{"id":498,"date":"2012-04-04T11:00:44","date_gmt":"2012-04-04T16:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=498"},"modified":"2019-12-03T12:45:09","modified_gmt":"2019-12-03T17:45:09","slug":"deliver-us-from-evil-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2012\/04\/04\/deliver-us-from-evil-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Deliver Us From Evil"},"content":{"rendered":"

John 13:31-35<\/a><\/p>\n

Joan Humphrey grew up on a farm in Kansas.\u00a0 She was born, the third of four children, to Donna and Jake Humphrey.\u00a0 The Humphrey farm of 480 acres, near Woodlawn Kansas, raised cattle and crops.\u00a0 Joan attended a one room school there until the eighth grade.\u00a0 She was a cheerleader at Sabetha High School.\u00a0 She also was an officer in her school\u2019s chapter of \u2018Future Homemakers of America\u2019.\u00a0 She graduated second in her class.\u00a0 A class of 48.\u00a0 Here is the caption under her yearbook picture:\u00a0 \u201ckeen sense, common sense, no room for nonsense\u201d. *<\/p>\n

Joan then attended Wheaton College, because her pastor was a graduate.\u00a0 Later on, she entered law school at Northwestern University.\u00a0 Her classmates there teased her about her slow prairie speech.\u00a0 They also envied her lack of stress over exams.\u00a0 In law school she met a boy named Michael.\u00a0 They worked summer jobs on behalf of the poor:\u00a0 disability benefits, evictions, food stamps.<\/p>\n

Joan and Michael were married in 1975.\u00a0 He wore a white suit.\u00a0 She wore daisies in her hair, and a white Moroccan caftan.<\/p>\n

Joan and Michael then began to raise their own family of four daughters.\u00a0 Every morning, he brewed coffee.\u00a0 He pre-heated her cup with boiling water, filled it with coffee, and carried it to the bed where together they could talk about the day to come.<\/p>\n

Joan\u2019s life had two paradigms, professional woman and devoted mother.\u00a0 She cooked dinner every night.\u00a0 She established a daycare center in the courthouse where she worked.\u00a0 She packed lunches for four daughters, making sure to use Tropicana orange juice to limit the girls\u2019 sugar intake.\u00a0 The newspaper quoted Joan as saying, \u201cI wanted my family to be a family that shared their food and the mom could cook like my mom could cook.\u201d*<\/p>\n

Joan\u2019s temperament and industry brought her, in the year 2000, to the federal bench.\u00a0 She became a judge in the US District Court in Chicago.\u00a0 It was the culmination of a fine career, a position that had eluded her on other occasions.\u00a0 Then in 2002, one of her rulings angered white supremacists.\u00a0 One of these was convicted of plotting to have her killed.\u00a0 They did not succeed.\u00a0\u00a0 But on February 28, 2005, Joan\u2019s husband Michael and her mother, both on crutches, were murdered.\u00a0 They were both shot in the head and chest with .22 caliber bullets.*<\/p>\n

Holy Week, every year, brings us to the precipice of a most disturbing question.\u00a0 At some point, we grow up or wake up enough to ask the question that Joan\u2019s daughter Meg asked her last week.\u00a0 \u201cMom, why is the world so evil?\u201d * Holy Week\u2014with its fleeting laud and honor, its temple conflict, its night of betrayal, its day of trial, its hour of tragedy, and its subsequent, lasting silence\u2014brings us right to this matter of evil. Why?\u00a0 Why Mom?\u00a0 Why is the world so shot through with evil\u2014sin, death, the threat of meaninglessness?<\/p>\n

After 250 of his students died in a plane crash near Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, Chancellor Melvin Eggers brought the question, via a newspaper interview, to his religious leadership at Syracuse University\u2019s Hendricks Chapel.\u00a0 I will never forget his interview, the pain of it, the grief in it, the troubled angst of it, which never left him over the few remaining years of his life.<\/p>\n

