March 3, 2013

Clay Nelson

Lent 3     Luke: 13:1-9

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Sin and evil tend to be ignored in progressive Christian pulpits, or left to God. Our perspective is more optimistic and hopeful. Discussions of sin and evil tend to lead to judgment, guilt and shame. Not our strongest subjects, we prefer to look at love as our guiding principle. When we focus on evil at all it is on systemic evil like racism, sexism, war, destruction of the environment, and economic inequality, as we seek societal change for a better world. 

As important as that is, it is not enough. As our Gospel today reminds us we must face the question of evil and the question of sin closer to home. It isn’t enough to face it “out there.” It isn’t enough to project it on “the other.”

In today’s story of the wall falling on the people of Siloam or Pilate’s killing of the faithful making sacrifice in the temple, Jesus discounts these as “Acts of God,” that phrase the insurance industry invented so as not to have to pay out claims. They were not divine punishments on evil-doers. Instead Jesus turns the focus from those who have suffered to those who ask the question.

If we are looking for evil and its source Jesus seems to be saying we don’t have to look too far.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was imprisoned in Stalin’s gulags, famously said, “The line between good and evil lies in the center of every human heart, not in some abstract moral, celestial space, but right here in each of our individual collective beings.”

During the 1930’s in America there was a popular radio drama called “The Shadow”. Each episode began by asking “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” It is still a relevant question. And the following story makes the point.

Once 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 cricket 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 beautiful the light was 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 choking 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.

So what should we do about it to prevent our capacity for evil from being unleashed?

Carl Jung, the son of Lutheran pastor, pursued psychotherapy to experience God. He believed that religion at its best provides a way of uniting opposites in human nature. Religious concepts are naturally divided into opposites, such as heaven and hell, body and spirit, sin and salvation. Depending on how these are interpreted those belonging to a particular religious group will experience either personal growth or personal stagnation. Stressing one side of the opposition to the exclusion of the other tends to disintegrate the personality, but emphasis on overcoming by integrating the opposition pushes a person towards wholeness. He believed that’s what Jesus’ teachings repeatedly exemplified. An example was his command to love our enemies, which challenges us to overcome our tendency to polarise others as either friend or enemy, loving the former and hating the latter. When we can love those we think we should hate we have had a religious experience. We know God.

The key question Jesus presents to each of us is how should we respond to life? What do we live for? To this Jung saw only two basic answers: others or myself. To choose the latter, to the exclusion of the former, is to choose the path of evil, leading to disintegration, whereas to live for others is to choose the path of love, leading to wholeness of self.

When Jesus challenges his questioners to repent, he is calling for them to integrate the opposition within each of us between our capacity for evil, what Jung would call our shadow, and our divine imprint. To focus only on the shadow will drown us in guilt and shame. To focus only on our divine goodness will blind us to our capacity for evil, unleashing it to harm others. Hitler and Bin Laden would be good examples. Owning both our divine nature and our shadow is to live for others while focusing on one or the other is only about our selves.

This work to uncover and acknowledge our shadow is a holy and lifelong enterprise. It is our call to be the gardener finding good in a barren fig tree and tending to its roots to assure it bears fruit.