Reverend Thomas Disrud

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

March 17, 1996

You, then, are my workers. You have come from me, the supreme eternal gardener, and I have engrafted you onto the vine by making myself one with you. Keep in mind that each of you has your own vineyard. But everyone is joined to your neighbors' vineyards without any dividing lines. They are so joined together, in fact, that you cannot do good or evil for yourself without doing the same for your neighbors.
-St. Catherine of Siena

It was almost 2000 years ago. It was about 35 years after the death of Jesus. In Jerusalem, for several years, three different factions of Jews were in revolt against the Romans, who were in control. The Jewish groups struggled among themselves for control. One group wanted to make peace, there was a group from the countryside fighting Rome and another group from the city that also want to fight Rome, but also wanted keep power from the radicals of the countryside. One commentator said the people of the city were like a great body torn to pieces.

After a long siege that was marked by a disastrous famine, the Romans moved into Jerusalem and entered the Temple. The soldiers looted the gold in the temple and set it on fire. They desecrated the temple by sacrificing there to their own gods. They raped and robbed the people in Jerusalem, leaving the city in ruins. These events shattered the community.

It was during this same time that something else important was happening. The anonymous writer we know as Mark was writing what would someday become the first Christian Gospel. He had some definite opinions about the conflict in Jerusalem.

It had been a generation since Jesus was executed by Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, apparently on charges of sedition against Rome. Many accounts of Jesus' life were written during this time but only four of them -- the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John made it into the Canon of the Bible. They have since been considered the official version of what happened. The other accounts of the time are considered to carry much less weight. Mark is considered to be the one who wrote first and the others several years later, using much of the material in Mark.

The followers of Jesus were not called Christians at this time, they were still developing their identity. Those who wrote the material that would later become Gospel considered themselves a suspect minority by their fellow Jews. They felt persecuted. The Gospels were written in wartime and the people writing them did so in the context of wanting to highlight the role of Jesus in the events preceding the war to persuade others to their side during the war.

The war shattered the Jewish community and the devastation exacerbated long-standing divisions in the community. The divisions were most obvious between those who advocated war with Rome, and those who worked for peace. With the destruction of the temple these factions fell apart and various groups were jockeying for position.

The followers of Jesus were polarized during this time, too. Many refused to fight the Romans because they saw the events surrounding the crucifixion as signs that the whole world was to be shattered and transformed.

Mark takes a conciliatory tone towards the Romans when he writes about the trial in the Gospel. In Mark, Pilot becomes a weakling justice who is pressured by the chief Jewish priests and the crowds outside. Pilot is portrayed as feeling that Jesus may be innocent but is forced to execute Jesus because of the crowds.

Other writers from the time - Jewish and Roman - depict Pilot as a despot with a "ruthless, stubborn and cruel disposition" famous for, among other things, ordering "frequent executions without trial."

Mark's motives in making Pilot weak are not clear. He may have wanted to make it clear to Roman authorities that the Jesus followers were no threat to Rome. He may also have wanted to convert Gentile readers. But Mark seems especially concerned about conflicts within the Jewish community - between his own group and those who reject claims about Jesus.

Mark has several big questions to answer in his writing: If Jesus was sent by God as the anointed King, how could his movement have failed so miserably? How could Jesus' followers have abandoned him and allowed the soldiers to execute him like a common criminal?

It is in this context of conflict that Mark portrays the life of Jesus as not something ordinary, but as part of some larger cosmic war between the forces of good and evil, between God and Satan. And this is the context of the Gospels of the new testament that were canonized several generations after they were written. Those that portrayed another view were not let in by the early fathers of the church several years later. It is said that history is written by the winners and perhaps this is one of the greatest examples of that. There were many versions of what happened during this time, but the stories that made it into the bible are the ones that have shaped the culture we live in.

The scholar Elaine Pagels, in her book The Origin of Satan, spells out this phenomenon in Christianity and how it has shaped much of western thought. Pagels is professor at Princeton. The book was published last summer.

The early writers, trying to establish the followers of Jesus as a legitimate sect, used their work to define the other - those who did not agree with them. In wanting to be the majority, they wrote persuasively to do just that. They saw themselves as right, and they portrayed themselves in opposition to the other. The other had names including Satan, the Devil and Beelzebub.

Now this is not necessarily new. In mythology, the gods and goddesses of good and evil challenge each other and are seen as fighting it out. But while their actions affect humans below, the humans are not viewed as the evil ones, so much as they are portrayed as the recipients of the good or the evil. Their lives were in the hands of the fates.

While angels are commonly appear in the Hebrew scriptures - the Old Testament - the demonic seldom appears before the Christian scriptures.

In the Gospels, starting with Mark and continuing through Matthew, Luke and John written a few years later, the struggle for good over evil takes a more human face.

