by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given March 3, 2002

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning! Three unseen guests attend our service this morning—faith, hope, and love. Let all our hearts prepare them room. Come, let us worship together.

We’ve been hearing a lot about evil lately— the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, the Satan figure himself. And now we add the "Axis of Evil."

The terrorist attacks, though, are but the current form of the incredible suffering that human beings can and do inflict upon one another. We’ve seen genocide in Africa and in the former Yugoslavia in recent years and of course the Holocaust earlier in the century. We look in vain for explanations—"How could anyone do that?" we ask, and shake our heads.

The question of evil, or in theological terms theodicy, is one that has vexed theologians throughout the centuries—if God is just, how could a just God permit evil?

First of all, I think we must understand that this question is one that comes out of dualistic Western thinking, not out of Eastern thought. This is not a question that Hindus and Buddhists wrestle with, for they acknowledge the complementarity of goodness and evil, understanding that one cannot exist without the other. During my recent visit to Bali, I observed that daily offerings were given to both the good spirits and the evil spirits, and nobody seemed to be particularly strung out because there are evil spirits. Of course there are evil spirits! The goal with these offerings is to give thanks to the good spirits and to placate the bad spirits, so as to achieve balance or harmony in the world. They would not understand the "Star Wars" approach in the Western world, in which good must fight to eradicate evil.

Lest you think dualistic theology and cosmology are unimportant, note our country’s approach to rooting out the terrorists networks—all of them, all over the world. We will destroy the evildoers, says our President. No, we will destroy ourselves as we blind ourselves to our own misdeeds and go in the guise of the good, the noble, even as we rev up our military machine for attacking other rogue states, as we call them.

So understand that any conversation about evil takes place in the cultural context of dualism. I’ve been trying to work out in my own mind how this all works, because I do believe in evil—I believe in evil acts, I think I believe in evil people, and I certainly believe in systemic evil, such as government policies which make some people overwhelmingly rich and leave other people hungry. So does that put me in the dualistic camp? Well, of course, language itself takes us right into dualism—as soon as you said "evil," up pops its counterpart, "good." I’ve tried to stretch beyond that, because this dualistic approach is just too simplistic—and not satisfying spiritually. I believe that the universe is one, that goodness and evil are both are part of the mind of God. It appears that we humans are caught here on a kind of "darkling plain," where we struggle with our limited concepts. Evil is a mystery beyond our knowing—I believe there is a larger knowing which we must trust, even amidst our suffering. This reminds me of a cartoon I saw once—two fleas are walking amidst the gigantic hairs on a dog’s back, and one looks at the other and says, "Do you believe in dog?" Our perspective is just so very limited.

Remember the Book of Job? God and the Devil make a kind of wager about whether or not Job will forsake God when everything he holds dear has been taken away. God and the Devil are having a kind of conversation, almost like at a cocktail party—"I think this," "oh, no, I think that"—but Job is the one who has to bear the consequences of the wager. He loses his children, his flocks, his houses and lands. His friends come and give bad advice. I think Job is every man. He is you and I and every person who has ever said to himself, "But I’ve been so good—or at least I’ve tried to be. Why is my life in shambles?" It just is. There is no quid pro quo for good behavior. When Job cries out for an explanation, a voice comes from the whirlwind, and it says more or less, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Who are you to ask for an explanation? Forget all this talk about good and evil. I’m all there is. There is nothing else."

So where does that leave us, with our imperfect knowledge? We struggle to find the good we want to do, to find the faith we need when things fall apart. We become confused, we make mistakes, but we know somewhere deep in our bones that some behaviors are right and some are wrong, and most of us most of the time want to do right.

And yet we are tempted, especially when we’re fearful. What is this force called evil that threatens to pull us from our best selves? But first of all, I want to say what evil is not. Andrea Yates, now on trial for the drowning of her five children, is not evil. Surely the deed is horrific, but Yates is not evil, she is certifiably mentally ill. You see, I think evil has to do with intention, for one thing. Intention, judgment, wasn’t there.

As part of my training to become a minister, I worked in a Federal prison for a while. I met a lot of people there who could have been considered evil, but I did not find them to be so. Yes, many of them had done some horrible things, including murder, but evil—no, I would not call many of them evil. I saw a lot of drug dealers, who saw themselves as participating in victimless crimes. I got to know bank robbers and white collar criminals, most of whom were trying to make a buck the easy way. The murderers—well, most of their crimes were acts of passion. In fact, most homicides are committed by people who’ve never committed a crime before. Most people go to prison because they are poor, not very smart, poorly educated, and cannot control their aggressive impulses.

