by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given March 25, 2001

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

OPENING WORDS

Come to this sacred time mindful of the beauty of this day,

mindful of the life we have been given to live.

In the presence of this community,

may we know our capacity to do good as well as to do harm,

our capacity to live in service of the good.

Come now, and let us worship here together.

There is a story about two brothers. They were evil, and they also happened to have a lot of money. They used their money to keep their evil ways out of the public eye. They attended the same church, and they appeared to be the most faithful of men. They had a good relationship with their fellow parishioners. They had a good relationship with their pastor.

One day the pastor retired and a new pastor came to the church. But the new pastor did not see the brothers in the same way. He saw right through their deception. The new pastor turned out to be very popular. He spoke well and more and more people started coming to the church to hear him preach. Before long, the church needed a new building to hold all the people. A fund-raising campaign was launched to build the new church. And then all of a sudden, one of the brothers died. The day before the funeral, the remaining brother sought out the pastor and handed him a check for the amount needed to finish paying for the new building. "I have only one condition," he said. "At his funeral, you must say my brother was a saint."

The pastor thought about it and gave his word, and deposited the check. The next day, at the funeral, the pastor did not hold back. "He was an evil man," he said. "He cheated on his wife and abused his family." He went on like this for a time, and then he concluded with, "but compared to his brother, he was a saint."

If only it was so easy—and we could respond so concisely—when faced with the presence of evil in our lives. If only we knew what to do. If only we knew what to say. If only we were sure we knew what it was we were seeing. But I have to say it has never been that easy for me.

The mention of the word evil can put us on edge. It is a word that is hard to hear and one that is not so easy to define. And yet every day we hear stories that make us ask, why did this happen? What caused this person to do this? In recent years it comes with stories of school shootings and trying to understand what is happening when children will plan for weeks and then try to kill scores of other students. And we ask ourselves, what is it that is making this happen?

Defining evil is not such an easy thing. Historically, it has been seen as part of a great cosmic struggle between God and Satan. Others would say that there is no battle to be won, no problem to solve. Evil is an illusion, a label we have created to understand events or experiences that cause us to suffer. Some would say that if we were taught to understand life differently, we would see that things that we call evil are really examples of Karma or a result of the world being out of balance, or nothing more than our own mistaken way of thinking. And others would say that what happens in the world is all determined and that we have little or nothing to do with it. With a given set of circumstances, a certain outcome is very likely to happen.

This, of course, challenges the notion of free will. What, after all, do we have if we don’t have free will? Our choices must make some difference in all of this. And if they don’t make any difference, then where is the hope? What does it mean?

I don’t know what the answer is and how much of a role we play in the workings of good and evil in the world. I certainly believe that we have some say in the matter. I’m just not sure how much.

This I can say: I do believe there is such a thing as evil. I have an awareness in my body when I am in the presence of it. It is that feeling that I don’t know what to do with. There is a visceral knowing that something is awry, that there is something broken.

Of the reading I’ve done on the issue, a simple definition has stuck with me. That is simply that the word live, spelled backwards, is evil. The two, we could argue, are opposites. In its most basic form, evil is that force that cuts us off from life. It does not promote life but takes life, does not enhance relationship but cuts it off. Evil is the absence of good. It is the absence that which gives life. It can happen in small ways we are not even aware of and it can happen in ways that it is hard for us to comprehend. We are, first of all, called to be aware and attentive.

A story. This comes from the New Yorker magazine from just a couple weeks ago (March 12, 2001). It is the story of a small village in Poland in 1941 and the confluence of events that led to 1,500 Jews being herded into a barn and the barn being set on fire, killing the people inside in a short few minutes. It is the story of half a village killing the other half on a summer day.

The town was called Jedwabne, and it is in northeastern Poland, about 90 miles from Warsaw. For hundreds of years, Poles and Jews lived relatively peacefully side-by-side. One Jew still living said that, "Here there were not such big differences in opinion or whatever, because they—the Jews—were in this little town, on good terms with the Poles. Depending on each other. Everybody was on a first-name basis… life here was, I would say, somehow idyllic."

It was written that Jews at the time always lived with the threat of violence, particularly when certain people would come into power and often around Eastertime when the sermon would hold up Jews as God-killers, the people who killed Christ. Still, life was relatively stable.

In 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany signed a pact that essentially divided Poland between the two countries. Jedwabne was taken over by the Soviets, and there was at least the impression that the Jews sided with this and curried the attention of the Soviet invaders. It is not entirely clear what happened, but the impression was that the Jews sided with the Soviets.