Satan is identified with the Jewish enemies of the followers of Jesus. His followers were a minority and so they portrayed their struggle in this way. Others before had certainly done this, but Jesus followers took it to another level. And Christians who would follow them would take it further. One of the things that evolved at the center of their religious understanding was a cosmic war between God and Satan. They see a parallel war going on earth as well as in heaven. This made the stakes high both in Heaven and on Earth.

Many years later, around 200 in the Common Era, the fathers of the church brought the gospels together. The Gospels were not included because they were the most accurate account of Jesus' life and teachings. They were included because they could form the basis for church communities. They brought people in and kept them there. For the fledging communities, that was critical. They wanted to be in control, and they were.

The Gospel of Thomas was one of the texts rejected by early church leaders because, critics say it is a gospel of transformation. The kingdom of god is something you achieve through knowing yourself and through looking at your life. In this Gospel, the answers to questions about how to practice one's faith leaves too much to interpretation. And leaders apparently feared the openness would make it hard to build a church.

The leaders of the church needed to bring things together. They needed people to be in line. In the Gospel of Thomas the kingdom of God is a solitary process, it is something you come to through self discovery. The other writers, the ones who would make it into the cannon, said that it was simpler than that. The kingdom of God was a process of believing. All you had to do was to join God's people and you would receive salvation.

As the different Gospels were written, different issues faced the emerging community of Jesus' followers.

Matthew saw the primary challenge to followers coming from teachers and rabbis called the Pharisees. Therefore his Gospel essentially encourages people to abandon some of the central observances of Judaism. In Matthew, the Pharisees are attacked as hypocrites.

Luke escalates the drama - he makes explicit what the Mark and Matthew imply: In Luke, Jesus himself suggests that the chief priests and scribes responsible for his arrest are allied with the evil one. In Luke and John, Jesus' followers lay claim to Israel's legacy of being the chosen people.

John, who was likely converted from Judaism, spoke bitterly toward the Jewish majority. We heard some of this in the passage read earlier. In John they become children of the devil. They don't belong to God. John is believed to have been part of a group of Jesus' followers who were in a bitter conflict with the Jewish majority. They were forced out of the synagogues and denied participation in common worship.

And as the needs of the church changed throughout history, the enemy, the other, the Satan, changed. As the Christian movement solidified and started to draw more and more Gentiles into its ranks, the need to demonize the Jews became less pressing. As the pagan community became more of a threat, the demonization shifted to them. They, like the Jews, became Satan's bidders in a cosmic war of good vs evil.

And later it would be other Christians, those who didn't agree with the people in control. Some of the people who we, as Unitarians and Universalists look to in history as a forefathers and foremothers were placed in the role of the other, questioning church doctrine and paying the price for that. This is a pattern throughout history.

And so what does Satan mean to us today? When I hear the word, I think of the comedian Dana Carvey playing the church lady on Saturday Night Live and asking the frequent question is Satan is behind someone's being. Whenever someone mentions the subject of sex or anything else considered naughty, the church lady invokes the name of Satan.

And it also brings to mind for me TV preachers extolling the threat of the devil, the immanent threat that it makes to our families and our homes. I came across a religious show entitled Called to Conquer the other night. I really don't know much about it. The title was so scary I didn't want to see a lot more.

But the call to conquer is a call to conquer something. Building God's kingdom seems to mean destroying something else.

The demonization that Pagels tracks in her book is with us today. The patterns established in the Gospels, that there is a cosmic war between good and evil happening in our midst.

Listening to the rhetoric of the presidential campaign there is talk of a battle for the hearts and minds of Americans. The presidential election isn't about politics as much as it is about one side getting moral control -- and claiming moral victory -- over our lives. In the rhetoric of 1996, the other often still includes Jews, but there are many more others including Mexicans who may or may not be illegal immigrants here, gays and lesbians, unwed mothers, women, liberals.

One of the things that happens in this battle is that the enemy is de-personalized. It is not a conversation about people but about a group of people - it brings to mind the reading from the Gospel of John that was read earlier - that we have groups who are the children of darkness - ruled by Satan. We don't necessarily hear about them in those terms, but the effect is much the same. They, as a group, are the other, and they are in opposition to us - whoever us happens to be.

When the other is dehumanized - lots of things become possible. It is easier to fight against someone because we lose a sense that they are people, that they have worth and dignity. They become someone who is taking away whatever it is that I want. They become someone who threatens me, someone who will hurt me. What they have I can't have, and what I have, I perceive they want to get.

Dualistic thinking is something we all have in us. In her book, Elaine Pagels describes how she came to study the phenomenon of Satan and the demonizing of others. In the course of a few months she lost a young son and her husband of 20 years was killed in a hiking accident. She was forced to ask why did it happen? In the process of searching for meaning after this, she came to identify how she saw things through a universe that was good and evil. She wanted a reason why the awful events had happened. They happened because bad things happen, but Pagels says she also found herself wondering why they happened and asking if forces of good and evil were at work. Weather she believed in them or not, they were part of what she calls the "mental architecture we have." She wanted to blame it on the other.

