This weekend’s Weekender comes in two parts. Today’s begins with a longer look at a sermon delivered on Sept. 12 in New York City by the Most Rev. Michael B. Curry, Primate of the Episcopal Church of the United States. The sermon may be worth listening to, HERE, as an example of how a leader can feel compelled to grapple publicly with the lying impossible official Executive Branch explanation of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

I take it as a given that Presiding Bishop Curry knows full well, 20 years later, that the Executive Branch “9/11” explanations are hogwash, a coverup of the truth. However, apparently he felt he couldn’t say so from a pulpit lest he endanger the national church he was selected to lead, lest he endanger his own top leadership position, lest he pay with his life.

Regrettably (at least for those who value getting to the truth of “9/11”), Presiding Bishop Curry felt he had to mask the potentially most worthwhile parts of his 20th anniversary sermon, titled “Why We Go to the Mountain,” with irrelevancies and worse.

First, what were the potentially most worthwhile parts? For me, they included his paraphrases from Isaiah 2:2-4* and a few words at the beginning of  Matthew 5,** just before the Beatitudes.

The potentially most worthwhile parts of the sermon included renditions of or allusions to parts of the Irving Berlin song “God Bless America,” the African-American spirituals “Every Time I Feel the Spirit” and “Down By the Riverside,” and the hymn “How Great Thou Art.”

The potentially most worthwhile parts of the sermon included the statement “We’ve been playing too many games with one another and with God’s creation. And if nothing else will [make us go to the mountain], 9/11, in our memory and in the reality, should.” They included his reminding listeners of the Baptismal Covenant in the Episcopal Prayerbook.

But Presiding Bishop Curry squandered these potentially powerful elements by using them to pay obeisance to secular mythology cloaking the September 2001 terror attacks and by stirring into the mix (1) climate change, (2) the January 6 Capitol assault and (3) Covid-19. What came out was a stew, a mishmash.

To top it off, he quoted from former President George W. Bush’s speech a week ago at Shanksville, Pa., giving a coverup-artist better-than-equal billing with Abraham Lincoln, whom he also quoted.

Jesus, a Jew, stood for truth against a corrupt, hypocritical Temple hierarchy of collaborators with the Roman occupiers of their land, and he was tortured to death on a cross for it. He was a truther.

It is important to know that 9/11 “in our memory” and 9/11 “in the reality,” although they overlap, are two different things, but Presiding Bishop Curry did not point this out. Melding the memories and the realities of the terror attacks as if there are no differences between them is a continuation of “playing too many games with one another.”

— Mark Channing Miller

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* “In the days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest mountain, and it shall be raised above the hills, and all nations shall stream to it, and many peoples shall say, ‘Come, let us go to the mountain of the Lord, that he may teach us his ways, that we may walk in his path, and then they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and neither shall they learn war any more. Come, let us go to the mountain, that he may teach us his ways.”

** “When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, he began to teach them.” (Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount begins with eight blessings known as the Beatitudes.)