You may remember the melody from that fabulous piano anthem Signe offered. The original version was on the Michael Jackson album, Thriller. The lyric of the song repeated this refrain: “Why? Why?… Tell ‘em its just human nature.” The composer was responding to a conversation with his young daughter who had had a bad day at school.
Perhaps his daughter was like the young girl, stung by a bee, in our reading, “trapped, as [we] so often are, in why things happen…”
“Are bees bad?” “Are they mean?”
Is it the intention of bees of harm us? Are bees evil?
Why was I stung by bees?
We want answers. And the response that it was an accident, it just happened… satisfies no more than the refrain in the anthem…”tell ‘em that its human nature.”
We want more. We want cause and effect. We want to understand our experience in ways that locate us in a predictable moral universe of right and wrong, of good…and evil. And, needless to say, we want to see ourselves on the “good” side of that equation.
Our spiritual theme this month is “evil” and dealing with evil is not, traditionally, a great strength of liberal religion. We speak of the inherent worth and dignity of every person…it is our first principal…yet we are bombarded every day with the reality that human beings are capable of hatred and violence almost beyond imagining.
Yes, we say. We acknowledge the violence in the world and, when we are pressed, even the ways we ourselves are complicit. But we view the shortcomings of the world and the shortcomings in ourselves as challenges to be overcome in a movement toward justice, equity and compassion. And we want to understand that movement toward justice as ordained and inevitable…and rapid.
That view of progress, that fundamental and almost naïve hopefulness…in the face of a reality that so often offers violent and evil results…
That view of progress is one of the main reasons our tradition has been criticized for having a thick ethic of justice, but a dangerously thin theology.
Love is the doctrine of this church…yes. But we also say that the quest of truth is our sacrament.
And the truth of the world, I believe, requires us to get clear about the capacity and the prevalence of evil.
So, here goes.
There is that in me…and perhaps in you…that wants to believe that our own lives are part of some larger moral plan…some structure…some meaning beyond self-interest…some good.
We want our world and our lives to make sense. Given the violence of the world and our belief in the power of love…making sense of the world is no small task.
Our Universalist ancestors, who proclaimed that “God is love” had to deal with the presence of evil, just as we do.
The religious orthodoxy of their day dealt with evil by separating the human family. Some, few, were to be saved…in the next world. The rest of us, most of us, were to be damned, again in the next world. The question was who would get into heaven and who had a different destination.
Most of us in this sanctuary don’t spend a great deal of time or energy worrying about heaven and hell. Heaven and hell, for us, are here, in this world, if they exist anywhere.
But in the religious world of the 19th century, the question of heaven and hell was very real.
Our Universalist ancestors heard that argument about who was saved and who was damned…they heard that argument as an affront to the God of love that they knew in their lives and that they found in their Bibles.
The God of love that they knew had given his son…these were committed Christians…to make good for all of our shortcomings…”atone for our sins” was the language they used…so that everyone would go to heaven…everyone would be reconciled and welcomed by God into Glory in the next life.
It was a radical theological claim. The early Universalists were called “No Hellers” and they were condemned as heretics…
But even the Universalists saw the evil done by human beings…and some of them began to question whether all of us…even those who had done great evil…would make it to heaven…at least right away.
Two factions developed. The first group were the “no hellers,” they proclaimed what was called “Death and Glory Universalism.” For them, everyone gets to heaven right away. Death, straight to Glory.
The second group believed in “Limited Chastisement” after death for those souls who had been truly evil in life. They, in fact, came to believe in “Probation,” as they called it. Some of you may recognize this…from your prior religious experience…as a version of Purgatory.
Death and Glory vs Probation.
This was called the Restorationist controversy, if you delve deeply into Universalist history.
Those who believed in probation even speculated on how long some of us would have to wait to be “restored,” how long we might have to wait in purgatory. One of the prominent voices on this side of the debate, Elhanan Winchester, suggested that some souls might have to wait 50,000 years.
Wow.
That is one way, theologically, to deal with the presence of evil. You can promise punishment for it. And since evil is so prevalent and so often rewarded in this life, make the punishment in the next life.
Presumably, those early Universalist believers in Probation would today imagine that the sad young shooter at the Parkland high school and the shooters in Las Vegas and Sandy Hook would get some maximum probation for confession and re-education. Even our President called the shooter in Las Vegas pure evil. Perhaps there might be some version of community service in heaven. Perhaps 50,000 years of penance, for those shooters, would not be too much.
Those Universalist religious ancestors did not have our contemporary understandings of mental health to explain evil acts. Nor did they have our emerging understanding of structural and cultural systems of privilege and oppression that sustain patterns of evil and violence.
