As this is the first Sunday of the month we will be celebrating the sacrament of Communion.
This past summer folk were invited to suggest topics for sermons or sermon series. This week's topic comes from that box. The actual suggestion was "Is there a Devil? What is the Source of Evil?"
The Scripture Reading for the week is Genesis 3:1-10
The Sermon title is Is Evil Real?
Early Thoughts: Reading the news it seems like a ridiculous question doesn't it. Can one seriously question the reality of evil when just days ago people were gunned down at worship in a Pittsburgh Synagogue? Can we really ask if evil exists a week before we pause to remember those who dies in the largest wars of the 20th Century? Earlier this month I read the novel Indian Horse. Can we examine our own national history and even pretend there is a question that evil exists?
Which was sort of why I chose that as the title of the sermon. It is helpful to get the obvious answers out of the way first. Even if people would like to believe otherwise I think it is clear that there is a thing called evil in the world.
But how does it work? Where does it come from? Does it have a central personified essence? Are there people who are purely/simply evil and people who are never evil? Those are harder questions.
The passage we read this week is often seen as the place where evil enters our faith story. Which is why we are reading it. But I am pretty sure it does not answer those questions up above.
It is tempting to be able to set clear boundaries of evil vs good. to have a personalized character of evil (devil), to say these people are good and these people are bad. It would be nice to say "evil comes from X". Unfortunately life is rarely that cut and dried.
In the end I think much (maybe even most, possibly all) great fiction has, at its root, the idea of good battling evil. And in the best of them they have a sense of ambiguity. Someone, (I think it is Gandalf, might have been Elrond) tells Frodo that even Sauron was not evil in the beginning. When Harry Potter is worried he is turning evil his godfather Sirius tells him plainly that the world is not divided cleanly between good people and Death Eaters. The world of the story is about the fight between good and evil but the murkiness of the line keeps coming up.
Evil is in the world, I think, because we have free will and we have the freedom to set our own priorities. Sometimes those priorities mean we are willing to stomp on others (or let people stomp on other on our behalf) to get our way. And those things we call evil results. Evil exists because of things like fear, and jealousy, and insecurity, and hatred, and self-centeredness. I am not big on demons or a person named the Devil (Lucifer, Beelzebub, Old Scratch....). I think evil is a part of the world, a sign of the broken-ness of the world. But I also believe that in the end, as Julian of Norwich was wont to say, "all will be well". Evil will not have the final answer.
--Gord
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