Then there were the psychopaths—they are an entirely different breed. Psychopaths seem to have a block missing in their mental make-up, the block called conscience. They are "morally challenged"--they simply do not feel shame or remorse for their deeds. I met a Mafia hit man in prison. He killed without malice, for money. I’ll never forget how he came with his watering can into the chapel each day and tenderly watered the flowers. Are psychopaths evil, or are they mentally ill? Depends on your definition. But they are capable of doing the most evil deeds and then walking away without feeling bad about themselves.

But now I want to explore a more subtle form of evil, a more everyday form, and one that is likely to take us off guard. M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist, says in his book People of the Lie—which is the most clarifying text I have ever read on the subject of evil—that evil is that which kills: that which kills life, kills the body or kills the spirit. He tells the story of Bobby, one of his patients, and Bobby’s parents. It seems that Bobby’s older brother Stuart had killed himself about six months before by shooting himself in the head with a .22 caliber rifle. Bobby had grown more and more depressed since that time, his grades had fallen off, and then he stole a car and crashed it. Dr. Peck saw a boy who seemed dazed, dull, expressionless. He asked Bobby a series of questions, just to get acquainted, but he wasn’t learning much. Bobby couldn’t talk about his brother. He claimed his parents were "good to him," though he was sometimes mean to them, he said. Then Dr. Peck asked Bobby, "It’s not long since Christmas. What did you get for Christmas?"

"Nothing much," Bobby answered.

Dr. Peck pursued, "Your parents must have given you something. What did they give you?"

"A gun," Bobby answered.

"What kind of gun?" asked Dr. Peck.

"A twenty-two."

"A twenty-two pistol?"

"No, a twenty-two rifle." Dr. Peck began to feel that he had lost his bearings. He wanted to stop the interview.

"How did you feel, getting the same kind of gun that your brother had?"

"It wasn’t the same kind of gun. It was the gun."

"You mean your parents gave you your brother’s gun for Christmas, the one he shot himself with?"

"Yes."

The next day Peck saw Bobby’s parents. They were, as he described them, the upper crust of the blue-collar class—quiet, orderly, solid. They seemed to have no understanding of the tragedy that had befallen them. But when Peck confronted them about their decision to give their depressed son the weapon their other son had used to kill himself, and suggested that Bobby might think to use it on himself, they were belligerent. "Are you one of these anti-gun people?" asked the father. "Besides, we couldn’t afford a new gun—money doesn’t grow on trees, you know." The long and short of it was that Bobby was sent to live with his Aunt Helen, and he did recover—but Peck tried in vain to understand the parents. He says he could not treat them in therapy, because he was repulsed by them. This is a healthy response in the presence of evil.

Peck goes on to describe what he calls "people of the lie." He says the evil deceive others and build layer after layer of self-deception. They are frightened and are "forever fleeing the light of self-exposure and the voice of their own conscience." The central defect of the evil, he believes, is not the sin itself but the refusal to acknowledge it. These people of the lie may think of themselves as noble, and they are engaged unceasingly in maintaining the appearance of moral purity. They will sacrifice others to preserve their self-image. In Peck’s experience as a psychiatrist, these people do not respond to kindness or reason or any form of spiritual persuasion, but only to raw power.

Fortunately, most of these people do not gain power over the masses, but history has shown us that sometimes they do. A case in point is Adolph Hitler. Author Ron Rosenbaum has written a book entitled Explaining Hitler: the Search for the Origins of His Evil. Rosenbaum started out trying to discover these origins, but found that the more he studied, the less he understood. He began to think that his most interesting finding was the reluctance of scholars to actually see Hitler as evil. A few scholars used terms like "eruption of demonism" or "near ultimate evil," but these were in the minority. Most wanted to find some psycho-social-biological reason, some clear aberration that happened at a point in time, turning this shy, failed artist and one-time homeless man into a mass murderer. It was simply unbearable to think of anyone doing such deeds without a cause that could explain the behavior. Here are some of those explanations, by various writers:

• a frequent theme is Hitler as victim—the prisoner of unconscious impulses. He suffered from that most terrible of all contemporary maladies, low self-esteem. Alice Miller was perhaps the best known propagator of this theory. She believed that Hitler’s deeds can be traced to brutal corporal punishment by his father.

• Eric Fromm blames Hitler’s mother and says that the child had a "malignant incestuous attachment" to her. Fromm believed Hitler’s hatred for Jews was an unconscious desire to destroy his mother.

