Hating Evil

Hating Evil

A sermon delivered by Rev. Peter T. Atkinson

September 24, 2017

at Bethany Presbyterian Church, Zuni, Virginia

Proverbs 1: 8-19

Luke 11: 14-23

Let us pray,

Help us to see despite our eyes

Help us to think outside of our minds

Help us to be more than our lives   

For your eyes show the way

    Your mind knows the truth

    Your being is the life.

Amen.

As we continue our journey, through Paul’s marks of a Christian from his letter to the Romans, I want to, each week read the passage, so that we can see where we have been, where we are, and were we are headed. So here is Romans 12: 9-21, again, because it still hasn’t gotten old yet. . . maybe it will, for it is a long road we are taking. . .

⁹ Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; ¹⁰ love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. ¹¹ Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. ¹² Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. ¹³ Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

¹⁴ Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. ¹⁵ Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. ¹⁶ Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. ¹⁷ Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. ¹⁸ If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. ¹⁹ Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” ²⁰ No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” ²¹ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

So this morning we are focusing on “hate what is evil” which is an interesting thing because in today’s world, many people are convinced that “hate” is in fact “what is evil,” but here we are missing an is there, instead it says clearly hate what is evil, and that leads us to the all important question, what is evil? I remember distinctly that in Psalm 23 it says clearly, that though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil. . . and I know in the Lord’s prayer it says deliver us from evil. . . but what is evil? And what does it mean to hate it? For hate it but don’t fear it, and hate it, while asking deliverance from it. . . what is evil? That’s a pretty good question right, and one that has to do with wisdom, as if the wise would know. . . so let’s go to the book of the Bible that is most about wisdom, Proverbs, and see what it says is evil. This is in the first chapter of proverbs, and in my Bible it has the subtitle, “warning against Evil Companions” this is verse 8-19

⁸ Hear, my child, your father’s instruction,
    and do not reject your mother’s teaching;
⁹ for they are a fair garland for your head,
    and pendants for your neck.
¹⁰ My child, if sinners entice you,
    do not consent.
¹¹ If they say, “Come with us, let us lie in wait for blood;
    let us wantonly ambush the innocent;
¹² like Sheol let us swallow them alive
    and whole, like those who go down to the Pit.
¹³ We shall find all kinds of costly things;
    we shall fill our houses with booty.
¹⁴ Throw in your lot among us;
    we will all have one purse”—
¹⁵ my child, do not walk in their way,
    keep your foot from their paths;
¹⁶ for their feet run to evil,
    and they hurry to shed blood.
¹⁷ For in vain is the net baited
    while the bird is looking on;
¹⁸ yet they lie in wait—to kill themselves!
    and set an ambush—for their own lives!
¹⁹ Such is the end of all who are greedy for gain;
    it takes away the life of its possessors.

So in this evil is a group of bandit like folks who offer you prizes if you will go in with them. . . they will offer you costly things, and they will share, they will promise that if you throw in your lot with us, we will all have one purse. . . interesting understanding of evil. . . easy perhaps to not fear it, because it is easy to walk away from if you are wary and wise, on your toes with your eyes wide open to weighing the consequences of your actions, and the emptiness of their benevolent, utopia of promises. . . it seems so easy. . . I was flipping around the tv yesterday in the little bit of time that I had to watch some football, and on one of the channels was the old movie Goonies, you know the one where the kids go seek to find the sunken pirate treasure of Old One-Eyed Willie, and are hunted from behind by the escaped from prison convict family, the Fratelli’s. . . it is easy to tell the clever, resourceful kids, from the cruel and bumbling bandits, its always easy in the movies, but what if those bandits aren’t so easy to spot, like they often aren’t in real life. . .

Now let’s look to our Gospel Text, Luke 11: 14-23

¹⁴ Now he was casting out a demon that was mute; when the demon had gone out, the one who had been mute spoke, and the crowds were amazed. ¹⁵ But some of them said, “He casts out demons by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons.” ¹⁶ Others, to test him, kept demanding from him a sign from heaven. ¹⁷ But he knew what they were thinking and said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself becomes a desert, and house falls on house. ¹⁸ If Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand? —for you say that I cast out the demons by Beelzebul. ¹⁹ Now if I cast out the demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your exorcists cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. ²⁰ But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you. ²¹ When a strong man, fully armed, guards his castle, his property is safe. ²² But when one stronger than he attacks him and overpowers him, he takes away his armor in which he trusted and divides his plunder. ²³ Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.