All they had was reliance on the God of love they knew and trusted to make sense of the unavoidable presence of evil in the world. All they had was deferred punishment to justify a belief in an orderly universe, created and controlled by a God of love.
The problem of evil has be-deviled human beings for…well, probably as long as there have been human beings.
Many faiths deal with the presence of evil by creating divine powers and personalities that embodied evil. This is the dualism of Zoroastrianism. The many dieties in the Hindu tradition that personify violence and evil. And, in the Judeo Christian tradition, there is Satan.
Miguel De la Torre argues that humans developed the idea of Satan, the evil one, to explain and even to justify the notion of God as good…because the presence of evil and violence and injustice in the world was undeniable.
De la Torre writes: “For evil to exist, and God to be acquitted of complicity and retain an all-loving and all-powerful nature, injustice must somehow be reconciled with God. … Satan literally becomes a necessary evil—an evil that excuses God.”
That is another theological way to deal with evil. “The Devil made me do it.” That still locates the source of evil outside of us. It preserves our ability to see ourselves as basically good. It avoids confronting our capacity for harm and our complicity with structures that oppress.
The quest of truth is our sacrament. Sometimes hard truth.
Here is what I can say, today, about good and evil and about how the universe works.
I do not see any evidence that God, or the Source or Spirit of Life “wants” any particular outcome. Desire is not an attribute of the Spirit of Life. Nor do I believe that there is any pre-determined plan. We are not living out some guaranteed movement toward glory.
As Victoria Safford puts it: “If I were asked to confess my faith or my beliefs out loud, and I were scrambling for some place to begin, I would … say that first of all and ultimately we are alone. No god abides with us, caring, watching, mindful of our going out and coming in.”
And because the Spirit of Life does not desire or demand a particular outcome, the universe is…at the practical level…not a moral place.
The universe is not an immoral place, either. Evil is not privileged. But neither is it a moral place where good is a guaranteed result.
The universe is amoral. There is no absolute good and no demand for progress toward it. Morality…good and evil…is not even a particularly relevant category…in the universe.
But, today, there is still a ground of hope I can affirm.
Safford again: “We are alone yet intricately bound, inextricably connected to soil and stream and forest, to sun and corn and melting snow. We are alone, yet bound by stories we cannot get out of to ancestors and descendants we will never meet. And all these bonds we did not forge ourselves and yet cannot deny, are the strands of a theology, the seeds of faith, the beginning of re-ligion, re-ligio, of binding all things.”
Whatever Gods may be are present not to control us or determine outcomes. The Spirit of Life, the Source, is there to call us to dream a world where love can live. The God I know is there holding that web where connections can be made and where the constant re-binding of creation can be sustained. The god I know is more than willing to collude with us to help love live.
I try, again and again, to put words to what I sense. But it remains, and probably should remain, mostly as mystery. Unknowable but present and somehow known.
As I listen to myself, I wonder how our religious descendants two hundred years from now will react to my stumblings toward meaning. Will they critique my answers just as I critique the answers of those Universalists and Unitarians of long ago.
Or will they nod their heads in some approval? Will they say that we were honest enough to accept the absence of some grand celestial plan as empowerment of the choices we can make? Will they say that facing a world of increasing divisiveness and fear, we were faithful to the hope that can be found in coming together? Will they say that we found hope and courage to push back against greed and fragmentation? Will they say that it was our resistance to evil that allowed the next tentative movements toward justice to blossom?
We speak of the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We ground our faith in the simple, clear affirmation that all people, without exception, matter.
We do not say that all people are or will be good.
As Rev. Lynn Ungar wrote recently, our affirmation that we are born with inherent worth and dignity, “doesn’t say anything about who other people are, it says something about who we are and about our own commitment as to how we … will be in the world.”
Let me be clear. We need to develop our capacity to see and to confront evil. We have only begun to imagine what justice needs to look like in the face of structural evil and a culture that oppresses so many of us.
Because we are called by the Spirit of Life, or by the better angels of our nature, to the building of Beloved Community. And there is no divine blue print, no heavenly work order for us to follow.
But what if we were able to live the urgency for life-affirming justice…not as an obligation or a duty or a sacrifice…but as a choice and a blessing and a gift.
What if the meaning for which we yearn is to be found not in theological speculation, but in the work of justice itself…in the learning and the teaching, in the trying and in the sometimes failing.
The meaning of good and evil is not abstract. It is in the choices that we make each day.
“Between two animals,
Choose the one who needs you more.
Between two children,
Choose both.
Between the lesser and the bigger evil,
Choose neither.
Between hope and despair,
Choose hope:
It will be harder to bear…”
Choose hope. We are, after all, people of faith.
Topics: Evil