Ephesians 4:1-16
2 Samuel 11:26 – 12:13a
My sister often walks her Golden Retriever, Paisley, with a friend who has a hound named Bogart. A few weeks ago, Bogart’s other doggy parent was walking him solo when a crossbow bolt suddenly struck the dog with what came a fraction of an inch from being a kill shot. The community rallied around Bogart and his owners, raising money and offering prayers, and the most recent news is that Bogart has survived surgery and infection and seems to be on the mend.
Amy and I talked about the fact that this could have been Paisley, or could have been one of the humans walking their dog that was struck and possibly killed, could have been her. James Smith and Linnette Torres were both arrested and charged with First Degree Restless Endangerment. She faces the additional charge of Criminal Mischief in the Fourth Degree. And for the record, these were not teenagers, as you might expect. He is 56 and she is 45.
You do not need to go to law school to notice that the charges do not include Cruelty to Animals. They were not aiming at the dog. They didn’t even intend for the crossbow bolt to leave their backyard. They were just too stupid to realize that it would. And no, I’m not going to sugar-coat it. At least they weren’t in the backyard firing an AR-15.
Recklessness and negligence are lesser charges in our justice system because under English Common Law, the foundation of the law in 49 states and at the federal level, “mens rea” is required for many charges. This is Latin for “guilty mind,” and what we more commonly call “criminal intent.”
Intent is just one factor when we are wrestling with the concept of evil. We can be sure that the actions of the sociopath are evil, but is the sociopath himself evil if his mental illness is caused by genetics or an evil father and a cruel childhood or some combination of the two? Is it ever appropriate to describe a person as evil, or must we only attach that label to actions?
According to the 2500 year old purity code found in the Torah, a cheeseburger is a gross violation of the Law as directly revealed to Moses. At least this is the traditional belief. According to a dubious insertion in 1st Corinthians, the fact that the president of our Church Council is a woman is a sin and disordered. So was that Thursday afternoon Big Mac at the rest area actually evil? Are we all going to burn in some make-believe hell because Jenny handled announcements and will help us welcome new members?
First, let us de-bunk some common notions about evil. We understand the Creation myths to be exactly that, myths. They wrestle with ancient and eternal questions about the nature of consciousness. They reflect the historic struggle between those who kept herds and those who planted crops. And most of all, they reflect one ancient culture that had evolved as a patriarchy.
A god who would place a booby-trap tree in a Garden of Eden would not be a good god. That same not-very-good god proposes rewarding and punishing generation after generation. You could be suffering for something an ancestor did a century ago. By the time of the prophet Jeremiah, the Israelite religion is moving toward each person being responsible for their own actions. The concept of inherited or “original” sin re-emerges in early Christianity as an answer to a practical and pastoral question: Why exactly are we baptizing babies?
Neither the Lutheran reform nor the Anglican reform moved very far from that idea of original sin as a reason to baptize babies. Our own theological heritage, the Reform Christianity that originated in Zurich, did, though we kept baptizing babies anyway, leaving us with a sacrament that doesn’t really align with our belief. In any case, original or inherited sin does not make sense in a progressive or reconstructive Christian theology. So we can definitively say that evil is not something you are born with as one more sinner in the hands of an angry god.
And while we are busy liberating God to be God and a good god, letting God be a force of creativity and creation rather than a giant abusive human male in the sky, we can let earthquakes just be earthquakes and wildfires just be wildfire, not actually being beings and having neither will of their own nor divine direction. Where we have contributed to earthquakes through fracking or wildfires through human-caused climate changes, we can describe our actions as evil, whether we are those who profit directly or are simply complicit in hurtling the planet toward mass extinction.
Cancer may be terrible, but it is not evil. Cancer cells do not have will and intent, at least insofar as we understand biology.
So evil is not a holy hand grenade thrown by an arbitrary and capricious god, nor are the natural functions of creation in any way “evil,” existing as they do independently of human categories.
Let us, then, go perversely back to that evil cheeseburger, the one that insults God because it violates one of the hundreds of rules in the purity code. Here we might find a real evil, albeit not in the burger.