In June of 1941, the Germans broke their pact with the Soviets and invaded the rest of Poland, including Jedwabne. In villages in the surrounding area, in a short time, Jews were rounded up and killed. Other Jews fleeing the violence came to Jedwabne. There was warning about what was happening, but many did not heed the warning, saying that the Bishop would protect them. In the past, deals had been made with the local Catholic priests and they would order an end to violence against the Jews.

But on this day, July 10, things quickly got out of hand. The Germans met with the new leaders of the town and reportedly said that the Jews should be killed, save for one family from each profession, but the Poles did not want that—that all the Jews had to be killed.

The men left this meeting and started herding all the Jews into the street. Word got around and many Jews tried to escape, but most of them did not. Vigilante groups from around the area were coming into town and taking people to the center of town. Jews were being killed in small groups. They were stoned. Mothers with children drowned. Others were taken to the local cemetery and ordered to dig graves for Jews that had just been killed, then were killed themselves and the next group had to dig their graves. A report from a witness said, "the murderers got excited and worked at a frantic pace."

Midway through the day, it became apparent that if all the Jews were going to be killed, the methods used were not going to accomplish the task fast enough. And the momentum was building and the townspeople wanted to get it over with as fast as possible. It was decided that a barn would be used for the killing. The Jews were forced into the town square and marched toward the barn that had been chosen.

They were ordered to march into the barn in rows of four. It says "near the gates a few hooligans were standing, playing various instruments in order to drown the screams of horrified victims." Once they were all in the barn, the doors were sealed, it was doused with gasoline and set on fire. Within a few minutes, the people were dead. Most suffocated from the smoke and having other bodies on top on them.

For most of the last 60 years, the incident has been largely blamed on the Germans who invaded Poland. It has since become pretty clear that while the Germans certainly came to town and gave permission, they were not entirely responsible. In fact, it was the local Poles who did most of the actual killing. One report even has the Germans trying to hold back some Jews from being killed. The Poles were going too far.

Reading about this horrible event, I had the sense that the frenzy to do away with the Jews moved almost as quickly as the fire that raged through the barn. It is almost impossible to imagine the event and how quickly it came together. It is as if a Pandora’s box of evil were opened up and the horror was unleashed.

Exactly all the forces that made this terror possible will perhaps always remain a mystery. What was it that allowed one half of this town to wipe out the other half of the town in a day? The Germans gave permission, the Poles carried out the task, and there were events that had happened previously that were a part, and yet it somehow doesn’t quite explain it all.

We all know that this is one of many stories we hear from times of war, stories that seem altogether common. They are hard to believe and yet we know they happen all the time. And yet the neighbors knew each other by name, they lived side-by-side for hundreds of years.

One of the lessons of history is that when evil gets personified, people will do all kinds of things in its name. When a group is demonized, it is easy to do whatever we will bring them down. We want to have one group that is all bad and another group that is all good, but that is rarely the case. In any situation we can never know what piece all the parts of the system play.

I don’t know what happened that day in Poland. This was not the only place where it happened. Other villages in Poland had the same thing happen. And yet, we ask why. When a student opens fire at school, it is easy to want to label the child as evil. Yes, that might be, but we also need to look at the system that child is a part of. Why do so many teen-agers feel so alienated? Why can they get so many guns? What are those things that reinforce feelings of disaffection and anger?

It is always dangerous when we want to label one person or one group as the evil ones. Too often there are all kinds of factors at play that make the situation more complex than we might like it to be.

And yet there is a need to be aware and not to deny it. As liberals, we can get into trouble when we deny evil, and don’t want to have anything to do with it. These days a lot of people in our culture are spiritual seekers. But much of the time, that seeking is only for those spiritual things that bring us to goodness. We don’t want to have much to do with anything else.

In any given situation, for starters, I must be able to recognize my own capacity to do harm, to bring evil to others. If I can look at the village and see all the players, to what extent can I see myself as part of the madness? When have I been a victim and when have I been a perpetrator of violence? If I cannot do that, I risk living in denial about that potential.

It is hard for me to imagine being able to kill another person. I can imagine it if I were defending myself or if a person I loved was being attacked. That I can see, but I can’t imagine the other.

And yet I also know that I am capable of that. I don’t know where it would come from, but I know that any one of us is capable. And that is a frightening thought. Yet it is real.

And yet, I must at least try to hold that thought. I must try to live with my disease. And with that I must recognize that in my capacity to do evil is also the capacity to do good, that the two are very much linked.

Words from Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn: "If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

When we hear of the horror of the latest high school shooting, the last thing we may want to ask is where am I in this? What part of my heart is in this? That is not always the easy question, but that is where we have to start.

