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This sermon was delivered by Rev. Dr. Sarah Voss on April 15, 2001.
At our service auction last February, Dee Phillips was the highest bidder for a sermon, to be delivered by me, on a title of her choice. When she told me last month that she'd thought picking a sermon title would be easy, I sort of smiled to myself. It wasn't easy at all, she allowed. And then she added, perceptively, I'd like to think, that her respect for ministers and members of the spiritual concern committee who have to come up with titles for Sunday services had just grown dramatically. "Yes!" I wanted to shout, and I had this sort of wonderful light feeling that you get when someone really seems to understand what you struggle with.
The truth of it is that it's often easier to deliver an "assigned" sermon than one you've selected yourself. This way, there's an element of shared responsibility for the day, which can come in quite handy in case the sermon turns out to be a complete flop. But having to do a sermon on "evil" on the "joyous" occasion of Easter Sunday -- I don't know, Dee. If I were of a slightly different bent, I might ask "Did the devil make you do it?"
Now, just in case you're in doubt, I'm being facetious here. Actually, Dee was perfectly willing to back off the date, or even the title for that matter, had I hesitated. But, in a perverse sort of way, it seemed to me that the subject matter might actually prove to be remarkably apt for Easter Sunday. I mean, if you think about it, Jesus' life was a fight against evil, where evil can be loosely understood as being separated from God. There's Jesus's answer to Dee's question, "What is evil?" Evil is being separated from God.
This was not a new concept. Indeed, in the Hebrew scriptures which Jesus studied, i.e., the Old Testament, God often brought this separation about himself, mostly out of frustration and disgust with these creatures he'd made. In 2 Chronicles (35: 24-25) we read, "Thus saith the Lord, behold, I will bring evil upon this place and upon the inhabitants thereof... Because they have forsaken me..." In Jeremiah (35:17), God says "Behold, I will bring upon Judah and upon all the inhabitants of Jerusalem all the evil I have pronounced against them because I have spoken unto them, but they have not heard; and I have called unto them, but they have not answered." And even in the beginning, in Genesis, God offers Adam and Eve the opportunity to be obedient (not a concept most UUs are terribly fond of), and when they mess that up by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he casts them out of paradise. He separates them from himself.
Jesus preached that good is being one with God, evil is being apart from God. Jesus wasn't always direct. Sometimes he used metaphor to make his points. "Every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears evil fruit, (Matthew 7:17), he told the multitudes in his famous Sermon on the Mount. "A sound tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." But sometimes he was chillingly straight-forward in his preaching: only "he who does the will of my Father" will enter the kingdom of heaven. To all others, he said, "depart from me, you evildoers." (Matthew 7:23)
To be sure, the Bible does not exactly make it crystal clear as to what doing the will of God entails, although there are many hints. Probably too many hints. "He that hasteth to be rich hath an evil eye..." (Proverbs 28:22); "keep thy tongue from evil..." (Psalms 34:13); "Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry... Anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul talk from your mouth." (Colosisans 3: 5,8) Sometimes these hints are confusing, and sometimes they seem to be so context-bound that they appear to have little to do with our present culture and its needs. Overall, though, the message is clear: we shouldn't do evil and we shouldn't consort with those who do evil and, if we slip up and actually do evil (which is highly likely since we seem to have been made that way -- "for the imagination of man's heart is evil from youth..." Genesis 8:21), we'd best repent quickly.
To the avid Biblical fundamentalist, all of this may make fine sense, but the typical Unitarian Universalist, in my experience, deals with evil by questioning it, ignoring it, pretending it doesn't exist, minimizing or limiting it, rejecting all fundamentalist beware-the-devil thinking, and so on. It's a little like the interfaith gathering, where the born-again Christian puts a pile of apples on one end of a table with a sign saying, "Take only one apple, please -- God is watching." On the other end of the table, a UU puts a pile of cookies, along with a sign, "Take all the cookies you want -- God is watching the apples." That's how we tend to be about evil. God may be watching those who believe in the Devil, but God's got more important things to do then watch us UUs too closely. To be sure, most Unitarian Universalists believe in universal salvation. Ultimately everyone is going to be saved, though from what we may not be so sure. Still, I suspect -- no, I know because UUs have shared this with me -- that many of us perpetual questioners carry around within us a kernel of doubt about evil. Maybe God really is watching the apples. Possibly this Devil-thing might even be true. If so, can/should we fight it? Or is it enough to live a good, moral life?