We sometimes hypothesize utility in ancient laws, preventing, for example, the spread of contagious and food-borne disease, but we get it wrong when we assume that utility is the primary basis for these culture specific laws. For many cultures, and especially in the case of the Israelite religious system, restrictions on how to eat and how to dress, on the seeming minutia of daily life, existed to mark and exaggerate “us” versus “them,” and to enrich those who defined and maintained that boundary through religious, political, and cultural leadership.
In other words, evil is any othering word or action, the creation of a person or class who is other, and therefore not eligible for the care we are meant to exercise within our own community. Money is not the root of all evil, but simply an instrument of much evil. The idea that anyone, indeed anything, is somehow other is a problem.
When a lawyer asks Jesus which commandment is the greatest, he responds with what we now refer to as the “Great Commandment.” “Love God above all things, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.” When asked to define “neighbor,” he responds with the story of the Good Samaritan.
That story has been sapped of its power by two thousand years of forgetting. A Samaritan, for us, is an identity in the Bible, a soft category to which we attach no emotion. For the followers of Jesus in pre-Rabbinic Judaism, the Samaritan was the other, hated and despised, descended from non-Israelite people brought in by the Assyrians to repopulate that region after the northern kingdom, called Samaria or Israel, was wiped off the map, one usage, or worse still, the theologically misguided remnant of the long defeated northern kingdom and their religious culture, because humans reserve a special hate for those who are closest to the border between us and them.
The authorities in Jerusalem, capital of independent Judah from the death of Solomon to the Babylonian conquest, constructed a national identity by making everyone else, not only lesser humans in their eyes, but lesser humans in the eyes of the divine, for they declared themselves to be God’s chosen tribe.
We cannot truly know the mind of Jesus, as the gospel went from oral tradition to written form decades after his death, but we can say that the story as we have received it, of a Samaritan being good and the seemingly righteous Judeans being evil, completely destroys the category of “other.”
We can find other texts where Jesus seems to set-up an “us and them,” though the “us” of Jesus is invitational, but those stories feel secondary.
What does the kin-dom of God look like?
There was a guy who got mugged and was left wounded in an alley. A deacon at the local church saw him bleeding there, but he was on his way to a Church Council meeting and there were important matters on the agenda, so he pretended not to see. That is surely not the kin-dom.
There was a Director of Learning for a multimedia firm in Manhattan walking across the Queensborough Bridge with thousands of others, many in shock and covered in poisonous debris. And at the base of the bridge were the good Samaritans, bodega owners, many Muslim, who threw everything in their coolers into carts, giving away their stock to those fleeing Manhattan.
Yes, bombing a residential neighborhood is evil. But to do it, you must first convince yourself that the people who live there are in some way “other,” and entitled to less.
Love God, for us not some giant co-dependent domestic abuser in the sky but rather the creative source of all, given to human descriptors like artist and architect and sometimes comedian. Love God as we experience God in their good creation, caring for that creation, for we are not apart and above, as so toxically taught. We can speculate about a post-mortem existence, but this spinning planet is our home, our only real context, and even the bravest and most privileged have not yet made it out the tiny bubble of Earth and our one satellite moon. Loving God means loving creation and seeing everywhere in it the holy. The earth is not other. We are earth, and as we remind ourselves, to earth we will return.
Love your neighbor. Your neighbor who speaks English with an accent because it is a second or third language. Your neighbor who thinks and believes differently but still loves and gives. You get it. This is the last thing I need to preach here.
And for the record, if it is evil when we do not love God and our neighbor, when we make this living planet other, when we make other humans other, it is also evil when you do not love yourself. That is a hard one. You may have been programmed to hate yourself by religion or parents, or simply the constant messaging of a Madison Avenue and Instagram world that tell you constantly that you are not enough, but for three easy payments of $59.99 plus shipping and handling, you can feel whole.
Our spiritual journey, the journey of our consciousness, is outward. At our best, the thin places between the mundane and the holy multiply, allowing us to see mystery and the divine with increasing frequency. The nature of evil is to wall us off, to make us small, to make us an “us” and to manufacture “them.” God give us some spiritual sledgehammers. We have walls to break down. Amen.