How should we respond to evil?

Forgiveness can be a very, very difficult thing, and it is made much more difficult by a number of grave misconceptions our culture teaches us about what it means to forgive.

Many think, for example, that forgiveness is a feeling. They believe that to forgive means that feelings of anger and hate toward those who have done evil against us should be immediately replaced with feelings of warmth and love for that person.

Not so. Forgiveness is a decision we make. Relationship with the person who has wronged us might or might not come, in time. But that depends a lot on the other person. Can he/she accept your forgiveness? Can he/she forgive him/herself?

What if the person we need to forgive has already died? Forgiveness is a decision we make, and might very well have to make more than once. Restoration of relationship is a possible benefit, but neither required nor always possible.

Likewise, relationship with God is a benefit—but neither a condition nor a necessary outcome of—God’s forgiveness of us. God does not force anyone into relationship. God seeks to love us into relationship.

Forgiveness also does not change what happened. It is not saying, “Oh, well, that’s okay, I really didn’t mind,” or, “It really didn’t matter.” If it didn’t matter, what is there to forgive? If it really didn’t matter, then I got upset about nothing, and what is needed is not forgiveness but an adjustment of my own attitude!

On Sept. 11, 2001, several thousand people died needlessly and wantonly. It happened. It mattered, and it still matters.
                                                                                              
 Forgiveness is precisely NOT about tolerating evil, not about indifference to evil, not about mere “inclusivity.” It is about confronting evil and naming it.
                                                                                       

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past.

Most of all, forgiving is not about forgetting. That popular little notion, “forgive and forget,” is perhaps the most wrong-headed of all. Forgiveness is precisely about remembering. We cannot learn from the past if we forget.

I have an index card I keep on my desk. I don’t remember where I got this quote, but it says, “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past.” In other words, we can’t change the past, we can only come to terms with it… in a way that enables us to move forward.

Bishop Desmond Tutu has written a book about forgiveness that recognizes this important aspect of forgiveness in its title alone. Tutu’s homeland, South African, has long been torn by apartheid and racial strife. Atrocities have been exchanged, revenge taken by both sides. If any place in the world needs the healing power of forgiveness, it is South Africa. Tute aptly titled his book, No Future Without Forgiveness.

In other words, forgiveness is about the past, the present, and the future. In each and every present, we must come to terms with the past because we cannot change it, in order to move toward the future.

So, how do we do that? How do we remember and honor the past, come to terms with it, transform NOT the past but our response to the past, so that we can go about the business of enacting God’s kingdom here and now and into the future?

We have no better example than how God, in the person of Jesus Christ, did it. In the second meditation I spoke of God embracing the evil and suffering of the cross, and that might not be how you are accustomed to thinking of the passion of Jesus Christ.

But I base that understanding on how Jesus himself taught us to remember and honor those events. He instituted the Eucharist, a feast of the bread and wine of daily life made holy... transformed into the real presence of God. And each time we partake, we transform the evil and suffering of the cross into a celebration of relationship among us... and with God.

Likewise, our ways of remembering events like September 11, 2001 can be outward signs of an inner grace, the grace of forgiveness.

A few weeks ago I heard a story on NPR that featured the mother of a young man who was killed in the fall of the Twin Towers. She vehemently opposed the plans to build an Islamic Center near Ground Zero, saying, “Every time I hear the bells calling Muslims to prayer five times a day, I will feel the pain of my son’s death all over again.”

I am deeply sorry for her pain and I pray people in her life will find a way to reach out to her and help her move on. But it is incomprehensible to me that a call to prayer in any language could be a source of pain to any believer. Her words are the words of one stuck in unforgiveness.

And, by the way, we Christians are also called to prayer five times a day. It is called “the Daily Office.” We just don’t ring bells… but perhaps we should! I wonder how Lower Manhattan might be transformed, how the whole country might be transformed, if all Christians stopped what they were doing for a moment of prayer each time the mosque bells ring!

I will close with another exchange between God and Mack in The Shack. God has just told Mack that he needs to forgive the man who killed his daughter.

How can I ever forgive that son of a bitch who killed my Missy, Mack cried. If he were here today, I don’t know what I would do. I know it isn’t right, but I want him to hurt like he hurt me…if I can’t get justice, I still want revenge.
    [God] simply let the torrent rush out of Mack, waiting for the wave to pass.
    Mack, for you to forgive this man is for you to release him to me and allow me to redeem him.
    Redeem him? Again Mack felt the fire of anger and hurt. I don’t want you to redeem him! I want you to hurt him, to punish him, to put him in hell…
    [God] waited patiently for the emotions to ease.
    I’m stuck, [God]. I just can’t forget what he did, can I? Mack implored.
    Forgiveness is not about forgetting, Mack. It is about letting go of another person’s throat.