Perhaps you think you don't have any ambiguity about the Devil. Here's a little test. The Pope, Billy Graham, and Oral Roberts were in a plane crash over the Atlantic Ocean. Tragically, they all died and went to the Pearly Gates together. St. Peter was surprised to see them. "Oh, dear! We weren't expecting you, and your quarters aren't ready yet. We can't take you in and we can't send you back!" Getting an idea, he picked up the celestial phone and called Lucifer. "I have three gentlemen who are ours, but their places aren't ready yet. Could you put them up for a couple of days? I'll owe you one." The Devil reluctantly agreed.
Two days later, St. Peter got a call. "Pete, this is Lucifer. You have to come get these guys that are yours. This Pope guy is forgiving everybody, the Graham fellow is saving everybody, and Oral Roberts has raised enough money to buy air conditioning!"
If you laughed, you probably have some ambiguity about evil. No one really laughs at the devil.
One of the reasons we UUs have such ambiguity about evil is that our faith tradition emphasizes the positive and the hopeful. But another, perhaps even more important reason, is that we naturally tend to be pluralistic in our views. Rev. Robert Eddy, a UU minister in Florida, aptly caught the sense of our pluralism when he wrote in an article published last year that, yes, he is a humanist, pagan, Christian UU. Such a blend is common in our faith tradition. "UUism is not a religion," Eddy points out. "It is a way for individuals of many religious orientations to seek the good, the true, the beautiful together in community." (The Journal of Liberal Religious Paganism) Note his omission of anything about evil. I agree with Eddy that our very pluralism helps define who we are as Unitarian Universalists. I would go further, though. I think it helps define what we think about evil as well.
I have suggested that Jesus considered evil as that which separates us from God. This is a good interpretation of evil, but it is by no means the only one -- probably not even the only one for Jesus. What I'd like to do next is to review for you some classic religious perspectives on the nature of evil and to offer, if not exactly a new perspective, at least a newly articulated version of one. Actually, I have already done this. The poem I read earlier, in my opinion, says it all. Unfortunately my poem is more of a head poem than a heart poem -- not one to cause you to sigh ecstatically "Oh, yes, she's captured it. That's just exactly how I feel about evil." In fact, it's not only a head poem, but it's a head poem which I probably need to explain. As poems go, therefore, it's something of a failure. Nevertheless, I offer it to you as a concise summary of the major theological positions surrounding the issue of evil.
In writing this poem, I drew heavily on the work of John A. Sanford, a Jungian analyst and Episcopalian priest. In his insightful book, Evil, the Shadow Side of Reality, Sanford sets forth several alternative arguments about the nature of evil. In each of the stanzas of the poem, I've tried to sift out and summarize one of these views, along with its most persistent inconsistencies.
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Perspective one. Is the devil Satan? An adversary, like Job's? This is the main connotation found in the Old Testament, where Satan is used almost exclusively in the sense of a being who hinders free, forward movement. In the Old Testament, Yahweh himself is responsible for evil, and Satan is something of a secular accuser or challenger. The Philistines didn't want David in their battle against the Israelites lest he "be an adversary unto us," i.e., a satan. (I Samuel 29:4) In 1 Kings 11:14, we find that "the lord stirred up an adversary (satan) unto Solomon." And in Numbers 22, the Hebrew version says that Yahweh stood in Balaam's way as a satan unto him. Thus, even God was a satan.
In traditional Christian churches, this perspective is still often championed; satan is seen as something to be fought off, conquered. Listen, for example to the words of a hymn from one of these contemporary churches.
Sound the battle cry! See the foe is nigh! Raise the standard high for the lord.
Gird your armor on. Stand firm, everyone. Rest your cause upon his Holy Word.
Strong to meet the foe, marching on we go.
A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing. Our helper, he, amidst the
flood of mortal ills prevailing. For still our ancient foe Doth seek to work us woe.
His craft and power are great, and, armed with cruel hate, on earth is not his
equal. (Singing the Living Tradition, #200)
The inconsistency with this view of evil is that our adversaries often serve to strengthen us, and, so, in a sense they are really helpmates and no devil at all.