"Whoever is not with me is against me," those are difficult words in today's world, aren't they? There are some people who would hear me say “hate what is evil,” and then say, “whoever is not with me is against me,”  and start hating me, because in our world we’ve already said people think hate is evil, another thing many thing is evil is Division. . . and these words from Jesus are the kind of words that separate people rather than bringing them together, building that fence right between, with and against, us and them, and believe it or not, here we see Jesus saying these exact words, and in our text for this Sunday we have, "Hate what is evil." So here we are in week 2 of our marks of a Christian series and we've already stumbled on some challenging stuff. If last week's cry for us to live, love, and be genuine wasn't hard enough, here we are this week having to hate evil. The Luke passage seems to paint a simple picture of it all. Have you ever thought that if you were a character in the Bible, faith, the walk, being a Christian, all of it would be so much simpler? When you have demons self identifying, and you have Beelzebub and Satan rearing their ugly heads in the light of day and in public, it is so much easier to spot evil. Or if we could be in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, there would be a ring that is evil and we could destroy it, or maybe even be Batman in Gotham City, there'd be tons of villains to defeat, and they are all the ones with the crazy identifying marks, like penguins and jokers and riddlers and such, or in some western where we know that evil is the guy on the black horse. Or if we could be Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, it is obvious who the enemy is, the empire and Darth Vader, easy enough go fight them, hate them, destroy them. They are evil and we know it, but our world is more like the world where all of a sudden Darth Vader turns to Luke and says, "I'm Your Father" in those immortal words of The Empire Strikes Back. Now everything that he thought he knew about evil has been turned upside down, and his new mission is not just to defeat evil, but to redeem the man who was his father, hating evil, but looking for the possibility of goodness behind the evil mask.

Such is our post modern world. It is hard for us to know what evil is. It seems harsh to us to label anything or anybody as evil, but here in this passage we are called, that one of the marks of a Christian is to "Hate what is evil," but what is evil?

On my final exam for my World Literature students when I was teaching I always gave them a final exam where they had to answer challenging questions from their own point of view, and I promised them that I would not grade them on what their opinion was, like whether I agreed with them or not, but instead on how well they expressed one definitive idea, hopefully their own, whatever they felt they wanted to say. I’d ask all kinds of things, sometimes about the nature of education, sometimes about character and ethical issues. I remember, one of my truly favorite questions, because I always got good responses was the question, “Are you a good person?” Always got the best. . . but one time I got this Korean kid, who had always been so well mannered and respectful. . . He answered that questions saying no, I am not a good person because I get envious and jealous of other people and I can’t help myself. Like if someone is playing guitar, I always think that I could play better than them, even if I really can’t, and if they are better than me, I get really nasty, like when Mr. Atkinson sings, I think to myself, the only reason he can sing like that is because of his big fat belly. . . I think something like that and then I feel better, so yeah I’m not a good person, to have to bring somebody down and not just be happy for them. . . . I was amazed, I thought that was the best answer I have ever gotten, so out of his typical outward persona, but so honest. . . and it made me laugh which always was worth extra points.

But one time I remember I posed a question to them about the nature of evil. I chose four quotes to frame the question, then the question. I want to share the question with us as a way to start getting at what evil is. I used the quotes to get them thinking. I'll do the same for us this morning. Each Quote gets at a different idea of what evil is.

"Evil is a point of view" -- Anne Rice
"Many evil things there are that your strong walls and bright swords do not stay." -- J.R.R. Tolkien
"What we call evil, it seems to me, is simply ignorance bumping its head in the dark." -- Henry Ford
"Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil." -- Anatole France
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke

 Here is the question I asked them:

Does evil exist? If it does what is its source? Does man have a responsibility to do anything in relation to evil? If evil does not exist, why is there suffering in the world?

 How would you answer that? Have you ever thought about it? If you look at your bulletin I chose three of the responses and printed them there for you. These are direct quotations from three of my students, and I chose them because they get at three different sides of the fence, if a fence has three sides. . .

