This past Tuesday, our Palisades clergy group got back together for lunch after our summer hiatus. I ended up sitting next to Matt, the pastor at Pali Pres who arrived in January of 2021. It was the first time we’d had a chance to really chat, and in swapping stories we discovered we graduated from seminary the same year (2004), both from schools in the East: General in New York, for me; he from Columbia, in Decatur, GA. Sidebar – Matt was lucky enough to have Walter Brueggemann for Old Testament and Anna Carter Florence, who wrote Preaching as Testimony, which changed my life, for homiletics!!!
Not surprisingly, our conversation eventually turned to 9/11; we were both seminarians on that awful day in 2001. Matt recalled that at Columbia classes were NOT canceled - the terrorist attacks must have seemed pretty far away. At the Lutheran Seminary in Philadelphia, which is where I actually began seminary studies, there wasn’t a choice. The whole northeast corridor shut down.
I bet we all remember where we were when we first heard what was happening in New York. I was home in Williamsport, in central Pennsylvania, getting ready to drive down to Philly for three days of classes, when the phone rang... (read more)
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