| "Why does God let evil things happen? What was God doing on September 11th, while terrorists were murdering 6,000 innocent people and tearing apart the social and economic fabric of our city?" Members of our congregation have been asking the pastoral staff to address in sermons and discussion groups some of the basic faith-issues posed by the World Trade Center tragedy, and the particular questions that I've just cited sit at or very near the top of most people's list of issues. "Why does a good God allow evil things to happen to innocent people?" This age-old question is one that has simply refused to die even though thousands of potential answers to it have been offered. You see, the "problem of evil" is not like a problem in 5th-grade arithmetic. There's no handy answer to be found by turning to the back of the book. And I'm sure that what I have to say this morning will not put the issue to rest, either for you or for me. Nonetheless, as your pastor, I owe you my current best thoughts on the subject, and they are what I'm sharing with you today. Your responses to what I say and your ongoing dialogue with me on this issue are most sincerely invited. Most of us are accustomed to saying and believing the following three things about God and the world God has created: (1) God is all-powerful; (2) God is all-good; (3) in this world created by God, evil things do happen. But we must acknowledge that there's a problem with believing in all three of these propositions at the same time, for any two of them can be seen to be compatible with each other, but surely not all three. For although God can be spoken of as being both all-powerful and all-good so long as evil things don't happen in this world that God has created, surely both of these attributes-all-powerful and all-good-both of these attributes can no longer be affirmed if evil things do happen here, as is most assuredly the case. You see, evil things can be conceived of as happening if God is all-powerful but is not at the same time all-good, for a God who is not all-good can be thought of as letting evil things happen or as even causing them to happen. And evil things can also be conceived of as happening if God is all-good but is not at the same time all-powerful, for a God who is not all-powerful can be thought of as having to let evil things happen. And it is just at this point in our reasoning that we encounter a surprising suggestion in one school of Christian thought, the suggestion that precisely because God is all-good God has chosen, in relationship to humankind, to become less than all-powerful. God has adopted, in relationship to us, a self-imposed limitation on divine power, a limitation glorious in its purpose if risky in its consequence. I say "glorious in purpose," because this self-imposed limit to God's power was what God had to do if God was really to grant to humankind such a supremely good gift as freedom and autonomy. Precisely because God is all-good, God chose not to create us as puppets who are expected to dance on the end of strings that control our moves and deny us choices. No, because God is all-good, God chose to create us in God's own image, which is to say that God chose to endow us with freedom of action and with what must necessarily attend such freedom-namely, moral responsibility. But God's glorious act of granting autonomy and moral responsibility to the likes of us was also risky in its potential outcomes. For the freedom to choose can be used for evil as well as for good. And any granting of freedom must allow for wrong choices to be made, as well as for right choices, such that while God may have one thing in mind for us, we may choose another. I'm reminded here of some words spoken by that world-renowned early 20th-century Brooklyn "theologian" Mae West-words she uttered when asked to comment on the deep meaning of an animated film made by Walt Disney in 1938. "Oh, about that," she said, "I used to be Snow White, but I drifted!" Well, the biblical story of the woman and man in the Garden of Eden, this morning's First Lesson, is precisely a story about a pair of people who used to be Snow White but drifted. God had hoped that the woman and man's inward desire to follow God's will would lead them to choose not to take and taste the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But the woman and man had within them another desire, one that overcame their desire to follow God's will. That other desire was rooted and grounded in the nature of freedom itself-the desire to gain the "whole apple" of personal autonomy by acquiring a knowledge like God's of all one's options for action. So God, having determined that we humans would be born free and morally responsible and that we would be participants in the process of our own becoming, of our own development from the innocence of childhood into a maturity of being-God having determined that,then both God and we must now live with the consequences of God's choice. Both God and we must live with the consequences of God's decision not to impose God's will on humankind, but instead to limit God's own power t intervene to the power of persuasion. For if God is to preserve the integrity of human freedom, then God must not intervene directly, at will, to cancel out persons' choices for action. Rather, God must wait patiently for "the right time," when "the right person" is willing, freely, to act in accordance with God's will to establish "the good." We often refer to God as being for us like "a father" or "a mother." And that image of God, as a loving parent, is particularly helpful for understanding what it is I've been trying to say this morning. For a loving parent does not seek to force his or her teenager into a particular course of action, but instead seeks to persuade the teenager. And in so doing the parent relinquishes ultimate control over the outcomes of the teenager's exercise of freedom. And for that reason, this loving parent cannot in every case prevent evil from overtaking the teenager. God's creation of us as free and morally responsible is a radical and risky thing, producing unpredictable outcomes. And God, like a parent, can only rejoice over the good outcomes and weep over the evil ones, having relinquished the power to intervene directly to change either the choices or their consequences. For the circumstance that we humans may choose to do evil rather than good is the price to be paid for our having been created free-the cost that God and we must mutually share, and bear. As the words of Jesus in our Second Lesson make clear, evil comes from within us, from the choices we make. So God cannot thwart our choices without aborting our freedom. We must not blame God for evil, for evil arises from human choices. Evil is something that wells up from within the likes of us, as we live with a knowledge in our hearts of both good and evil. Evil is the product of our misuse of the treasure God has given us-the incomparable gift of freedom and moral responsibility. If God is to honor our freedom, God must allow humans to choose the evil. It is in this sense that God "permits" evil. But every time we choose evil, the heart of God fills with pain and sorrow. So what is it that God can do to mitigate the effects of humans' evil choices while preserving human autonomy? Well, God can act