Evil

a sermon by Reverend Lynn Thomas Strauss

Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockville, March 19, 2006

“The mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn.”

Viktor Frankl

Evil is a subject many preachers relish; but not Unitarian Universalist preachers. We avoid evil whenever possible. Ours is an optimistic faith.

I thought you might want to know what your minister thinks about evil and sin, confession and forgiveness, salvation and redemption. Obviously, I can’t touch on all these issues in a single sermon. As a good UU, I can tell you that I’m unclear about sin- that my search for understanding the nature of evil is on-going.

Because Unitarian theology emerged from debates about the nature of God, and because Universalism emerged from a debate about the nature of sin and salvation- we UU’s have often defined our difference from orthodox Christianity in terms of optimism. We have proudly stated, we don’t believe in hell, we don’t believe in original sin, we don’t believe in the efficacy of prayerful confession, we don’t believe in salvation. At lease some of us don’t believe in some of these things, some of the time.

American Unitarianism, as formulated by the Transcendentalists of the mid-19th century emphasized the good and the true. American Unitarianism, as formulated by the humanists of the mid-20th century, emphasized progress, ever onward.

American Universalism as formulated by frontier experiences and works for societal change in the 19th and 20th centuries, emphasized love as a guiding principle.

Sin and evil tended to be ignored, or left to God.
Hope was the ascendant value.

We have, of course, discussed evil in our seminaries and our pulpits. But, having rejected the dualism of good and evil, having acknowledged the shadow side of reality and the Jungian archetype - the dark power of the collective unconscious, and the death of God in the midst of the Holocaust, for the most part, we UUs’ have been satisfied to leave consideration of sin and evil to others.

We moved away from personal piety, and on to power analyses, and systemic evil…focusing on racism, sexism, classism, environmentalism, and other isms… As necessary and important as this conversation continues to be…it has allowed us to divert our attention away from the personal and communal or familial forms of sin and evil.

But this is not enough. If we are to be a serious and alive faith tradition, we must face the question of evil and the question of sin. We must face it in ourselves, in our families, in our church life, in our philosophies, in our hearts.

It isn’t enough to face it “out there”…to project it on “the other”,
To blame it on those in power.

“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” This old radio tag line from the program “The Shadow” is still a relevant question. And the lack of a definitive answer still sparks the endless television shows on criminality and courts… endless movies about alien invasion.

I offer this story for our consideration. It is called “The Window”. Two men, both seriously ill, shared a hospital room. There was but one window open to the world outside. One of the men was allowed to sit up for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon and his bed was next to the window.

The other man had to spend all his time flat on his back. Both were to be kept as quiet as possible…with no reading, no television, few visitors.

So they talked for hours, about their wives and children, their homes, their jobs, their military service, their vacation and travel experiences. And every morning and afternoon, when the man in the bed next to the window was propped up for his hour, he would describe what he could see outside. The other man began to live for these hours.

The window apparently overlooked a park, with a lake and there were the usual ducks and swans, children throwing them bread, boys sailing model boats, young lovers walking hand in hand beneath the trees. And there were flowers, mainly roses, but with a magnificent border of dahlias and marigolds, bronze and gold and crimson. In the far corner was a tennis court and at times the games were really good. There was a baseball field where youth played in the afternoons. And at the back of the park, a row of shops with a view of the city in the distance.

The man on his back would listen to all this, enjoying every minute, how a child fell into the lake, how beautiful the girls were in their summer dresses, how fast the base runners were, how beautiful the light on the roses. He could almost see what was happening out there.

Then one afternoon, as a tennis match was being described, the thought struck, why should the man next to the window have all the pleasure of seeing what was going on? Why shouldn’t he get that chance? He felt ashamed and tried not to think like that, but the more he tried the worse it became, until in a few days, it all turned sour; why wasn’t he near the window?

He brooded by day, and stayed awake by night and grew even more ill and even more angry.

One night as he stared at the ceiling the other man suddenly began coughing violently…so violently that his hands couldn’t find the button to call the nurse.

But the man lying flat watched without moving…thinking his angry thoughts… What had he ever done to deserve to have a bed by the window? The coughing racked the darkness, on and on, and chocking off…then stopped, then the sound of breathing stopped. And the other man continued to stare at the ceiling.

In the morning the nurses came and found the man dead and took away his body. As soon as it seemed decent, the man asked if he could be moved to the bed next to the window. They moved him, tucked him in and made him quite comfortable…and left him alone.

The minute they’d gone, he raised himself up on one elbow, painfully and laboriously, gasping, and looked out of the window. It faced a blank wall!

Sometimes, evil is doing nothing. Sometimes evil is as human an emotion as envy. Sometimes evil thoughts come into our minds unbidden.

Sometimes we act on those thoughts. Hannah Arendt, was an observer to the Nuremberg trials that followed the Holocaust, Arendt decided that evil was banal…trite, commonplace. There is truth in her observation. Evil begins small and you can find the seed of it in the hearts of each one of us.

The most helpful definition of evil I’ve found comes from Bill Houff’s Infinity in your Hand published in 1989…he defines evil as “an abuse of power growing out of a sense of powerlessness.”