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A second common perspective is that the devil is darnel, that unwanted grassy weed which grows right along with desired wheat. In this understanding of evil, fairly prevalent in Jesus' teachings and the four Gospels, (e.g., Matthew 13:24-30) the wheat and the darnel, the good and the bad are both allowed to grow in this world. Only at the end of time will evil be separated from the food and destroyed. On earth we perceive a kind of dualism at work, with God being opposed by the devil. Yet from a larger perspective, there is only one Divine Plan, and the devil is but a part of it.
Something of this view is also expressed in our UU hymns. "Come, Ye Thankful People, come," we sing together, often at Thanksgiving time. "Come, raise a song of harvest home." And why? Because "All the world is but a field, given for a fruitful yield; wheat and tares together sown, here for joy or sorrow grown...." This, too, is an old, old hymn. When it was included in Hymns of the Spirit, our red hymnal, first published around 1937, the words were "All the world is God's own field, Fruit unto his praise to yield, Wheat and tares together sown, Unto joy or sorrow grown." Here we have a slightly different connotation, perhaps a little more in line with the Gospel parable, but the overall message is much the same.
In our old red hymnal there are, actually, a number of hymns which seem to illustrate this perspective that both good and evil belong to this world, with good eventually winning out. Reading selectively from them we see that
Thou whose spirit dwells in all... What shall separate from thee? Naught of all
created things! Joy and sorrow, good and ill, Each from thee its essence brings.
(#65)
O yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill... (#237)
I see the wrong that round me lies... Yet in the maddening maze of things, And
tossed by storm and flood, To one fixed stake my spirit
clings -- I know that God
is good. (#256)
And, finally, in an earlier version of a hymn we still sing
Once to every man and nation Comes the moment to
decide, In the strife of truth
with falsehood,
For the good or evil side. ... Though the cause of evil prosper, Yet
'tis truth alone is strong... (#319, cf. #119, Singing the Living Tradition)
The original, unadapted text was written in 1844 by James Russell Lowell; it was included in the hymnal compiled in 1937 "by the Unitarian and the Universalist Commissions on Hymns and Services, jointly, for use in the free churches of America." We sing it now as once to every soul and nation, rather than man and nation, and we've completely dropped those portions which refer to Jesus and God. However, we've retained the description of the nature of evil as being "prosperous" here on earth, but ultimately subservient to goodness, i.e, truth.
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In the next stanza of my poem we find a third interpretation, that the devil is our shadow side, the anti-Christ. This view, too, emphasizes a dualistic approach. In his book, Sanford gives a psychological bent to this Anti-Christ, suggesting that the human Shadow is that "part of us which resists the demands of consciousness to be perfect, to be entirely light, to have no sins, no failings, no reprehensible thoughts, fantasies, or impulses." (p127) Our goal is to make this resistance, this laziness, known to ourselves, for the Shadow can look and act like evil if it is not "made conscious, recognized and accepted."
I'm reminded here of the fellow who was always just a little bit on the lazy side and suddenly finds himself in front of those famed Pearly Gates. St. Peter explains to him that's it's not easy to get into heaven. You can't just get in. There are certain criteria that must be met before entry is allowed. For example, was the man a church-goer or religious? No? "Oh, that's bad, St. Peter told him. Was he generous, perhaps, giving money to the poor or to charities? No? St. Peter shook his head. "That's bad, too." Well, did he do any good deed, such as helping his neighbor? Anything? No? Exasperated, St. Peter finally said, "Look, everybody does something nice sometime. Work with me, here! I'm trying to help. Now think!"
The man thinks for a minute, then says, "Well, I did help this old lady once. I came out of a store and saw that a dozen Hell's Angels had taken her purse and were shoving her around. I threw my bags down and got her purse back, then I told the biggest biker there that he was cowardly and I spat in his face."
"Wow," said St. Peter, "that's impressive! When did this happen?"
"Oh," the man replied, "about fifteen minutes ago."
Yes, it can be difficult to take a chance that we can do good things. We long, as a
song in our yellow hymnal, How Can We Keep from Singing? purports, to see the day when
we will take the measured step and pluck the thorn
out of our foot that since dawn
bothers us without our knowledge.
