The Place of Evil

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

03.15.15; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Genesis 3:1-8

LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:

“Deliver us from evil,” we pray, and we mean it.  

But what is it we mean, exactly?  Just naming what is good and evil is something of a challenge these days.  What is good?  What is evil?  We are told that such things are culturally mediated, that what is good for one person may be evil for the next.  Who is to say what is good and what is bad?  Really, what does that even mean?

Back when I was a pup, I thought I knew what evil was.  Evil was monsters and the monstrous.  I was a voracious reader, the kind of lad who gets sent to the principal’s office for reading in class.  For a couple of years, round about third grade, when every time we’d line up single file and go marching in an increasingly chaotic column to the little library at Timberlane Elementary School, I’d wander out with two or three books.  Every one of those books would have a title like “Twenty Tales of Terror” or “Seven Spinetingling Stories” or “Five More Reasons Your Child Won’t Be Sleeping Tonight.”

As indeed I often did not.  Having read and read and read, I’d lie there drawn up tight under the impenetrable protective shield of my race car covers and my Snoopy sheets, listening to every last creak and groan of our nondescript suburban home, to the faint rushing of pipes, to the wind sussurating through the trees.

Every sound meant the slime was there, that formless dark devouring monster I’d read about in a short story creatively titled, “The Slime.”  It had oozed from depths of the sea after a nuclear test, as all good monsters from the 1950s and 60s did, where it had moved through the darkness of night to absorb hobos by campfires and unwitting children.  It could be there, bubbling and undulating hungrily in my closet, waiting to engulf and digest me.  Or it could be under my bed, waiting for the deep darkness of night and mindlessly hoping I wouldn’t notice how derivative that short story was of the Blob.  I would lie there and tremble until I trembled off to sleep.

When I was in fourth grade, we moved to England.  There, thousands of miles away in a new home, I would recall a Victorian-era story I’d read in one of those books, a tale of bloodcurdling horror, in which one never actually saw the terror, but only the poor souls who died from sheer fright.  It was set in a London suburb, and told in a way that seemed to insinuate that the story could possibly have been true, perhaps, and there I was, with my race car covers and Peanuts sheets, now living in a London suburb in the very city where that ancient evil manifested itself.  I would lie there, fearing evil, wondering how I might ward it away.

That fear of evil, of monstrous things?  It’s not quite the same in me now.  I do not fear beasties and creepy crawlies and things that go bump in the night.  I can read through a scary tale and be unphased, or watch a horror film and only very infrequently squinch my eyes closed and plug my ears to keep from getting too riled up.  Make-believe evil and monsters don’t really phase me.

As I’ve moved into adulthood, it’s the existence of evil in the world that I struggle with, the terrible things and monsters that move about in the light of day in our world.  The wars and violence that plague our species.  The way we manage somehow to have people starving to death in the midst of abundance.  The ease with which we inflict sorrows on each other, and hurts on each other.  Evil is something we wrestle with, struggle to come to terms with, something human beings have always wondered at.  Why does this exist?  Why does God let this happen?  How can we keep it far away from us?

That’s the purpose of the story we heard a snippet from this morning, this earthy, meaty, fascinating tale about why it is things are the way they are.  This is the second of two completely different tales of the act of creation from the book of Genesis.   The first is the the newer of the two, a back-and-forth song of seven days and creation and goodness, which scholars believe may have been sung or chanted by priests in the ancient temple.  It come from what’s called the Priestly tradition.

But the other story is older and earthier, the kind of tale that would be spun out in the flickering light of a campfire, the tents circled at night, as the wise one is asked: “Why is everything so messed up?  Why do bad things happen in the world?”

And so, remembering the story that had been told for generations, they would take a quaff from the passed wineskin, clear their throat, and start in.  In the day that the I AM THAT I AM created the heavens and the earth, they would begin, using that ancient Hebrew name for God.  From that name, scholars can link this to what is called the Yahwist tradition.  It’s more ancient than the priestly stories, and the relationship it reflects with the God of Israel goes back to a primal time.

The answer, told in the earthy cadences of an ancient wisdom story, revolves around a garden, the man, the woman, the snake, and the fruit of a tree that must not be consumed.

It is there at the center of the perfect garden, and it’s the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

This is not, not, not, the tree of knowledge.  This is an important thing to grasp.  It is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, where up until this point, everything that the man and the woman have known has been good.

By taking that bite, they’re not deepening their understanding of what it means to live graciously with one another, or in harmony with the garden.  They are not growing in their understanding of what their world truly is.

They are tasting what it means to lose sight of their purpose, which is to be helpmates and supports and companions to one another.

That fruit does not open their eyes more deeply to the world.  All it taught them was what it means to be ashamed, to hide from their Creator, and to blame one another.  What is the first thing the man and woman do, upon having their eyes opened up?  They are open to social shame, to hiding the truth of who they are away.  What they know is separation and defensiveness, fear and anxiety.

From that place, they choose to pass blame to one another, which we can read in the very next verses.  When asked, “Did you eat,” the man does not say, “Yes I did, I knew better, and I wish I had not.”  He says, “It was her fault.  She made me do it.”   When asked, did you eat, the woman does not say, “Yes, and I am so sorry because this is kind of terrible now.”  She says, “The snake made me do it.”  We don’t hear what the serpent says, but it might have been, “Everything I said was technically true.  Technically.  What’s wrong with telling the truth?”

So where, in this story, is the evil that Jesus asks us to pray to be delivered from?   Where, in the swirl of this broken world, is that evil we’d be delivered from?

It is not my mortality, not my small and fragile being.  That’s just a part of my reality, which can be neither escaped or denied.  It is my nature, as a creature of earth, as a creature of dust and ashes.

And while I don’t particularly want brokenness around me, the sweeping darkness of war and famine and illness that moves like a plague of locusts through so much of the world?  That is not the evil I fear most.

I do not pray, “Deliver me from it.”  I am not praying, “Deliver me from them.”

I am praying, “Deliver me from the shadow of my own soul.”  The evil I want to be most delivered from is the evil that has laid down root in my own soul, in my own self, body and spirit.  I fear that thing that tears me from my vocation, those parts of me that turn me from the task of living out Christ’s grace and the heart of Christ’s compassion.

And when I pray, and offer up that call for deliverance, that’s where I most pray.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.