AMEN

What is God's answer to evil?

“Deliver us from evil.” We say those words each time we pray the Lord’s prayer. And for us Episcopalians, that is quite often. We pray the Lord's prayer at virtually every service. What are we asking for?

In today’s first meditation, I suggested that whenever, wherever evil happens, God is there, that when humans suffer as a consequence of evil, God is there. But is being present, comforting us, getting us through it, God’s only or primary answer to the problem of evil? Is that all we mean when we pray, "deliver us from evil”?

I think not. We Christians believe in a future in which God’s triumph over evil will be complete. In Revelation (21:1-4, NRSV), “the Lamb that was slain” will reign over a new heaven and a new earth. God will wipe away tears; Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.

John is describing a world beyond the reach of evil, beyond even the shadow of past wrongs done to us. Jesus himself spoke of this (John 16:21-22, NRSV); he likens it to a woman who is in the great pain of childbirth, but the moment the child is born, the power and joy of new life pushes the pain into the background. Our joy will be complete, Jesus says.

These and many other passages point to God’s answer to the problem of evil. And that answer is forgiveness, forgiveness as enacted and represented by Jesus on the cross.

God did not shun evil. God did not come to earth in military might to overthrow evil by force—as the Jews long expected. Rather, God came in the form of a peasant carpenter, a pacifist at that, to wrestle with fear and dread, but nevertheless to embrace evil and suffering, to experience the feeling of having been abandoned by God, and to forgive… even as he still hung dying on the cross.

Forgiveness is God’s answer to evil. But the point of the cross is NOT that the victory was won, and so now there’s nothing left to do. Rather, the cross has won the victory so that redeemed people can begin living out God’s forgiveness in the world.


The church is not merely the “community of the saved,” although some church communities seem to focus almost solely on that. Rather, we are the community of the redeemed, now become a kingdom of priests to serve God in this time between the cross and the ultimate victory of God in the new heaven and new earth. There's a difference between being merely "saved" and being "redeemed." (See N.T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God.)

And, of course, forgiveness is one of those odd things. We can only experience it by also giving it away. “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us,” we pray.

I wonder how often those words roll easily off our tongues without a thought to their implication. Jesus sought to make them real by telling the parable of the servant who was forgiven a debt by his master, then failed to forgive those who were indebted to him. If you don’t forgive, said Jesus, you won’t be forgiven.

Some people interpret this to mean that God withholds forgiveness until we have done something to earn it, like forgive someone else. I don’t think so.

Jesus died for the sins of the world! And he doesn’t have to keep dying over and over again every time we screw up! It’s done. God enacted forgiveness for the sins of humankind, past, present and future, by embracing the evil and suffering of the cross.

What I believe Jesus means is that until we forgive, we are conditioned and controlled by the evil done us. We have no peace. We are driven by anger and hate that sap our energy and deaden our spirit. Nothing eats away at the human soul like the inability to forgive.

And even though God’s forgiveness is already in place, ready and waiting, we cannot accept it or experience the peace it brings as long as we are stuck in unforgiveness.
                                         

The Shack by Wm. Paul Young is the story of a man’s journey back to God after the abduction and murder of his little girl. The following bit of the conversation between “Mack,” the protagonist, and God comes right after God asks Mack to forgive the man who killed his daughter (p. 225):

      "I don’t think I can do this," Mack answered softly.
      "I want you to. Forgiveness is first for you, the forgiver,” answered [God], "to release you from something that will eat you alive; that will destroy your joy and your ability to love fully and openly."

AMEN

For this second quiet period, I invite your reflection on forgiveness, both that which you have received and that which you have given--or perhaps not yet.

*September 11, 2010, I led a Quiet Day at St. Patrick's Episcopal Church in West Monroe. Here is the second of three meditations, each guided by a question that will serve as title for these postings. I will post the last meditations in the next few days.
                                     

Where is God when evil happens?*

One of the great conundrums of Christianity is the presence of evil in a world created by a good God. Indeed, we believe not only that a good God created a good world, as told in the Genesis accounts, but we believe also that the same one and only God is all powerful and could stop or prevent evil in the world at any time.