The first one says:

"Evil is the opposite of love. To give yourself completely is love. Taking in completely, on the other hand, is evil. When one spreads love by giving to all rather than taking from all, then joy can be found in the world." 

I liked that one. It seemed like a definition of evil that could be positive and beneficial. He really gets at some of the main ideas of what I had hoped to teach them, but isn't hate truly the opposite of love, and if so, how can you hate evil, as we are called to do without become evil yourself. . . Problematic, but let's keep that idea on the back burner as we proceed.

The next two seem to reflect two popular secular ideas about what evil is if it exists at all. The student writes:

"There are opinions of evil and what evil things are, but there is nothing in the world everyone can agree is evil. There are too many different aspects of life to say one thing is good or evil because one thing that may be helping one person could be destroying another person and vice versa." 

He is basically holding up the relativists point of view, very popular today. Evil is a mere matter of opinion, and since there are so many different opinions, then there must be no such thing as something that is absolutely evil, and by the way there is nothing absolutely good either, and no absolute truth. Very prevalent among my students.

Leaving us with the third student, which is very similar to the second, just more informed, from a anthropology standpoint, more educated, erudite, and intellectually honest, yet arrogant, if you didn't think so just ask him, writing. . .

"Evil exists only because we have made a "moral scale" or "system" to measure how good or bad something is on a level of the society's standards." 

Basically he is saying, like student number 2, just going one step further, stating that we as a society determine evil, based on our society's standards, but you can see from his use of quotation marks, that he sees moral scale and system as a bogus artificial made up kind of thing that those in power use over those who lack power, but there is no truth behind it. They are merely arbitrary standards that have seemed to work for us, maybe, or at least until we evolve and don't need them anymore.

Again I'll pose the question to you all. What is evil? Does it exist? Is it real? Is it one thing or many? Is it easily definable? Is it embodied in a devil type character, you know a little red dude who lives beneath the ground, but comes up to haunt and scare, or to sit on our shoulders and debate with the little cartoon angel we have on the other shoulder? Or is evil within human beings? Is it merely a manifestation of human sin? Do you know evil when you see it? Can you look at an event or a person or an idea and say, that's evil? Was Adolf Hitler evil? Is driving an airplane into skyscrapers in the middle of a normal workday morning evil? Is the persecution of Christians evil, the beheading of innocents? Is the systematic slaughter of a race evil? Is slavery evil? Yes, Yes, Yes. It seems to me that the relative argument only exists in the vacuum of a philosophical academic discussion because when you start looking at examples of evil, it is not hard to find and distinguish them. It may be uncomfortable; it may be easier to avoid the topic of evil altogether.

One thing that is interesting in our marks of a Christian passage is that the word Evil is used twice. . . here with ours today, hate what is evil, and then at the very end where it says, “do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.” Hmmm, he plot thickens. . . so if we were to take these together, we’d have to hate what is evil, but somehow not be overcome by it, quite a challenge I think. . . because that hate slope is a slippery one, and it is easy to become the very thing you are fighting against. . . it is just true about human nature. . . and this is something I want us to remember as we go forward because these can and probably should be thought of in the same context, and they definitely are related, but despite that I’m going do everything I can to separate them because there is something that must be said, though I don’t necessary want to. . . because it just makes an already challenging text, more so, and that is that they are completely different words in the original language of Greek. . .

The Greeks actually have two words for evil, and both are used right here  within the confines of our passage. These words for evil from the original Greek language are actually two completely different words. In "hate what is evil" you have "poneros" used for evil, and in "do not be overcome by evil" you have a completely different word entirely, "kakos." Getting at the difference between these two words gives us a deeper insight into what is going on in this text. I looked at a lot of different sources to get to the bottom of the difference between these words. According to Strong's Greek Lexicon, the difference is Kakos describes the quality according to its nature, poneros, according to its effects. In other words Kakos is describing evil in a person, and in that being a person who is less than what they were created to be, something missing, and Poneros refers with the hazardous effects of wicked or evil deeds.

