A sermon by the Rev. Daniel Schatz, delivered at BuxMont Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, November 8, 2003

The proof of a life is in the living of the life, and the proof of a people is in the lives of the people.

The weary lamentation that humanity inherently is evil, that we are fallen creatures, is set at naught if we can show one person who in living has given this judgment the lie.

We would then have to explain how this one person could have been good.

Those who weep for the problem of evil, let them consider the problem of the good, for this is a problem the doom-sayers cannot solve.

It upholds our faith in the worth of the human family.

To remember the good person restores us when we are discouraged, for we are upheld by the evidence of steadfastness.

The good persons shame the waning of our person, for we recall their patience, they upbraid our falsehoods and dissembling, for we remember the honor of their ways.

When we are moved to name humankind a plague and an abomination, we are reproved by the modest goodness of their years, and in the treatment of their righteousness we are renewed.

- Kenneth Patton

Hymns of Humanity

            The anti-gay activist Fred Phelps has made a living promoting his belief that all homosexuals, bisexuals, and indeed any people not like him are evil.  With signs proclaiming “God hates fags” he and his supporters at the Topeka Kansas Westboro Church descend upon college campuses, cities and small towns, spreading hatred.  He shouts that homosexuality is the embodiment of evil, and many shout back, declaring Phelps to be the same.  In reality, he is nothing but a low life career bigot.  I mention him not because he is important, but because of the actions of a few students at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, who were disturbed to learn that members of this church planned to visit their campus.  Instead of meeting them with the usual fruitless shouting match, the students invited Phelps to debate.  It was the first time any school had taken this approach, and the 2000 students and faculty who attended refused to be provoked to rage or shouting.  They sat silently during the debate and at the close cheered for the ministers and faculty with the courage to face down bigotry.  Thomas Simon, a professor who participated in the debate, later said, “Unable to provoke rage, the Phelps’ disjointed rantings fizzled.... Afterward, the representatives of the Westboro Church left dejectedly left under police escort.”

            Then the professor said something else.  He said, “Neither silence nor shouting accomplishes very much compared to structured discussion....  those who stir the emotions often fail in more rational settings.  Hate feels more comfortable in the dark.  Hidden in the shadows, hate calls itself tough.  But in the glaring light of an auditorium stage, under the watchful gaze of a courteous audience, and within a structure that enforces the forms of rationality, it loses force.  Fear grows when we imagine something terrible but unknown.  Civil debate disarms that power.”

            Whether it is through civil debate or the simple refusal to bend under the fear of evil, ordinary good and decent people can overcome terror.  Sometimes this happens in unexpected ways.  When I was a student in Austin, Texas, the Klu Klux Klan staged a march on the state capitol building.  Eight Klansmen showed up, white sheets and all, and thousands of counter protesters lined the edges of the sidewalk.  As the Klansmen approached the building’s steps, about four hundred of the counter protestors turned around and mooned them.

            Like the students in Greeley, Colorado, the counter-protestors in Austin recognized an evil in bigotry.  At the same time, people like Fred Phelps and maybe even the Klan think they are campaigning against evil.  I’m not sure either group has a good idea of what they mean by the term.  This is the problem with words like “evil;” unless we have some idea what they are supposed to mean, they can be twisted to mean anything, with sometimes devastating impacts.  The effects of bigotry preached in the name of “the good” are often violence and pain.  If we, who disagree with that brand of religion, wish to counter with our own ideas, it is vital that we know what we are talking about.

            Not long after the Klan incident in Austin a professor of mine was strolling down the West Mall on the university campus.  A couple of philosophy graduate students were walking nearby, engaged in an animated discussion.  He could tell they were philosophy students because he could catch little bits of conversation – "ontological fulfillment," "metaphysical construct," and so on.  Then, suddenly, just in front of him, the pair stopped.  One turned to the other in exasperation and shouted, “Good?  Evil?  Define your terms!”

            Of course, there is a danger in trying to define powerful words.  Last week I read a UU version of the 23^rd Psalm:

            Yea, though I walk through the valley

            of the shadow of death,

            I shall fear no evil,

            for “evil” and “good”

            are merely logical constructs.

They aren’t merely logical constructs.  They carry powerful emotion and have real impact.  Tossing them around loosely and applying them indiscriminately causes real damage.

            Good and evil become terms of judgment – a way to separate human beings from human beings.  A preacher of hatred does not say that “we hate them because we do not understand their way of life and it threatens our biblically based system of values;” instead he says, “we hate them because they are evil.”  Adolf Hitler spoke of Jews in similar ways, and because too many people responded to the power of his rhetoric rather than stopping to think about what it meant or whether it could possibly be true, six million Jews died.

            The word “evil” and more occasionally the word “good” become labels used to judge other human beings.  “We are the good guys,” you might hear.  “They are evil.”   We don’t stop to think very much about the person behind the label.

            A Newsweek Magazine cover story on evil printed not long after September 11, 2001 showed pictures of criminals and terrorists under the heading “monsters.”  I wonder if we honestly believe that.  Has our approach to evil progressed no farther than the belief that some people are simply “monsters” and if we get rid of those people we will get rid of evil?  Shouldn’t it be more complicated than that?

            There are too many examples of people once labeled “monster” who found good in themselves to dismiss any human being so easily.  Perhaps the change in their lives came because of some simple act of humanity toward them; perhaps it was because they finally had to come to terms with the fruits of their actions.  Maybe they just grew, into a greater wholeness within.  Maybe there was good in there all along.

