September 11, 2001, taught us that sin is alive and well on Planet Earth. Last year's attack on civilians was sin at its most vile. When two planes hit the World Trade Towers, we flew into a black hole of human making. Designed as an attack on American "symbols" of commerce and power, it really was an attack on human sanctity. Terrorists saw a building's collapsed steel frame as more significant than the lives of mothers and fathers, husbands and wives. Passengers and employees became pawns in journeys of hatred.

Sin is dark because it is blind. Seeing its own selfish objectives so clearly, souls become ghosts not worthy of care or preservation. Sin is dark because unchecked it births horrific acts like 9/11/01. As such, the attack of September 11 was not primarily an attack on the United States, it was part of an ongoing homicide on humanity. We have been in this war a long time, but are slow to admit it. This attack was rooted deep in something within all of us that needs to be checked. One place where freedom fails is where sin reigns freely in the human heart directed against others.

Our reaction is that we must stop such vile sin. But to stop sin, one must change the selfish heart, both in the individual and in society. One must quench the unregulated, lawless quest for power and control that spurred such an act. One must quell the hatred that sacrifices people for political statements. One must calm the anger that causes me to turn my neighbor into an enemy, to turn one made in the image of God into an object of hate. One must embrace the standards of human sanctity that God created as a part of us all, a potential that is there until sin's hatred and blindness extract it.

Those who undertook this mission were taught ...