What thorn is this? It's that old devil, our shadow side, that tells us that we "can't." It's
...the thought that we cannot remake the earth
into a paradise... This is the thorn
that slows our
march and keeps us back when music plays in the light, in the
neighborhood of our hearts. (#27)
But what are we without our shadows, that negative part of us that claims paradise is impossible? What we must do is become knowledgeable about that thorn that's "bothered us since dawn without our knowledge." We must understand it and use it to assist us, rather than to hinder our every step.
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A fourth common perspective on the nature of evil is that of the devil as Lucifer. Lucifer, was once one of God's principal angels (the light-bearer), but he was thrown out of heaven because of his aspirations to obtain divinity. This is the devil we find in the book of Isaiah, the devil who said in his heart "'I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high.'" (Isaiah 14:13) In this view, evil is our drive for power and our susceptibility to pride, conceit, and ambition. This is the devil that shows its face as a tyrant, a bully, a power-monger, and we are left to wonder, as Isaiah did, how did you come to fall from the heavens, Daystar, son of Dawn? How did you come to be thrown to the ground, you who enslaved our nations?" (Isaiah 14:12) Yet, as Sanford reminds us, "a certain power drive is necessary if the ego is to differentiate itself sufficiently to eventually experience a confrontation and reconciliation with God." (p127) So in a sense we need this old devil, too, to bring about our redemption, our reconciliation with God.
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A fifth interpretation of the devil is Lilith, or "that which we fear." Lilith, according to an old, mostly Jewish legend, was the first woman, the one who appeared in the first creation story when God created man male and female, and before he created Eve from Adam's rib. The latter he did because Lilith would not be subservient to Adam. God sided with Adam, kicking Lilith out of paradise. Lilith, cursed and barren, wandered around and finally became Samael's wife. Together they plotted revenge against mankind, slipping the serpent into the Garden of Eden.
In a modern interpretation of this story, Lilith can be seen as the feminine spirit which has been so often denied, repressed, and rejected in both men and women. It is the collective personification of that which is feared. In the Middle Ages, for instance, the role of Lilith was assumed by the new scientific methodology, and human reason was highly suspected by the Church as the devil's work. Thus, what appears to be evil from one perspective is not evil from another. Evil, in this view, is relative, and therefore only appears to be evil, an evil, incidentally which is always capable of being changed for the better.
So here we have, briefly, five interpretations of evil -- evil as an adversary, as unavoidable weeds, as our shadow side, as misplaced power and pride, as that which we fear. Well, maybe six interpretations, if you include the notion of evil as separation from God, but in a sense, all of the others have an element of separation within them. These interpretations, as you can readily see, are not mutually exclusive. You may think they weren't very brief, either, which just goes to show how "evil" some interpretations of appropriate sermon length can be. A perceptive colleague once told me of the mother who finally got her fidgety seven-year old son to sit still and be quiet during the church service. About halfway through the sermon, she leaned over and whispered, "If you don't be quiet, Pastor Dave will lose his place and will have to start his sermon all over."
Well, I'm not going to start over, but I am also not quite finished with today's sermon. When Dee Phillips requested a sermon on the nature of evil, I sensed that what she wanted, at least in part, was for me to share my own perspective about it, and that's the one thing I haven't done yet this morning. So let me just plunge in, so to speak.
Some of you might have wondered about the title of the poem I included as a guide to this sermon -- "G�del on Evil." This is where this sermon turns into one of what I call my math sermons, that is, a sermon in which I use a metaphor drawn from mathematics to make my main point. Kurt G�del is the G�del in the Pulitzer prize-winning G�del, Escher, and Bach, written by computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter in the 1980s. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1906, G�del eventually wound up lecturing and studying mathematics and philosophy at Princeton. Brilliant by any standards, his fame has really begun to spread only since his death in 1978.
Although his drive for precision led him to publish almost exclusively in the field of mathematics, G�del was mostly interested in philosophy and metaphysics. A close associate of Albert Einstein, he has been linked philosophically with Leibniz the same way that Einstein was linked with Newton, and he considered Leibniz's philosophy of universal monads to be close to his own. Nonetheless, G�del was firmly committed to the role of reason in religion and, contrary to the general sentiment of most of his contemporaries, he was also firmly committed to the existence of a next world. Much of his philosophical endeavor was dedicated to an effort to show that this likelihood was rationally sound. (See Hao Wang, Reflections on Kurt G�del, MIT Press, 1987)
While his philosophy is interesting, it is Godel's mathematical rather than religious view which I draw on today. Specifically, it is his mathematical idea known as G�del's theorem of incompleteness. This theorem says that certain systems of thought may be either consistent or complete, but not both. While G�del was himself cautious in his application of this notion to systems of thought outside of mathematics, the idea of completeness vs. consistency has nonetheless caught on in more popular arenas.
