward danger to save others.

Grief has its own honesty, and scripture never asks us to rush past it. The Psalmist gives us words for the ache: “My tears have been my food day and night” (Psalm 42:3). We do not need to explain our sorrow or apologize for it after twenty-five years. Some losses simply live in us. And yet even in lament, the Psalms turn toward refuge: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” (Psalm 46:1). God is present in trouble, not removed from it.

We remember also the firefighters, police, chaplains, and strangers who carried others down smoke-filled stairwells, who held hands with those they would never meet again on this side of glory. “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). That love was real that day, and it remains the truer story beneath the horror — that hatred did not have the last word, because self-giving love met it and answered it.

We pray for the construction and rescue teams who worked tirelessly at Ground Zero in the months after the attacks. Our hearts go out to those who became sick in the years following their exposure to the environmental pollutants at the site. We pray especially for those who died from their exposure.

We ask that God’s compassion be with survivors of the attacks, for whom today is especially difficult. May the comfort of the Holy Spirit be with all who bear the physical, emotional, and spiritual scars of those tragic attacks.

Twenty-five years of mornings have come. Grief has not vanished, but it has, for many, been transformed — into deeper compassion, into a fierce commitment to peace, into gratitude for ordinary days that are never guaranteed.

We remember that this day asked something of us beyond mourning: to love our neighbor, including the neighbor who does not look like us, pray like us, or share our history. Paul writes, “For neither death, nor life… nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God” (Romans 8:38-39). Let that love be the thing we build with the memory of this day — not walls, but the wide table of Christ, where all are welcome and none are enemy.

In the endless peace of the risen Christ,

Leslie+

God of all comfort, hold in your mercy those who died twenty-five years ago and those who still carry that day in their bodies and hearts. Turn our remembrance into compassion, our grief into gentleness toward one another, and our fear into courage for peace. In the name of the One who wept, who suffered, and who rose again. Amen.