"May Nothing Evil Cross This Door" preached March 6, 2016
"In the darkest, meanest things, always, always something sings." Ralph Waldo Emerson
This week, waiting in line at the supermarket,
a magazine cover caught my eye.
No, it wasn’t about Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani’s romance.
Or how to dye the perfect Easter Egg.
It heralded a look back at the 90s. The 1990s.
What?
Are the 90s really that long ago?
Bill Clinton,
Bookstores,
Blockbuster video.
Seinfeld!
Turns out, that’s a popular time period right now.
The TV show “Portlandia”
enshrines it in an opening montage,
called “the dream of the 90s,”
in which they extol that decade’s virtues.
They ask, remember when
“people were singing about saving the planet?”
“People had time to hang out with friends.”
“You were encouraged to be weird?”
They invite us to imagine
what life would be like if
“the George W. Bush administration never happened.”
“The dream of the 90s”
recalls a time of hope and creativity and
long afternoons spent in coffee shops pursuing your chosen art.
By the end of the 20th century,
we had seen hate and suffering.
we can rattle off, quickly, many global instances of destruction:
the Holocaust,
Vietnam,
Salvadoran Civil War,
just to name a few.
But for my generation, Generation X,
we hadn’t intimately known,
or for the most part been personally impacted by,
these world events.
If we were part of a white, middle class household,
we experienced an upward climb of wealth.
The 90s were a time of strong economic growth,
steady job creation,
low inflation,
a surging stock market.
By the mid-90s we watched our nerdy computer friends
get lured away to Silicon Valley,
for jobs with starting salaries that made our heads spin.
It wasn’t a perfect time, not at all.
I still hold a grudge about NAFTA
and the Welfare Reform Act.
We felt a backlash against
the feminist advances of the 1970s.
But in retrospect,
it was a sweet time.
We were in the last decade before 9/11.
The only decade between the end of the Cold War
and the beginning of the War on Terror.
The Columbine School Shooting
would not take place until April 20, 1999.
A new heart,
a new spirit,
was alive within us.
Liberal religion breathed an
onward and upward,
forever and ever, theology.
In 1994, when I embraced Unitarian Universalism
our movement claimed an unbridled, positive outlook,
reminiscent of the pre-World War Two optimism of liberal religion.
Our current hymnal,
created in 1993,
is a testament to that time.
In the topical indexes of hymns and readings,
you can see the predominantly affirmative messages throughout.
Go ahead, take your hymnal out and peruse.
Those headings tell a story of our collective theology
at the time of printing.
Beauty, Beloved Community, Buddhism
are just a few of the themes you’ll see there.
Earlier this week at an interfaith educational event,
one of the speakers asked us to always, always,
ask questions of the text.
She meant texts sacred to each person’s tradition.
I wondered: “Which text for us?”
Our common text is our hymnal,
and that’s why I want you to pick it up and study it.
I want you to struggle with those hymns,
those readings.
I want you to put them into historical context.
To ask, why this particular hymn,
and not another one?
Why these prophetic words,
and not others?
For fun, you could compare two of our earlier hymnals,
Hymns for the Celebration of Life published in 1964
and Hymns of the Spirit from 1937.
I’d love to lead a class sometime - with Catherine! -
comparing and contrasting the theologies and values
lifted up in our hymnals through the years,
to chart a path of our continually unfolding beliefs.
As you thumb through Singing the Living Tradition,
our current hymnal with songs and readings,
you’ll note there is no heading for
evil or suffering or even despair.
No surprise, since we Unitarian Universalists
don’t claim a theology of sin.
One of my colleagues said that
a member of his church exclaimed,
upon hearing that their monthly worship theme was evil,
“Evil? That, to my mind, is an un-Unitarian concept.” (1)
But after Columbine ...
after the Presidential election of 2000
when the Supreme Court determined our President ...
after September 11, 2001 ...
the world around us looked different.
We lost some of the innocence we had regained
at the end of the last century.
We liberal religious people,
who believe in the inherent worth and dignity -
even goodness -
of each and every person,
had to grapple - again - with the reality
that yes, sometimes hearts are made of stone.