When we read this passage like this we seem to be more in line with the overall Gospel message of loving our neighbor, and/or our enemies, rather than hating them . This passage is not asking us to hate people, but to hate evil, and its effects, but now what are evil effects? How can we get at what exactly signifies something as evil? "Poneros" gets at things that cause toil, burdens, struggles, pain. We can look at all of those things and see evil right, maybe, but sometimes those struggles, burdens, and pain are the things that make us grow, so that is hardly evil, right? People who suffer no struggle never grow, people who suffer no pain, don't get stronger, people who are unburden seem to shrink and become weaker, mere shades of their former selves, so I have trouble with this narrow idea of the essence of evil. Evil can't just be the things that make us uncomfortable or work harder. To me that is too much like heading into the realm of relativity, you know, I don't like it if it makes me struggle. Evil seems to be bigger, more devastating. Now last night as I was looking through and revising and writing this, I was relooking at this very part, when Clara woke up screaming because her ear was hurting, and we tried drops and all the other things, but it just wouldn’t help, and she was screaming and I was trying to calm her down, not really being able to do much. . . . now I don’t know whether whatever was causing her that pain was evil or not, in this high minded paragraph that I wrote about pain and struggle and their growth effects, but at the time I can tell you I had not problem hating it, and considering it to be evil as it could right well be. So I get that sometimes in the heat of the moment our definition may be different.

But it seems to me that the best way of looking at what is evil, is not just what is burdensome, but what destroys life, both physically and spiritually. If God is good, and created life for living, then destroying life would be the opposite of good, evil. Now let's look at our list of things that I posed as being evil earlier. Hitler--putting the world at war, systematic killing of Jews, repression of human freedom, Hitler's got it all. Driving an airplane into skyscrapers in the middle of a normal workday morning, yes destroying of life, so many lives on that day, but also the after effects, fear, reduction of freedom, invasion of privacy, going to war. Isis over there in the Middle East, their persecution of Christians, the beheading of innocents, driving trucks into crowds, just to kill. It's evil.  And finally slavery, yes the ultimate evil. It destroys the human will and the human spirit because it reduces a human to being a tool. I called slavery the ultimate evil, because though it does not physically kill in most cases, rather it kills everything about what it means to be human. And slavery takes on many forms, chained slavery, slavery to the state, slavery to an idea, slavery of the mind, slavery to fear, and of course slavery to sin.

These are all things that we are called to hate. There is always the danger though, and that is the power of hate to become an evil in itself. . . I started this morning by looking at a few movie versions the struggle between good and evil. Most of them try to show this danger. In The Lord of the Rings there is a constant threat that the ring that Frodo is called to destroy will come to possess him, turning him toward the evil. In Star Wars, Return of the Jedi, when Luke finally faces Vader, his father, and the emperor, the emperor tries to use Luke's hatred of evil to turn him to the Darkside of the force. In both the heroes are faced not only with the evil that they are fighting against but also the capacity for evil that is within them. Frodo and Luke both persevere and resist, but for us there is always that danger. It is just as true for us. As we work hard to try to keep 911 from happening again, we are constantly in threat to become the evil we are fighting. It is not that we aren't supposed to fight evil, we are, but we have to be constantly vigilant that we don't lose ourselves in the fight allowing the hatred of evil to overwhelm us. When we found and killed Osama Bin Laden I wrote the following poem:

Upon Osama’s Death 

Although on this day the free world rejoices,

Part of me stops because being the hand of justice

Is dangerous. It is too much power, and I pray

It will not corrupt as it tends to do. Especially

When justice is wrapped in the flag of vengeance

And the proud man stands above, satisfied,

Taking credit for the triumph of Good over Evil,

But by what means? May we seek a world

Where Evil is overcome with Good, where

Vengeance and Justice are in God’s hands,

For it is only finite justice that we can do,

Temporary, incomplete, and only partial good,

With the shadow of Evil rising again behind us

In the eclipse of our increasing, ever escalating

Misguided, but well intentioned action. 

I'm not saying that he shouldn't have been killed, I'm saying that it was evil to kill him, and we have to hate what is evil, even when it is within ourselves, even when it is a "necessary" evil. It is really easy to let our need for revenge, or our hatred of an evil act transform us, and we can't do that.

This idea leads us straight into our text for next week, which states, "hold fast to what is good." We must because hating evil is a slippery slope, and though we are called to hate what is evil, we know that hatred us leaves us hanging over a pit, and our only chance is to hold fast to what is good. God give us the strength. May it ever be so.