            One of these “monsters” is a man named Paul Crump.  Crump was a murderer, nothing less.  He killed a security guard during a robbery and was sentenced to death in 1953.  While on death row a warden named Jack Johnson befriended him.  Johnson’s kindness made a world of difference to Paul Crump; it changed his life more than any sentence of death, or even the reality of execution would have.  Instead of murderer and thief, Crump became an author.  While in prison he wrote a novel called Burn Killer Burn, and figures as diverse as Mahalia Jackson and Billy Graham asked for clemency.  After nine years on death row, Crump’s sentence was commuted to life in prison on the grounds that he had been rehabilitated.  A man whose life had been judged by the courts to be less than worthless had a purpose after all.  Crump died a free man one year ago.

            Paul Crump’s story is one of many, and there are countless others that we will never know.  If we as Unitarian Universalists are serious when we talk about “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” than we need to recognize that no human being, no matter how great the evil they have committed, is beyond redemption.

            That isn’t an easy statement to make.  “What about Hitler?” we ask.  “What about the September 11^th terrorists?  Weren’t these people absolutely evil?  And with what we know about them, its hard to argue otherwise.

            But we don’t really know them.  We don’t know what lives led them to actions that were indisputably evil.  We do know that Hitler did not act alone, and I am not so ready to condemn a generation of German soldiers to the realm of absolute evil.  There were many who were, as Edmund Burke observed, “good people who did nothing.”  I’m not ready to label them monsters.  I’m not even ready to labeled terrorists that way, despite the horrors for which they bear responsibility.  The problem is not that these are inhuman monsters.  The problem is that they are profoundly human, broken individuals.  If we dismiss criminals, dictators and terrorists as inhuman, we will never solve the problems of crime, oppression and terrorism.

            Likewise, if we elevate those who do great good – Martin Luther King, Jr., perhaps, or Mother Theresa – to the level of sainthood and ignore their imperfections, we will find it much harder to recognize the good of which we ourselves are capable.

            Good and evil, you see, are not qualities of human beings.  They are qualities of the choices human beings make, and they are the living results of those choices. 

            Evil choices are those that damage other people or the world, choices that fragment the creative relationships that define our existence.  Usually these are very small wrongs, and while none of us is completely innocent, very few if any of us are especially guilty either.

            The good is that which moves away from such fragmentation and towards wholeness.  An unasked-for kindness, or an asked for one, a glimmer of humanity shown to someone who is not expecting it, forgiveness, a sacrifice on behalf of a stranger – this is the modest goodness of which we are all capable.

            It isn’t a simple way to look at good and evil, I admit.  When we think of good and evil as qualities of the choices we make, it doesn’t take long before we find choices that lead us in both directions at once.

            As we approach Veterans Day I think of the terrible choice faced by soldiers in battle.  These are human beings – soldiers, sailors and pilots, few of whom signed up to be heroes – whose country has asked them to perform acts that they have been taught from birth are evil.  They are asked not merely to die, but to kill for their country, for a greater good.  Whether or not we believe that such acts can ever be justified is not the question – in their hearts, these people are acting on our behalf.

            I once had a conversation with a dying man who was tortured by his memories of battle.  He had been a naval gunner in the second world war, and for half a century he had been haunted by the knowledge that through his actions people had died.  That those people were enemy soldiers didn’t matter.  They were people. 

            What does it do to a human soul to perform evil in the name of good?  I can think of few other kinds of suffering that are as wrenching.  Whatever we believe about the rightness or wrongness of any war, or war at all, we owe the people who fight on our behalf the greatest debt of gratitude.  They have risked not only their lives and their bodies, but also their souls for the ideals of their country.  War is an evil that has taken on a life of its own, with good people caught up in all sides.

            There are other evils like it – societal evils that have taken on lives of their own – racism, poverty, homophobia, sexism.  These linger long after the people who made the choices that led to them are gone.  We are called to respond to these evils with our own goodness – education, dialogue, anti-racism, empowerment of the disempowered.  The good that we can do is no less powerful than the wrongs of society.  Though it takes time, we can create a better world.

            Changing the world does take effort.  It isn’t enough to consider ourselves “basically good people” and let it go at that – even if it is true.  Nowhere do the scriptures tell us to “be good.”  The Bible doesn’t tell us to “be good;” it tells us to “do good.”

            Be who you are and live with integrity and you’ll have made start.  Despite what the six o’clock news would have you believe, there is vastly more good in the world than evil.  Every day people reach out to one another and create bonds of togetherness, wholeness and love.  Every day there are people who go out to find the homeless and hungry and give them food and, at the very least, a warm blanket.  Every day there are others who loudly ask why, in a world of plenty, some have no food.  Fourteen members of a homophobic gang were met in Greeley, Colorado by 2,000 courteous students who quietly and courageously told them that they were wrong.  Things like that happen all around us.

            But it takes more than that.  To truly overcome evil, we must recognize its potential in us and choose otherwise.  If someone hurts me, I am likely to want to hurt them back, or without realizing I find myself in an evil mood, and I lash out at someone who doesn’t deserve my anger, not in that way.  They may do the same thing to someone else, and like a cancer it spreads.  Good works that way, too, though.  All it takes is a choice.  I may be hurt, but I can choose to respond to pain with kindness, if not towards the one who hurt me, at least towards the next person I see.  Any one of us can make a decision at any time, to bring a little more good into the world.

            It’s amazing how much difference even the simplest and smallest act can make.  It is the difference between hurt and healing, between war and peace, between hate and love.  By themselves our choices may not change the world much, but we are not alone.  Billions of people make the same kind of choices with us.  Humanity has overcome countless evils, and we are slowly moving toward that day when we will all be able to live out our beliefs in the equality of every human being and the dignity of every soul.  We can make a difference if we only stop to think, however briefly, about the effects of our actions on the larger world.  Every one of us can be an agent of the good.

            Could there be any hope greater?

Go forth into the world in peace,

be of good courage;

Prove all things and hold fast to the good.