And we believe, fiercely,
that our church homes
have an important role to play
in both countering evil - yes, evil! -
and in dreaming and creating
a world that is whole.
But how to we begin to name and address
hate-filled acts
if we haven’t developed religious language or metaphors
to guide that discussion?
We can probably all agree - mostly -
what it is not.
We don’t understand evil as characterized
in the guise of Satan, or demons.
We don’t understand evil as masquerading
in the form of natural disasters
or personal tragedies.
Those incidents are horrendous.
Heartbreaking.
But we are not victims of divine punishments
meted out with no rhyme or reason.
To go back to our hymnal,
our scripture,
look closely enough and you can see
our theology of evil emerging.
The evil we know and try to combat
is an entirely human design;
when we encounter it,
we know it,
because “it contradicts everything
we love about humanity.”
Reinhold Niebuhr suggested that:
Evil is always the assertion of some self-interest
without regard to the whole,
whether the whole be conceived
as the immediate community,
or the total community of humanity,
or the total order of the world. (4)
In our world today,
no matter how hard we may try,
evil does indeed cross our doors.
I’m not saying that you, or I, or we,
intentionally perpetrate or condone hateful acts.
But I want to challenge you
to consider your response to them.
You know what you believe
to be horrible or profoundly immoral.
The ones I name today are
harming our planet for financial gain
white supremacy, gaining a louder voice in the Presidential primaries
institutional sexism, racism, ableism, heterosexism, which deny the wholeness of each individual
And an image from yesterday:
a Candidate for President
vowing to broaden torture laws,
asking followers to swear an oath of support
while raising their rights hands in the air,
reminiscent of a “Heil Hitler.”
Those, my friends,
are among the darkest, meanest things.
Asserting self-interest
without regard to the whole.
Evil.
If you are not speaking out against them in some way,
that is not a testimony to your
neutrality of indifference.
Niebuhr wrote:
Ultimately evil is done
not so much by evil people,
but by good people
who do not know themselves
and who do not probe deeply
Your voice,
if it is silent,
allows the “perverting powers that destroy community”
to lead the way.
Evil crosses over our threshold,
whether we intended it to or not. (4)
Our job as liberal religious people
is to not only confront those powers or tendencies within ourselves,
but to confront them in their institutional forms.
And we do that best from within a church home.
Sharon Welch, contemporary UU theologian, writes:
The roles of the ritual community
and of the spiritual leader
are not to measure the moral worth
of an individual or a community,
but to help the individual and the community
see what is going on,
what the relationships of power are,
and, from that seeing,
find ways of balancing relationships
and ways of balancing power. (5)
To see what is going on,
and find ways of balancing relationships
and balancing power.
This is why our congregation engages not only
matters of the mind and spirit,
but why we put our feet to the pavement
and show up at city hall.
Niebuhr characterizes that balancing of relationships and power
as the “harmony of the whole.”
Seeking wholeness is the
correction of evil in our world.
Earlier we heard Frances sing,
the words from Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Unitarian prophet:
In the darkest, meanest things, always, always something sings.
The something always singing ...
that’s us.
Our hearts full,
we share our love ballad for humanity.
Our own opening montage
for a healed and reconciled world.
In the pages of our shared story,
the antidote for brokenness
is found through chorus, verse and prose.
The message is clear,
over and over and sometimes against great odds,
we are recipients of a love that compels us to:
- create peace
- seek truth
- unite across socially constructed divisions
- heal Creation
- hold one another in compassion
May our sheltering walls be strong
and keep hate out,
and hold love in.
Notes
1. “Speechless in the Face of Evil,” sermon by Rev. Josh Pawelek, accessed on March 4, 2016 at http://uuse.org/speechless-in-the-face-of-evil/#.VtnyVzaWZZU.
2. Ibid.
3. Sermon by Rev. Dr. Beth Johnson, accessed on March 5, 2016: http://www.vistauu.org/images/audio/Shall_We_Speak_of_Evil.mp3.
4. Beach, George Kimmich, Ed. The Essential James Luther Adams: Selected Essays and Addresses, p. 156.
5. Rasor, Paul. Faith Without Certainty: Liberal Theology in the 21st Century, p. 180.
a magazine cover caught my eye.