Of course, we have the story of the fall of Adam and Eve to explain how evil came into the world. As a woman, I am all too aware that much of humankind throughout history would really like to blame it all on Eve!

But Bishop N.T. Wright points out in his book, Evil and the Justice of God, that all of our discussions that begin with Adam and Eve as the ones who introduce evil into the world really ignore an important question: What was a snake with evil intentions doing in Paradise anyway?

Adam and Eve sure didn’t put it there. I am reminded of a Far Side cartoon that depicted God--as an old white man with long white hair and beard, of course--rolling clay into snakes, and saying to himself, "Boy, these things are a cinch!" Perhaps that's why he made so many of them!

The Far Side, by Gary Larse

How evil came into the world is a subject worthy of consideration; it might be less simple than we tend to think. But  I want to turn our meditations in a different direction.

Nine years ago today, a great evil happened here in these United States. Airplanes crashed into buildings in New York City and Washington D.C. Another plowed a furrow into a field in rural Pennsylvania. Several thousand lives were snuffed out—some instantly, others horribly, by being forced to jump to their deaths from the Twin Towers.

Several thousand families lost loved ones, and thousands more lost friends, co-workers and neighbors. We all lost our sense of security, a certain feeling of invulnerability, and of control of our own destiny, as the wealthiest, strongest nation on the planet.

The horror of those events continues to haunt us today. Their repercussions continue to strain social and cultural relationships and to distort our politics.

Today’s meditations are offered to the glory of God, and with special intention for helping us re-think the questions we ask about evil and how we respond to evil.

When Christians turn their attention to the conundrum of evil co-existing in the world with a good, all-powerful God, it is often with a question that implicitly blames God. “Why did God ‘allow’ that to happen?” we ask. And our answer: “God must have had a reason."

It is almost as if we have to give God an “out,” as if the possibility that evil just happens... is too terrifying for words. Or, perhaps we’re thinking, if God doesn’t have a reason, then God must not be so good after all. And that too is terrifying.

Fr. Richard Rohr is a Franciscan friar and Roman Catholic priest who publishes a daily online meditation. He says that “loss of control” is the very definition of human suffering.

I think “reasons” are the product of human attempts to control suffering by explaining it. Who are we to say that God must have a reason? WE need reasons. God does not.

Rationalizing evil typically involves both fixing blame and figuring out “what God wants us to do,” given that God must have had a reason for the evil happening in the first place. I suggest that it is precisely this kind of reasoning that leads to all kinds of problematic responses, from using God to justify one country invading another to a pastor in Florida thinking he is called by God to burn the Koran in protest against an Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York City.

Let us ask a different question: Where is God when we suffer? Where is God when evil happens?

For a period of several days after the Twin Towers fell in NYC, I was profoundly troubled by the nightmarish TV images I could not get out of my head. Then one night I had a dream. I was on the top floor of one of the Twin Towers. I and a bunch of people were standing in the elevator lobby. We were waiting for an elevator that, at some level, we knew would not be coming. We could smell the smoke and hear the roar of the fire below us. We were terrified. Then suddenly, miraculously, the elevator doors opened. We stepped forward. And just as we crossed the threshold into the elevator, the building, the elevator, the elevator shaft, the smoke and the fire... all fell away beneath us. We were instantly lighter than air. We looked at each other and laughed as we soared off into the heavens.

I rarely claim to receive messages directly from God. I don’t hear God’s voice in my ears or head. I question the source of every thought. But that dream was from God and the message was simple and clear. God said, “I was there. I was there when the Twin Towers fell. I was there in the Pentagon. I was there in rural Pennsylvania.”

AMEN.

For this first period of quiet, you might want to read Psalm 73, for it expresses both our lack of understanding of evil and the faith that, indeed, God is with us when evil happens.

*September 11, 2010, I led a Quiet Day at St. Patrick's Episcopal Church in West Monroe. Here is the first of three meditations, each guided by a question that will serve as title for these postings. I will post the other two meditations over the next few days.
                                         

Words and Wisdom: A Sermon for 22 August 2010

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

--Rudyard Kipling. 

I use that quote as a signature line that automatically prints at the bottom of my campus e-mail messages. I figure it is one more reinforcement for students of my role in their life at this time, which is to mark up their papers with copious amounts of red ink, to chastise them for choosing weak words, ungrammatical words, imprecise words, words that obfuscate rather than clarify… in the papers they write.

So important are words to humankind that a quick Google-search of the Internet will yield hundreds of “quotes about words.” Here are a few:

One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.