Thus, whenever the G�del of my poem attempts to speak of the devil, that is, to define evil completely, he inevitably finds himself caught in a paradoxical inconsistency. Evil becomes, somehow, good. He concludes that he cannot define evil adequately. Always there will exist questions about evil which remain beyond our scope to understand. Similarly, there will always exist another possible interpretation of evil. The system is not complete, nor can it ever be complete without a corresponding loss of consistency. The predominate theme in this global perspective is the acceptance of many different ideas about evil, none of which, nor any combination of which, will be completely adequate.
It is this perspective of incompleteness, drawn from the precise world of mathematics, which undergirds my entire poem, and it is this perspective which I offer as especially useful in today's religiously diverse, but divided world. G�del's incompleteness implies that there is a consistency to diversity. It says "yes' to freedom of conscious choice, even with regard to arguments about good and evil. It promotes tolerance of other views, saying in effect, it's improper to embrace any one definition of evil exclusively. There is room for mystery, for uncertainty, in this view of evil. As Sanford put it in the concluding comments to his book,
It is better for us to be left wondering, with a hint,
to be sure, about the
relationship between Evil and God, but with
no final answer. For we are more
apt to discover truth as we
contemplate God as the Great mystery, instead of
supposing that
we have reduced God to a final truth we can understand in human
terms.
I want to leave you this morning with one final clarification. Yes, I do believe that our best definitions of evil are all going to be incomplete and somewhat relative, but I do not believe that evil doesn't exist as a fact. What I have given you today are some cognitive, rational approaches to understanding and perhaps "naming" evil. The fact of it is, though, that our best understanding of evil comes from the experiential level. We feel evil, and we know it when we feel it, just as we feel God, and know God when we feel God, however you understand these intellectual concepts. What, then, do we do about evil? I could write an entire new sermon just on that question, but what I am going to give you is a short answer. And, as befits the day, I think we can find this short answer modeled for us in the life of the prophet Jesus.
Shortly before Judas betrayed him, Jesus spoke with his disciples, knowing that they would soon be abandoning him to face the upcoming events all alone. Picture yourself struggling with the hardest crisis of your life, and all your friends suddenly disappear. That's the situation Jesus was in. What Jesus did then was illustrative. He prayed for his friends. He prayed, not for forgiveness, though that might have seemed appropriate. He prayed not that God "shouldst take them out of the world." Rather, he prayed that God "keep them from the evil." (John 17:15) So, too, may we respond to the trials and tribulations in our lives by praying for the care of others, that they may be protected from evil, one and all. So may it be.
Speak of the devil said I to G�del
but G�del turned mutely away.
Is the devil Satan? I persevered.
An Adversary like Job's?
I guess he's really a helpmate then,
and so is no devil at all.
Is the devil Darnel, I tried again,
like the stuff that grows with the wheat?
For sure, he's part of The Plan,
I've no doubt, and hence is
incredibly good.
Well, perhaps he's our Shadow, the Anti-Christ?
The black with the white? The left
with the right? The yin with the
yang? I think not, for the one needs
the other, adds stature and breadth,
and so is a good in itself.
Lucifer, then? The light-bringing angel
whose lust for power made him fall?
Without which, it's clear, we'd need
no redemption: yet, again, it's sure
we need him.
Ah, he's really a she. Lilith, perhaps?
The woman whom Adam scorned?
What we fear we reject, that I'll
never deny, but a relative evil is this.
Can be changed for the better,
and thus is servant
to a good that is ever more firm.
Then the devil's a myth?
A Hindu illusion?
Or, perhaps, the absence of good?
Oh, speak of the devil, said I to G�del.
Alas, he replied, I would if I could,
but I can't and so it must be.
The entire content of this talk is copywrited
(© 2001) by Rev. Dr. Sarah Voss. All rights reserved.
If you have any questions or
comments about this talk, please contact Rev. Dr. Sarah Voss through her
website.