No, it wasn’t about Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani’s romance.
Or how to dye the perfect Easter Egg.
It heralded a look back at the 90s. The 1990s.
What?
Are the 90s really that long ago?
Bill Clinton,
Bookstores,
Blockbuster video.
Seinfeld!
Turns out, that’s a popular time period right now.
The TV show “Portlandia”
enshrines it in an opening montage,
called “the dream of the 90s,”
in which they extol that decade’s virtues.
They ask, remember when
“people were singing about saving the planet?”
“People had time to hang out with friends.”
“You were encouraged to be weird?”
They invite us to imagine
what life would be like if
“the George W. Bush administration never happened.”
“The dream of the 90s”
recalls a time of hope and creativity and
long afternoons spent in coffee shops pursuing your chosen art.
By the end of the 20th century,
we had seen hate and suffering.
we can rattle off, quickly, many global instances of destruction:
the Holocaust,
Vietnam,
Salvadoran Civil War,
just to name a few.
But for my generation, Generation X,
we hadn’t intimately known,
or for the most part been personally impacted by,
these world events.
If we were part of a white, middle class household,
we experienced an upward climb of wealth.
The 90s were a time of strong economic growth,
steady job creation,
low inflation,
a surging stock market.
By the mid-90s we watched our nerdy computer friends
get lured away to Silicon Valley,
for jobs with starting salaries that made our heads spin.
It wasn’t a perfect time, not at all.
I still hold a grudge about NAFTA
and the Welfare Reform Act.
We felt a backlash against
the feminist advances of the 1970s.
But in retrospect,
it was a sweet time.
We were in the last decade before 9/11.
The only decade between the end of the Cold War
and the beginning of the War on Terror.
The Columbine School Shooting
would not take place until April 20, 1999.
A new heart,
a new spirit,
was alive within us.
Liberal religion breathed an
onward and upward,
forever and ever, theology.
In 1994, when I embraced Unitarian Universalism
our movement claimed an unbridled, positive outlook,
reminiscent of the pre-World War Two optimism of liberal religion.
Our current hymnal,
created in 1993,
is a testament to that time.
In the topical indexes of hymns and readings,
you can see the predominantly affirmative messages throughout.
Go ahead, take your hymnal out and peruse.
Those headings tell a story of our collective theology
at the time of printing.
Beauty, Beloved Community, Buddhism
are just a few of the themes you’ll see there.
Earlier this week at an interfaith educational event,
one of the speakers asked us to always, always,
ask questions of the text.
She meant texts sacred to each person’s tradition.
I wondered: “Which text for us?”
Our common text is our hymnal,
and that’s why I want you to pick it up and study it.
I want you to struggle with those hymns,
those readings.
I want you to put them into historical context.
To ask, why this particular hymn,
and not another one?
Why these prophetic words,
and not others?
For fun, you could compare two of our earlier hymnals,
Hymns for the Celebration of Life published in 1964
and Hymns of the Spirit from 1937.
I’d love to lead a class sometime - with Catherine! -
comparing and contrasting the theologies and values
lifted up in our hymnals through the years,
to chart a path of our continually unfolding beliefs.
As you thumb through Singing the Living Tradition,
our current hymnal with songs and readings,
you’ll note there is no heading for
evil or suffering or even despair.
No surprise, since we Unitarian Universalists
don’t claim a theology of sin.
One of my colleagues said that
a member of his church exclaimed,
upon hearing that their monthly worship theme was evil,
“Evil? That, to my mind, is an un-Unitarian concept.” (1)
But after Columbine ...
after the Presidential election of 2000
when the Supreme Court determined our President ...
after September 11, 2001 ...
the world around us looked different.
We lost some of the innocence we had regained
at the end of the last century.
We liberal religious people,
who believe in the inherent worth and dignity -
even goodness -
of each and every person,
had to grapple - again - with the reality
that yes, sometimes hearts are made of stone.
And we believe, fiercely,
that our church homes
have an important role to play
in both countering evil - yes, evil! -
and in dreaming and creating
a world that is whole.
