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Sermon - Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (B) - 30th August 2009
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 7, 8 & 10am
Readings: Mark 7:1-8; 14-23
Several weeks ago the North Epping community experienced an appalling act of evil with the murder of the Lin family, while they slept in their beds. It is hard to believe that such a thing could happen in a place like Epping. Yet it was made more difficult to understand when we learnt of the professionalism of the act and the apparent complete absence of a motive for it. And we are left with questions. “Why this family?” “Why this place?” “And what sort of people would do a thing like that?” They must be animals. They must be subhuman. What sort of people use their considerable skill and employ such careful planning to do such an evil thing?
Other acts of violence we can understand. Some things happen purely by accident. There was no intent to do any harm. And yet an injury was suffered. Or in a moment of passion a person lashes out. They behave in a way they wouldn’t normally, but because of the situation and the way they responded to the perceived provocation they hit out. That too can be understood if not condoned. But how can we understand a planned attack on an innocent family? I don’t think we can. The evil is just there. It is an awful reality. Though we might want to distance ourselves from it we know in reality it is always there in some form.
It’s the problem that the current generation of Germans face. How could their parents or their grandparents have allowed the holocaust into their community. How could this state organised extermination have grown up in their own community, which required many thousands of their people to be involved so that the work could be done. People look at their parents and grandparents and wonder. What could they have done to stop it? Why couldn’t they stop it? And they have to live with the fact that there are no simple answers. Evil is very real and its always with us. Its effects are played out daily in revolutions in African countries, the war continues in Iraq and Afghanistan. When the TV cameras interview the people on the streets, all they want is peace and a quiet life, the privileges we enjoy every day. What they want is no different to what we want and what we usually have. Yet it is denied them by the ongoing consequences of evil.
But people respond to the idea of evil in some surprising ways. Some have argued that evil is not a big problem, that with some social reform and a good education the problem of evil will go away. Well, I am not criticising education but you can’t make it solve all of society’s problems. That is unrealistic. What’s more, we now know that some of the worst perpetrators of evil were not suffering from a lack of education. Those men who took control of those passenger planes and flew them into the Twin Towers in New York were not only educated, they were middle class. In some ways they were just like us. In fact, humanity has failed all attempts to eradicate evil. World War I was not the war to end all wars. Education has not led to the end of evil but to a great sophistication of the methods of the terrorists.
Some people blame the existence of evil on God. Perhaps if God can be blamed for it, it absolves our responsibility. They argue that there can be no God if there is evil in the world. God is supposed to be all loving and all powerful. But because evil persists it must mean either God doesn’t love us otherwise he wouldn’t want this evil or God doesn’t have the power to get rid of it. So because evil exists there can be no all powerful, all loving God. But that argument is self-defeating because once you remove God from the scene, who will we blame for the ongoing presence of evil? It must be us. And we probably don’t feel comfortable with that.
But the history of 20 th century has taught us that evil is always with us and as we enter the 21 st century, as we look at the state of our world we can see that nothing has changed. In so many ways and in so many places things are not as they ought to be. The world is not as it ought to be and Jesus teaches in today’s gospel reading that we too are not as we ought to be. Then he gives us a list of what is wrong – evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. What amazes me is the fact that that list is now 2000 years old and there is nothing on the list that is out of date. Nothing we can point to and say, “Well, nobody does that anymore.” After 2000 years we can’t cross off greed, or deceit or immorality and declare “We never see that these days.” “We really got over that one.” We are not surprised by this list. It is not difficult to identify the list with people we know or people we know of. This list still trips up humanity. When we go wrong its usually in these areas.
Now I don’t mean we are as bad as we could be. Or each of us is guilty of what’s on the list. But it is a fair summary of where humanity fails to be truly human, to be humanity as it ought to be. On the other hand, we must remember the best of what people have been. Humanity seems to be able to achieve almost anything. With computers smaller than a pocket calculator the US put men on the moon. The 20 th century ironically has also been about the best of human achievement – the diseases that have been cured, the inventions that have been created, the technology we can enjoy can make life a rich and enjoyable experience. But what Jesus is doing is reminding us of the full extent of human behaviour. Its true we can be very, very good. But the sad fact is that we can also be very bad. And no matter how good we get we always carry that lead in our saddle bags.
As we look through that list we see nothing has changed in 2 millenia. That list is as relevant today as it ever was. And just looking at our world we know that humanity is not as it should be. And that’s the remarkable thing about us. We don’t look at the world and throw up our hands and say, “Well, that’s the way we are, we better get used to it.” Rather, we look at what’s wrong and we huger for a better day. Humanity is relentless in our attempts to build a better world in spite of our failures and weaknesses. It is not hard for us to recognize evil, to declare that things are not right, that for all the good in our world there is something that is still very bad.
The Bible divides the history of the world into three ages. There is the beginning where everything was right and good, when the world was as it should be. Perhaps that time has always stayed in our collective consciousness. We have never forgotten that time and so we compare our world as we experience it to what it once was. Intuitively, we long for a better day. So we live day by day in this present age looking forward to a future age when the world will be put right again when all things will be as they should be. This will be a world where theft and murder, adultery, greed, malice and deceit will have become irrelevant, out-of-date, meaningless. A world where there will be no more death or mourning, or crying or pain, a world where God is making everything new, a world where evil will be robbed of all power, releasing its fatal grip on humanity, and defeated and expelled for all time.
And so today, we baptise Christopher into this new hope.