and does act in ways designed to optimize the likelihood that humans will freely choose the good. And God's most notable and effective action of all was that at "the right time" God sent us "the right person," Jesus, a person willing fully and freely to conform his will to God's will and to be God's agent for demonstrating and establishing the operative norm for what is good. And through the example of Jesus, God is still today seeking to persuade all of us to choose the good and to reject the evil. Through Jesus, God is still today inviting each and every one of us to cooperate in the producing of good by manifesting a love like Jesus's, a love that respects the integrity and intrinsic worth of every human, a love like Jesus's, that remains steadfast in choosing God's will, even at the cost of death on the cross. And where in modern times can we look to find persuasive examples of such Jesus-inspired choosing of the good? What examples can we cite from modern history of cases where God has acted to interrupt a cycle of human evil by means of the voluntary actions of persons who fully and freely choose the good and reject the evil? Well, to cite but one example, at the issues forum after worship last Sunday Christine Gorman reminded us of the documentary film Weapons of the Spirit, made in 1989 by director Pierre Sauvage. Reflecting on World War II, it portrays the true story of the residents of a small, overwhelmingly Protestant farming village on a windswept, wintry plateau in the mountains of south-central, Nazi-occupied France-the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Most of the villagers were proud descendants of the Huguenots, the first Protestants in France. Huguenots, like us Presbyterians, were spiritual descendants of the 16th-century reformer John Calvin. The Huguenots had suffered a sad and tragic history of persecution throughout the 17th century, a persecution that had decimated them and robbed their remnant of religious freedom, a freedom that was not fully restored until 1905. The villagers of Le Chambon were mindful of the history of their own people's persecution, and it mattered to them when others suffered persecution. They also read their Bibles. Even the humblest home had a Bible, and the father read it aloud to his family every day, so that they might all follow the example set by Jesus of loving God and of loving one's neighbor as oneself. Their lives were built on the rock of the Word of God. Weapons of the Spirit narrates the story of this whole community, who, when confronted by the specter of Nazi evil, chose the good in rejecting the evil. The day after France surrendered to Hitler on June 22, 1940, the Protestant pastor of Le Chambon, André Trocmé, stood in the pulpit to remind his parishioners that we Christians have the responsibility to resist the violence that is brought to bear on our consciences-to resist that violence in non-violent ways, using only "les armes de l'esprit," "the weapons of the spirit"-such as love and peace, patience and kindness, gentleness and faithfulness to God. Said Trocmé, "We shall resist when our adversaries will demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel. We shall do so without fear, but also without pride and without hatred." The story of Le Chambon is one of how a persistent moral consensus took root and flourished among the villagers as each individually chose the good and rejected the evil, the evil of the Holocaust. When a first few fleeing French Jews stumbled into this tiny outpost, they were welcomed and offered shelter by the villagers. So more Jews came, and the people of Le Chambon kept taking them in-individuals, couples, families; children, the elderly, the middle aged; those who could pay and those who could not; doctors, merchants, scholars, homemakers-5,000 Jews in all, taken in by the 5,000 Christians living in the village and the surrounding countryside. The people of Le Chambon spent their time being active in the doing of good rather than rationalizing the doing of evil. The Nazis had proclaimed a Thousand-Year Reich, a Thousand-Year Empire, and appeared triumphant, but Le Chambon remained part of the Kingdom of God-even when toward the end of the war the Gestapo arrived and things turned dangerous for the villagers, with deaths occurring. The story of Le Chambon is a story of crimes that did not take place, of atrocities that were thwarted through simple acts of goodness. According to testimony offered by Jews who were rescued, the goodness of the people of Le Chambon arose from the utter naturalness and simplicity of their total commitment in everyday living to their religious convictions and basic moral principles. And one of the villagers himself also put it thus, saying: "It all happened very simply. We didn't ask ourselves why we were doing it. It was the human thing to do or something like that … that's all." And a woman resident commented: "It happened so naturally, we can't understand all the fuss.… I helped because they needed help." Le Chambon was a whole village that never drifted! We humans don't have to choose the evil; we can with naturalness and simplicity and courage choose to follow Jesus in choosing the good. And when we do so, our influence can be contagious. What took place in Le Chambon could only occur because a number of government officials and police and even German soldiers were affected by the villagers' "conspiracy of goodness," so that they never really reported to their higher authorities what was going on in that village. Reflecting on his film, the director, Pierre Sauvage, had this to say: "… as [my son] learns that there is in all of us a capacity for evil… I want him to learn that the stories of the righteous are not footnotes to the past but cornerstones to the future." The question many of us have been asking these past weeks is "Why does God allow evil?" The best and simplest answer to this question, it seems to me, is this: "Because God has chosen to give all of humankind the incomparable gift of freedom and moral responsibility, God has, therefore, limited divine intervention to forms of persuasion, forms of persuasion like offering renewed examples of what it is to live in God's image, examples like Jesus, and the villagers of Le Chambon. In light of that answer I believe the most fruitful question for us to be asking ourselves today, and everyday, is not, "Why does God allow evil," but rather, "Why do humans so commonly choose to do evil? Why do humans so steadily ignore or misread the promptings of God's word and the examples of Jesus and others, like the villagers of Le Chambon?" The young Assistant Pastor in that village during World War II was a man named Edouard Theis. He was interviewed by Pierre Sauvage in 1989, when Weapons of the Spirit was being filmed. In his study hung pictures of Martin Luther King and Gandhi. During the interview Sauvage asked Theis to summarize his faith in a few words. Without hesitation he replied simply, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, and your neighbor as yourself." Sauvage was amazed: "That's it? [It's so simple.] It just has to be applied?" And Theis replied, "Yes! Of course!" "Yes! Of course!" It's that simple-we just have to choose to do it! Let us pray: Amen |
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