Faith Is Being Open
A hymn I wrote after 9/11 — and a gift
Sometimes a biblical text stays with you.
Twenty-four years ago, on the first anniversary of September 11, I was working with the lectionary passage from Romans 12. The country was still grieving. We were angry and frightened. The response to 9/11 was widening into war — first in Afghanistan, with Iraq increasingly in view.
This is the line that grabbed my attention:
“Do not repay anyone evil for evil.” (Romans 12:17)
“Do not repay anyone evil for evil.”
I do not see Paul’s words as a call to suppress anger, or to imagine that violence should have no consequences. His words, rather, are a call to remain open-hearted. In the face of what has been done to us, the challenge is to refuse to allow that evil to determine who we become.
This led to deeper thoughts about faith. Faith, for me, has never been primarily about the answers we claim to have. Faith is about being open — open to the mystery of life, open to questions we cannot resolve, open to other people even when (especially when) they frighten or anger us.
So I wrote a hymn back in September 2002 and called it “Faith Is Being Open.” I preached that Sunday on Romans 12:17, and we sang the hymn at the conclusion of the sermon.
It begins:
Faith is being open to the mystery of life,
to the oneness of God’s family, to a world so torn by strife;
The hymn moves from there into suffering, anger, injury, and the all-too-human temptation to return evil for evil. It asks us to remain open to the good within each person, open to another way, open to the possibility of peace. The hymn is my attempt to take Paul’s ethical challenge seriously. What might life in this world look like if faith were centered in a theology of wonder and grace?
That question breaks open into this series of questions that might guide us as we craft our sermons this week:
What happens, when we are hurt, if we don’t close ourselves down?
What would happen if we remained open to the possibility that the person who has hurt us is more than the evil he or she has done?
What would happen were we to embrace the biblical vision of a world at peace?
These are not easy questions. They don’t resolve into easy answers. But this is my conviction: living with questions like these, living into those questions, is itself an act of faith.
That’s why the hymn ends where it does:
to the questions opening up our hearts that we may embrace
the wonder that God cares for us, enfolding us in grace.
The lectionary lessons this week bring us back to Romans 12—the same passage that was appointed on the first anniversary of September 11. Though 2026 presents a different world, the old pattern persists: repaying evil with evil. The temptation named by Paul remains painfully familiar: when we have been wounded, we want to wound back. When we are afraid, we believe that armed force can keep us safe.
Which brings me back to the hymn. It offers not an answer but an opening. I offer it to you as a gift. The words are mine. Originally written in 2002, they have been revised for publication now. The tune is loosely based on Carole King’s “Tapestry,” and to my ear, it fits the words rather well. Or, of course, you are welcome to set the text to a different tune.
I offer it in the hope that it might give us something we need as much today as we did one year after 9/11:
a little more room for questions
a little more room for wonder
a little more room for grace