We could apply this definition to most prisoners on death row. Most of them lived without a sense of power. All abused whatever power they had, even if it was just physical power.

We could apply this definition to dictators and tyrants – from Hitler, and Mussolini, Stalin and Ceausecu…to Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden. All abused power with the excuse of some imagined powerlessness.

We could apply this definition to the terrorists of 9/11 or even to our own country’s rush to pre-emptive war. When we are afraid, we imagine we are powerless, and we abuse power.

By this definition we are all vulnerable to thoughts and actions of evil, because we all, at times, believe we are powerless and we all experience true powerlessness in certain situations. Just being tired or stressed or afraid can cause us to feel powerless.

We need more than sunny theological optimism to counter our human vulnerability to the possibility of doing evil. We need to counter a sense of powerlessness for as many people and groups as we can, and for ourselves.

So we talk again about power…but this time, not about secular, physical, material power, this time …let’s talk finally about spiritual power- moral, ethical power.

How do we increase and encourage the power of the human spirit? A power in individuals and in the collective human community. How do we in the liberal religious community increase moral and ethical power.

When UU theology turned away from embracing original sin, we also turned away from rituals of confession and forgiveness. In giving up the spiritual power of forgiveness we may have increased our own sense of powerlessness.

I believe we still need rituals of confession. Yes, I have evil thoughts. Yes, I am capable of doing harm to others. Yes, I too, might envy the man who gets the bed by the window. Yes, I might believe that the people of Transylvania, or Iraq, or Africa, should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Yes, I might not spare the time to protest torture. Yes, I might not listen with patience or always think the best of someone.

I wish I had a ritual of confession so that I could speak of these things in my heart and thereby move toward forgiveness. Just because we don’t believe in sin, doesn’t mean we UU’s don’t need forgiveness. Just because we don’t believe in a dualistic construct of Good and Evil…doesn’t mean we are always good.

Where in our worship do we make a space for confession, for assessing our actions and intentions of the week past? Do we just continue in an attitude of blaming the universe for the bad stuff. Do we just try to think positive thoughts.

What might change in us and in our communities of we had a way of acknowledging our very human limitations. If we had a way, even in private to name our regrets…and to ask for forgiveness, to learn to forgive ourselves …and each other. Where do we turn when we are ashamed?

Dave and I came to Unitarian Universalism to find community, seeker support for the values in which we wanted to raise our children. We wanted help in moving from living within a dualistic construct of good and evil to living with meaning.

We wanted to help our children to learn to choose not just between good and evil, but between feeling helpless and finding or creating meaning.

We wanted to give them the understanding, skills, support, to make meaningful choices, so they wouldn’t feel powerless. For as our definition of evil tells us, out of powerlessness can come abuse of power.

I believe the greatest weakness, the greatest danger of our Unitarian Universalist thought and ways of living, is our tendency to idolize the individual. Extremem individualism often taints our understanding of our first principle; honoring the worth and dignity of every person.

We hear this principle and we think of each individual, each person standing separate in their worth and dignity, I wish it was written, to honor the worth and dignity of all people. Then what comes to mind would be all people, people everywhere, people known and unknown, people who came before and people who will come after.

For it is in standing separately and alone, isolated, that we feel most powerless, even if we’re offered a theoretical or even a heartfelt worth and dignity from afar, still tanding alone, we imagine that we are better or worse than those around us, we imagine that no one cares, we begin to covet, to envy, to feel inadequate, to hate.

Or we imagine we are better than, different from, always right, and then we begin to criticize, to control, to dictate, to punish, to hate.

Dave and I brought our family to Unitarian Universalism so we wouldn’t have to stand alone. We needed the power of the collective human community. We needed a place to empower us and our children to choose meaning. I needed a religious community within which to practice my faith, in which to speak my confession, and seek forgiveness, in which to find that meaning , not yet fulfilled.

So the task, the responsibility of Unitarian Universalist religious community (the way to reduce evil in the world) is, I believe, to increase moral, ethical, spiritual power.
To increase the power to choose meaning over good and evil.
To find ways to increase power for more individuals and for peoples.
Moral power is not a zero sum game, there is always more.
And certainly we do a lot to encourage and sustain moral power.

One way to think about the Partner Chruch Program of this congregation and the UUA is that it is a program of moral power. The people of Transylvaniz, under communist rule were denied freedom of religion, freedom of speech, their churches , their seminaries, their ministers were isolated and left without the power to practice their Unitarian Christian faith.Our work, our money, our partnership builds their moral power and ours, builds community across boundaries, increases choices, and changes lives.

The man in the hospital bed who felt so hopeless, who felt so helpless, did not have eyes to see or ears to hear.

He was isolated, he did not know how to find meaning in his situation. His sense of powerlessness led him to an act of great evil.

Let us not fail to open our eyes to a new way of seeing, to seeing beyond good and evil, to seeing into meaning. To seeing beyond isolation and separateness to community, beyond imagined powerlessness to our power for moral good.

Let us find ways to speak our confession, to find forgiveness, thereby to increase our moral power so that we can contribute to the moral power of the world community.

So May It Be/Amen