--James Earle Jones

The two most misused words in the entire English vocabulary are love and friendship.

--Larry Flynt, publisher of sex magazines, who probably contributed to their misuse

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

--Voltaire, who surely had politicians in mind when he said it.

Even more famously, Voltaire also said: I do not agree with a word that you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. That one, it seems to me, is on the endangered quotes list in today’s political climate of gross exaggeration and shrill accusation.

And finally, the Chinese proverb, A bad word whispered will echo a hundred miles. Who among us has never spoken that “bad word” we desperately wish we could take back?

Turning to our Old Testament lesson for today, we find Holy Scripture not only affirming the importance of words, but also telling us very clearly that sometimes our words come from God.

The prophet Jeremiah (1:4-10, NRSV) seems to have experienced in some physical way the Lord putting words in his mouth. How incredible! It is hard for me to imagine being able to speak at all… after experiencing so directly the touch of God.

What a powerful story for Christians called to testify to the Good News of Jesus the Christ. We often feel inexperienced and unworthy of the part. But if we take God’s words to Jeremiah seriously, that’s not an excuse. Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’; for you shall go to all to whom I send you. Who can argue with that?

In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus heals, as he often does, first by speaking the words: You are free, he says to the woman (Luke 13:10-17, NRSV). In other stories, his healing words are Your sins are forgiven and Your faith has made you whole.

The letter to the Hebrews often challenges me with the complexity of its words and phrases, and I can’t begin to unpack today’s entire passage. But I will draw your attention to this amazing and powerful word and sound picture of Judgment Day.

The one who is speaking, whom we should not refuse, is surely God. In times past, God spoke on earth through the prophets, and those voices shook the earth. But once again, God will speak and shake not only earth but also heaven, and shake and shake… until all that is of the earth is shaken away and what remains is only God’s kingdom, the kingdom that cannot be shaken. (Hebrews 12:18-29, NRSV)

Those of you who took the Handel’s Messiah class last year during Advent and Lent will recall that stunning passage based on a Psalm in which God’s voice is represented in words as music: shake, shake, shake sings the bass, reinforced by the agitated sound of the entire string section of the orchestra.

These lessons evoke questions that have haunted me most of my adult life:
    How do we know which words that we find in our hearts and minds, on our tongues, and in our text messages, e-mail, and so forth, are from God?
    How do we know they are not from one of the other powerful and constant influences on our oh-so-human ways of thinking and speaking?
    How often, before we speak or write, do we even ask the question, Are these words from God? Or from my own social, cultural and political point of view?

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann put this very concern into eloquent words. Praying at the beginning of one of his Bible study workshops, he thanks God for the joy of words given us.

But then he acknowledges that we are also subject to other influences: Our own rich imaginations, cowardice, arrogance. We are, on most days, Brueggemann prays, a hard mix of true prophet and wayward voice.

We are a literate people. Our days are filled with words: printed and spoken, in books, newspapers, magazines, online, radio and television, and on our ever-present smart phones, iPads and laptops. Witness the ease with which I located hundreds of quotes about words… from which to pick and choose the ones that served my purposes this morning.

I am especially concerned about the quality of our political discourse today. It seems that no idea or project is worthy of debate on its own terms. Rather, truth and reality must be exaggerated and distorted in order to be worthy of our support or opposition.

And so an Islamic community center that includes prayer space at 51 Park Place in Lower Manhattan becomes “the Ground Zero Mosque” if you’re against it, and if you’re for it, a mere basketball court and culinary school that nevertheless stands for the entire principle of religious freedom in the U.S.

Oh, to know with certainty when the words on our tongues are those of true prophet and not wayward voice!

Of course, Jesus does offer us help with this problem. In another passage in Luke (20:15, NRSV), he promises his disciples, I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand.

We humans are social, cultural and political beings. We cannot and should not check who we are, and the points of view each of us brings to public debate, at the door of our common and communal lives.

But we must, if we are to love God and our neighbor as ourselves, choose our words prayerfully and thoughtfully—not just when we are in church, but in all aspects of our lives. We must use our words, not to bludgeon each other or those we perceive as our enemies, but as the eloquent, precise tools of communication they are intended to be.

Dare I suggest that our words can be the outward and visible sign of that one, ultimate Word spoken by God—namely Jesus the Christ—dwelling within.

Today my prayer is, “Fewer words, Lord, but greater wisdom in discerning which are from you and how we might use them to testify to your most holy name.”

AMEN.