• Some believe that the cultural milieu, the economic devastation of Germany after World War II made the Holocaust inevitable. If not Hitler, somebody else would have killed the Jews. If that stretches your credulity, then try this next one.

• Hitler supposedly had a missing left testicle, and perhaps had a malformed penis. Well, that would certainly be enough reason to kill 6,000,000 people. It appears that one of Hitler’s classmates was interviewed and he propagated what is known as the "billy-goat bite story." According to the classmate, Hitler was trying to urinate into the mouth of a billy-goat, and the goat, offended, took a bite out of Hitler’s penis. This book was widely and respectfully reviewed.

• Then there is the germ theory. Hitler had encephalitis, or he had syphilis, and became mentally deranged.

It appears that the scholars who knew the least, says Rosenbaum, seemed to defend their theories the most fiercely. We need an explanation. Else we might conclude that we, too, might be susceptible to the power of evil.. Maybe we, too, might have the capacity to torture and kill. It is just too much to comprehend, to admit.

I believe that people can choose evil, and some do. I know a few. It is a way to power, this selling your soul to the devil—not the only way, or the best way, but it is a way. I believe that the impulse to power, which we all have, is grounded in fear, ultimately a fear of death. We will try to gain power however we can, to relieve our anxiety. In the film Lawrence of Arabia, Lawrence saves one of his soldiers who is lost in the desert. Later the same man is found stealing, and the rule is that a thief must die, so Lawrence pulls out his hand gun and shoots the man. At this point he decides to leave the army. "Why?" someone asks. "Because I enjoyed that," he said. Power over life and death—it is a rush. Instinctively, Lawrence knows to distrust it.

I think one of our weaknesses as religious liberals is that we refuse to see evil, or to even believe it exists. A recent issue of the UU World magazine had a cover story about evil. I found most of it to be pretty pale stuff, enshrining relativism. Like this definition, for example: "Evil is a label, a term for someone else’s interests that conflict with one’s own. There is no intrinsic good or intrinsic evil."

As Unitarian Universalists, we run two risks in failing to acknowledge the presence of evil in our world. First, we weaken our prophetic voice when we say, "Well, one position is as good as another. We don’t want to take a stand, because somebody might be offended." And then second, all too often I’ve seen UU churches allow unhealthy individuals to follow their destructive agendas and wreak havoc in the community. In a healthy institution, the leaders set boundaries. They know how to say "no" when they need to.

What are our responsibilities as human beings, as citizens, as parents, in the face of the mystery of evil? First of all, we must move toward more and more consciousness in our own lives. We all have the capacity to rationalize, to project our own motives onto others, to scapegoat. We must own our errors. Look at our motives. Look at the fruits of our living. Did a particular statement, a particular deed, bring life, or just the opposite? Leaders have to take particular care, because they have power to influence so many.

This lack of consciousness leading to evil is portrayed beautifully in a current film, Monster’s Ball. In this film you will find racism, capital punishment, suicide, prostitution—and the redeeming power of love. I highly recommend that you see it.

I have mentioned systemic evil. As citizens, we need to acknowledge the evil that’s being acted out on a massive scale not just by terrorists, but by our own foreign policy, our lack of regulation of corporate power, our weapons industry. We must once again expect, we must demand, that our country will be a moral leader, not just an economic leader.

We must not be silent and thereby acquiesce when we see evil at work, whether it’s in our neighborhood or in national policy. The leader is the boat, as someone has said, but we are the water. Let us refuse to float the boat if it doesn’t serve the good.

A warning: do not fight evil on its own ground, for when we do, we will be drawn into it and become dirty and besmirched by it. There’s an old Chinese saying: "If a mule kicks you, you don’t kick it back." We must fight evil with every positive force we have. Fight it with clarity of voice, fight it with compassion of heart.

And know that, yes, now we see through a glass darkly, but then we will see face to face. We don’t understand the mystery of evil, and yet we must live in a world where it is a reality. It is part of a larger whole that we cannot see, I believe, and we really do have to travel on faith. We hear again the voice from the whirlwind: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth. I’m all there is, there’s nothing else." And yet by grace, and by the power of redeeming love, it is enough. So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Giver of Life, we pray today that we will be pulled back to you when our fear leads us astray, when we find ourselves a part of the hurting rather than a part of the healing. Give us self-knowledge, that we might see the paths we are to follow. And may we have the courage to confront evil in its every guise and say no and no and no, that we might say yes and give ourselves to the good as we know it to be. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go now, and have the courage to be in the world as it is, to give thanks in faith that all that is, is good.

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Copyright 2002, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.