And so she explores how we look at things in our culture from a dualistic perspective: good vs evil, liberal vs conservative, male vs female, black vs white. She traces the roots of this dualism and its power.

Until a couple weeks ago, there were lots of people voting for Pat Buchanan. I don't necessarily think that they are all bad people - I do expect they are pretty afraid. Afraid of losing jobs, afraid of their lives changing and not being able to control that. And, like most of us, they see things in a dualistic fashion. Us vs them.

In a conference last month here entitled the Psychology of Bigotry: Diversity vs. Dualism, Lee Knefelkamp, who teaches at Columbia University, made the distinction between what she calls pernicious dualism and naïve dualism. Pernicious dualism is the intentional setting out to destroy others, to hurt others. It is an effort to sanction others to kill, to harm, to do great danger. It is contrasted with naïve dualism - dualistic thinking that comes from ignorance, from not knowing. It comes from relying on fears. It is pernicious dualism that nurtures naïve dualism, and the two can be a deadly combination.

Pagels work paints a vivid picture of the roots of this mindset. It opened my eyes to how I see the world in this way. We live looking for either/or positions. Both doesn't usually come up as likely a possibility. The mental architecture of our culture brings us to look at things this way. It is a mindset that comes easily. It means there must be winners and losers and that some will win on the backs of others.

But what this also does is put it outside of us when we are in this mindset. We become the good battling the evil. We are right and the other side is wrong. This view does not leave any middle ground. We are called to conquer. We must either win or lose.

And of course, life is not that simple. It is much more complex. Each one of us has the ability to great good is the world, as well as great harm. Life is an ongoing choice. But living in a world that is at war means that lives are destroyed, and the quality of all our lives is lessened. And so much energy is wasted.

But it may also be easier to live in the dualistic mindset. I'm right in this scenario and really don't have to look at myself, what my beliefs are, ways I might grow. I'm simply locked in place and the other guy is wrong. End of discussion. My shadow side stays hidden and may therefore have more power.

We are asked to stay with ourselves and look at ourselves in a non-dualistic model. Perhaps the most difficult thing is the hard work of being with all the elements of our own lives. Just as we have the ability to create and build life, we also have the ability to destroy and take down life. Within each one of us is the capacity to do great good or to do evil, to add to life or to take away. One of the handy things about dualism is that it takes the other outside of ourselves, it becomes something we can fight and win, something that is outside of us. Of course, if we're doing it in the name of something outside of ourselves, than we don't have to take responsibility for our actions, and that, too, makes it easier.

Unitiarian Universalism calls for a theology of inclusion, one that brings people in. And this takes place in a culture that is often about exclusion. We, as members of this culture, must work to build bridges to bring people together, and not to keep them apart.

But it is also our faith that calls us to be in touch with our power and to use it to build community. If we are not in touch with our power to build bridges or to destroy them, than it becomes a dangerous power. When the conflict between good and evil is at stake, we will do anything to win. This gets dangerous.

And dualistic thinking is not just something that happens to fundamentalists or others we don't agree with. We, as religious liberals, can also fall into this trap. I know for myself, the religious right can become the other. They become a bunch of hateful people set out to take control. I don't see them as people in need but as a group. I find it easy to write off all fundamentalists as ignorant folks who, if they just thought a little differently, would see it my way.

And it is easy to deny the power we have to challenge this mindset in ourselves and in others - to build bridges instead of destroying them. It is easy to think it will go away.

And of course, part of the problem today is that the search for a common ground on which to have a conversation can't be found. When war is declared, it is hard to have a dialogue.

But we, too, can oversimplify things, and, in our own way, demonize people. That doesn't bring down walls but simply means we have two instead of one. Maybe the conversation for people on the left starts with people on the right who are a little close to people on the left than other people farther on the right. That won't solve the problem, but it will perhaps be a step in the right direction.

Christina Feldman says: " "I" and "you," "us" and "them," "winning and losing," "victor" and "vanquished"-these are not more than the tricks of the mind exiled from the heart. The face we see before us is no other than our own, the person we see before us is ourselves in another guise. What else can we do but open our hearts, what else do we need to do?

Satan, like the shadow, can be an agent of change, transformation. It is a matter of connecting this part of ourselves with the other parts of ourselves. In closing, I hold up a simple image - the image of a circle. The circle can be seen in a couple ways. It can be a shape that we draw to keep people out or a shape we draw to bring people in. Perhaps when Satan is invited into the circle, he loses some of his power and the circle is able to grow.

May it be so. Amen.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Thomas Disrud. All rights reserved.