But how to we begin to name and address
hate-filled acts
if we haven’t developed religious language or metaphors
to guide that discussion?
We can probably all agree - mostly -
what it is not.
We don’t understand evil as characterized
in the guise of Satan, or demons.
We don’t understand evil as masquerading
in the form of natural disasters
or personal tragedies.
Those incidents are horrendous.
Heartbreaking.
But we are not victims of divine punishments
meted out with no rhyme or reason.
To go back to our hymnal,
our scripture,
look closely enough and you can see
our theology of evil emerging.
The evil we know and try to combat
is an entirely human design;
when we encounter it,
we know it,
because “it contradicts everything
we love about humanity.”
Reinhold Niebuhr suggested that:
Evil is always the assertion of some self-interest
without regard to the whole,
whether the whole be conceived
as the immediate community,
or the total community of humanity,
or the total order of the world. (4)
In our world today,
no matter how hard we may try,
evil does indeed cross our doors.
I’m not saying that you, or I, or we,
intentionally perpetrate or condone hateful acts.
But I want to challenge you
to consider your response to them.
You know what you believe
to be horrible or profoundly immoral.
The ones I name today are
harming our planet for financial gain
white supremacy, gaining a louder voice in the Presidential primaries
institutional sexism, racism, ableism, heterosexism, which deny the wholeness of each individual
And an image from yesterday:
a Candidate for President
vowing to broaden torture laws,
asking followers to swear an oath of support
while raising their rights hands in the air,
reminiscent of a “Heil Hitler.”
Those, my friends,
are among the darkest, meanest things.
Asserting self-interest
without regard to the whole.
Evil.
If you are not speaking out against them in some way,
that is not a testimony to your
neutrality of indifference.
Niebuhr wrote:
Ultimately evil is done
not so much by evil people,
but by good people
who do not know themselves
and who do not probe deeply
Your voice,
if it is silent,
allows the “perverting powers that destroy community”
to lead the way.
Evil crosses over our threshold,
whether we intended it to or not. (4)
Our job as liberal religious people
is to not only confront those powers or tendencies within ourselves,
but to confront them in their institutional forms.
And we do that best from within a church home.
Sharon Welch, contemporary UU theologian, writes:
The roles of the ritual community
and of the spiritual leader
are not to measure the moral worth
of an individual or a community,
but to help the individual and the community
see what is going on,
what the relationships of power are,
and, from that seeing,
find ways of balancing relationships
and ways of balancing power. (5)
To see what is going on,
and find ways of balancing relationships
and balancing power.
This is why our congregation engages not only
matters of the mind and spirit,
but why we put our feet to the pavement
and show up at city hall.
Niebuhr characterizes that balancing of relationships and power
as the “harmony of the whole.”
Seeking wholeness is the
correction of evil in our world.
Earlier we heard Frances sing,
the words from Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Unitarian prophet:
In the darkest, meanest things, always, always something sings.
The something always singing ...
that’s us.
Our hearts full,
we share our love ballad for humanity.
Our own opening montage
for a healed and reconciled world.
In the pages of our shared story,
the antidote for brokenness
is found through chorus, verse and prose.
The message is clear,
over and over and sometimes against great odds,
we are recipients of a love that compels us to:
- create peace
- seek truth
- unite across socially constructed divisions
- heal Creation
- hold one another in compassion
May our sheltering walls be strong
and keep hate out,
and hold love in.
Notes
1. “Speechless in the Face of Evil,” sermon by Rev. Josh Pawelek, accessed on March 4, 2016 at http://uuse.org/speechless-in-the-face-of-evil/#.VtnyVzaWZZU.
2. Ibid.
3. Sermon by Rev. Dr. Beth Johnson, accessed on March 5, 2016: http://www.vistauu.org/images/audio/Shall_We_Speak_of_Evil.mp3.
4. Beach, George Kimmich, Ed. The Essential James Luther Adams: Selected Essays and Addresses, p. 156.
5. Rasor, Paul. Faith Without Certainty: Liberal Theology in the 21st Century, p. 180.