It is when we are in denial that we are in trouble. If we are not able to know what is in our own hearts, and we deny what is there, that is when we keep ourselves from seeing evil—within ourselves and in our midst.

In M. Scott Peck’s book entitled The People of the Lie, the people he has experienced as evil are devoid of a connection to someone else. Their actions are all in their own self-interest, to the destructiveness of another person or people. It is their ability to deny the capacity for evil in themselves that is at the heart of the problem.

He tells one story about a family—a mother, father and two sons. The oldest son killed himself with a gun. The other son started to have a hard time in school and was depressed. As Peck talked with the family, he learned that the parents had given the gun the older son used to kill himself to the younger son for Christmas.

How, Peck asks, could the parents have such hatred for their son to do this? How could it be so blatant? Yet, he writes that the parents seemed to have no sense of what they were doing. No sense that something was wrong.

The theologian Rheinold Niebuhr, in 1944, wrote: "Evil is always the assertion of some self interest without regard to the whole whether the whole be conceived as the immediate community or the community of mankind, or the total community of the world. The good is, on the other hand, always the harmony of the whole."

When there is not a connection, there is an absence that we don’t know how to fill. In life we make a series of choices, consciously or unconsciously, and these choices lead us down certain paths. They can be choices that lead us into right relationship or they can be choices that lead us against right relationship. And once we are on a certain path, it can be very difficult to get off that path—only when something drastic happens to stop it. We find ourselves cut off and don’t know what to do.

Back in the mid-1980s, the story of the serial killer Jeffery Dahmer emerged. The story of how he lured men back to his apartment drugged them, killed them, dismembered their bodies and put them in the freezer. It was one of the more grizzly tales to emerge in recent years. It was a terrible story on all kinds of levels. I particularly took note because I became aware that the apartment that I lived in during college was about three blocks from Dahmer’s apartment and that he was living there when I was there. It was not something that was supposed to be happening right there. A serial killer was not supposed to live in my neighborhood.

In reading the stories of his arrest and the murders, I remember the account of a police officer who said Dahmer seemed to be relieved after he was arrested. How there actually was a sense of peace about him, how he seemed almost thankful. I later read that during the time he was killing he had, on more than one occasion, reached out to churches but never made a connection.

And it makes me wonder what it was in him that was reaching out. What was the absence there and would it have been possible for him to find something to fill that absence in a way that supported life? I’ve tried to imagine what could possibly have been going on for him, what inner evil was being expressed. What it was that made him do what he did. I don’t know those answers. And yet I’m struck by that image that he was at peace when we was arrested. That in the knowing that he was not going to kill anymore there was relief. He could not stop himself and maybe he wanted to be stopped by someone else.

Evil has been described not so much as the opposite of good but the absence of good—the absence of God. That we become isolated and alone and the absence emerges. It is that absence that combines with many other factors. That this is one of many factors in the equation.

We must to be attentive to this absence. We are called to be attentive to what is happening inside of us and around us. We must ask ourselves how we are part of this, what we can do, and what our responsibility is, both when goodness is present and also when it is not.

Words of the poet Rumi:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.

This is how the story from the Polish town of Jedwabne ends. It is entirely possible that we would have never heard the story were it not for the deeds of a Polish woman named Antonina Wyrzykowska. She was a Polish woman from a nearby town and as the Jews were being rounded up that day, she brought seven of them to her farm and fed them for three years. Even her husband did not know how many people she was hiding—because it was safer for them that even he did not know the whole story.

It was one of those Jews she hid who went on to write the story of the massacre. When the war was finished and when Antonina Wyrzykowska’s neighbors learned that she had sheltered the Jews, they took her and beat her, but she survived. She and her husband were forced to move to another village, and when their story was learned there, had to move again. Eventually, after her husband died, she came to live in the United States.

There is no clean ending to the story. It is a quiet ending, when goodness seems almost entirely absent. And yet, not completely lost. It is there. And it is here. It is here in the telling of the story. And the story will be told again and again. And hopefully the story will not be forgotten. There is power in telling this story and in telling all the stories of evil and good, those stories that separate and bring us together. Those stories that make us aware of the mystery we are a part of, and how that mystery calls us, again and again, to be present and not absent. How that story calls us, again and again, to live with the tension. How we are called, again and again, to give ourselves over to the good. Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of life, hold us this day. Hold us as we witness all the good and all the evil present in the world. Hold us as we try to make sense of all that we see. May we know ourselves in the midst of this violence and beauty. May we know our capacity to harm as well as heal. In this knowing may we find life. In this knowing may we give ourselves over to the good in all of our days. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go forth this day in love. Give yourself to the good.

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Copyright 2001, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.