EVIL UNMASKED

September 11, 2005

Texts – Psalm 103: 6 - 8

Galatians 3: 26-28

            Are you thinking about what happened four years ago today?  I confess I am.  I’ve been thinking about it all week.  It’s the weather that has reminded me.  Clear, beautiful, sun-lit September skies . . . that’s what I remember most about that Tuesday morning when we watched in horror as jetliners slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.  Was it really just four years ago?  Part of me feels like it must have happened in another life time, but another part of me still feels like it was only yesterday.

            “Surreal, unreal, shocking, mind-numbing, unbelievable” . . . those are the words that came to my mind on that day.  I’m sure you have your own memories of it.  That afternoon I sat down to compose a meditation to share at the interfaith community worship service we held at the Unitarian Universalist church that evening.  Some of you were there.  “After the terrible events of this day,” I wrote,

            “we know – some for the very first time and for some of us it’s something we’ve known for a very long time . . . but we all know now the reality and power of evil.  You can’t wish it away.  You can’t close your eyes and pretend that because you don’t see it that therefore it does not exist.  It is as real as that airliner sailing through a bright sunlit sky into a building filled with innocent people.  But make no mistake . . .”

I went on,

            “That is not its only face.  It is also as real as those thousands upon thousands of faces we’ve seen on our television screens over the years . . . faces that have no names that we know . . . faces of men and women and children suffering from malnutrition and racial hatred and poverty and injustice.  Do not I beg you give your face or your name to this evil.”

            That’s what the date “September 11^th” has come to mean for me – the unmasking of the face of evil.  The events of the last two weeks in New Orleans and the gulf coast of Mississippi have added weight to that imagery.

            It’s been excruciating to watch, hasn’t it?  The terrible devastation wrought by the storm, the looting, people shooting at rescue workers, our government’s painfully slow and inadequate response, people dying in front of our eyes outside the Superdome.  One commentator wrote that it “rubs our noses in so much that's wrong in our country.”

            My son calls New Orleans home.  He and his girlfriend evacuated Sunday afternoon, hitching

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a ride with friends who were headed to Houston.  Thank God they got out in time.  But thousands upon thousands did not get out – many of them simply because they were too poor.  Indeed, it is hard to escape the conclusion that they were and are so desperately poor that they were deliberately left behind by our society – shut up in housing projects and hideous poverty, and then left behind by local and federal officials who failed to come up with an evacuation plan for people too poor and isolated to leave on their own.

            Is it just coincidence that the overwhelming majority of those I’m talking about are black?  You tell me.  I think Howard Dean is right when he says – “We must come to terms with the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a deadly role in who survived and who did not.” [Burlington Free Press, September 8, 2005, p. 11A]  “This crisis is going to be with us for a long time,” columnist Joan Walsh writes, “because it’s been coming for a long time – we’re going to have to face issues of race, poverty and civil rights we’ve long chosen to ignore.”  [“Flushing Out the Ugly Truth” by Joan Walsh, salon.com, September 1, 2005]

            Unmasking the face of evil – that’s what September 11^th in this country needs to stand for, whether it’s in 2001 or 2005.   It is evil when religious fanatics use hijacked airliners to murder thousands of innocent people, but it is also evil when incipient cultural and societal racism condemns thousands of innocent people to death.  It is not just that the destruction visited upon the southern coast by Hurricane Katrina was “unprecedented.”  It is not just that “mistakes were made.”  It is, rather, that our oh so human community is and long has been blighted by the unmistakable stain of willful poverty, bigoted racism, and unconscionable injustice . . . by evil, in other words. 

“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil . . .” we pray.  “Deliver us” . . . it means both “protect us from evil’s terrible wrath in this world” and it means “keep us free from evil’s seductive lure which leads human beings to become unwitting instruments of suffering and destruction.” 

“In Christ Jesus you are all sons and daughters of God,” Paul says in our New Testament lesson.  “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” [Galatians 3: 26-28]  That is the key, he says, to being “delivered from evil.”  It is the answer to our prayer, and it is the answer to this day.  It is the answer to willful poverty, to bigoted racism, and to unconscionable injustice.  What do I mean?

            Evil begins with, and is fundamentally dependent on, the separation of human beings into groups and classes, tribes and clans, which are absolutely unrelated to one another.  Paul names three from his own time – Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, male and female.  Everything in Paul’s world revolved around them – the economy certainly did, societal norms clearly did, religious life undeniably did.  “You are not like them,” the culture whispered.  “You have nothing in common with them ....  They are not human in the same way you are.  They are not deserving of the same things you are.  You may use them, or abuse them ....  You may ignore them or manipulate them.  It doesn’t matter.  You are different and special and entitled.  You are like God.”

            That is the voice of evil.  It is the voice Adam and Eve heard in the Garden of Eden.  “Did God say you may not eat of the fruit of the tree of good and evil?” the serpent whispered.  “Surely not, for God knows . . .  You will not die ...  Indeed, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.” [Genesis 3: 1-5]  That’s pretty special.  It was then.  It is now.  Now we delight in our “specialness,” our “uniqueness,” and we are heavily invested (aren’t we?) in the categories we use to separate ourselves from one another.  Oh it’s no longer Jew and Greek, or slave and free, but “male and female” still works, and so do black and white, Christian and non-Christian, Americans and foreign aliens. 

            Have you been paying attention to the uproar around the word “refugee” this week?  Because the vast majority of those displaced by the hurricane are African Americans, many feel that to label them “refugees” is racist.  “It is racist to call American citizens refugees,” Jesse Jackson said last Monday.  President Bush seems to agree with him.  “The people we are talking about are not refugees,” he said on Tuesday; “they are Americans and they need the help and love and compassion of our fellow citizens.” [“Use of Word ‘Refugee’ Stirs Debate,” Jocelyn Noveck, AP, September 6, 2005]  “Americans, be they black or white,” both men seem to be saying, “are not ‘refugees,’ only foreigners are . . . only aliens are.”  I wonder how that feels to non-Americans of any nationality?

“In Christ Jesus you are all sons and daughters of God,” Paul says.  “In Christ” – which is to say, in the eyes of Christ . . . in the spirit of Christ . . . in communion with Christ – these categories so important to us mean nothing.  “You are all sons and daughters of God” – Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female ... which is to say, black and white and brown and yellow, American or Iraqi, Iranian or Canadian ... all of you “are sons and daughters of God.”  And that means, you are all one.

            The reality and power of evil are very great.  Make no mistake.  That was the lesson of September 11, 2001; it is the lesson I hear being repeated again on September 11, 2005.  We cannot wish it away.  We cannot close our eyes and pretend that because we don’t see it that therefore it does not exist.  It is as real as jetliners sailing through bright sun-lit skies into skyscrapers.  It is as real as a Superdome filled to overflowing with African-American citizens left behind in a dying city.  In both we see evil unmasked.

            That is why it is so important that we worship together today as members of the First Congregational Church and the New Alpha Missionary Baptist Church.  For over fifteen years we’ve shared the same building for our congregational lives.  It has not always been easy.  The world tells us that we have nothing in common.  You are predominantly black; we are predominantly white.  You are considered conservative and evangelical; we are called ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ (we like that word better!).  The world is wrong.  In Christ Jesus, we are all one . . . we are sons and daughters of God.  Let us together say – Oh God, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.   Amen.