After 2500 died on 9\/11, that next Friday, hundreds of people filled this sanctuary, without invitation or liturgical preparation.\u00a0 Here they were, truly hunting for the language and heart with which to assess the same question.\u00a0 What in the world is wrong with this world?<\/p>\n

After 250,000 were lost in December on the day after Christmas, 2004, out of a numbed and fogged stupor, there has gradually emerged a serious question, a question about bearing, perspective, and, ultimately, about faith.\u00a0 What kind of world is this?\u00a0 Who is the God who has breathed life into such a place?\u00a0 \u201cMom, why is the world so evil?\u201d<\/p>\n

The same reckoning can arrive in a far more cotidian fashion.\u00a0\u00a0 One middle aged morning in the winter you may wake up to list the smaller showers of estrangement that meet us every day, long before we ever are drenched in the great thunderstorm of evil:<\/p>\n

Premature <\/em>resignation<\/p>\n

Partial <\/em>self-awareness<\/p>\n

Indirect <\/em>criticism<\/p>\n

Cold <\/em>honesty<\/p>\n

Inflated <\/em>responsibility<\/p>\n

Excessive <\/em>enjoyment<\/p>\n

Needless <\/em>worry<\/p>\n

Wasted <\/em>time<\/p>\n

Careless <\/em>haste<\/p>\n

Misguided <\/em>loyalty<\/p>\n

Postponed <\/em>grief<\/p>\n

Avoided <\/em>maturation<\/p>\n

Partial <\/em>planning<\/p>\n

Unconscious <\/em>entitlement<\/p>\n

Pointless <\/em>earning<\/p>\n

Self-serving <\/em>posture<\/p>\n

Thankless<\/em> reception<\/p>\n

You meet them every day\u2026<\/p>\n

In our time, people of conscience are truly alive, suddenly and earnestly alive, to this question, which is, again, the whole content of Holy Week.\u00a0 It is a question that, in the main, is a matter of grief, trouble, and loss.\u00a0 Which is, of course, the whole content of the church\u2019s experience and memory of Holy Week.\u00a0 It is a matter of deep, abiding grief to face the gone-wrongness in life.\u00a0 And, while we have tried, in our churches, to feed the hunger in this question, to slake the thirst in this question, to provide compelling responses to this question, to a great degree, across the land, we have failed.\u00a0 And failure is the whole content of Holy Week.\u00a0 It is a grief to this preacher that our pulpits, including this one, have thus far failed to meet the grief and loss and especially fear that pervade our time like a mist in London along Aldersgate Street, like an invisible unholy ghost,\u00a0 just on the edge of our awareness.\u00a0 Like a dawn that just will not come.<\/p>\n

We have not been able robustly and preparedly and piercingly to remember, to call to mind our biblical, Christian, tragic sense of life, when most we have needed it.\u00a0 To hear Job on the ash heap:\u00a0 \u201cWhat is my crime?\u201d; and Second Isaiah: \u201cA man of sorrow, acquainted with grief\u201d; and Jeremiah\u2019s lamentations;\u00a0 \u201call the rivers run to the sea\u201d;\u00a0 and the tears of the David, \u201call flesh is grass\u201d; to evoke Ecclesiastes, speaking of 9:11, \u201cthe race is not always to the swift\u2026.but time and chance happen to them all\u201d;\u00a0 and the affliction of Paul, \u201cpersecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed\u201d; and best of all Jesus himself,\u00a0 \u201cif it be thy will, let this cup pass from me\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 You cannot read all of Barbara Brown Taylor on Job the night of 9\/11.\u00a0 It has to be read ahead.\u00a0 You cannot do all of an STH course on Jeremiah the night after Tsunami.\u00a0 It has to be read ahead.\u00a0 You cannot absorb all that Lou Martyn says about Galatians, the afternoon of Lockerbie.\u00a0 It has to be read earlier.\u00a0 In wrestling we used to make weight, trying to lose 5 pounds in two hours by jogging in sweatsuits through the school showers.\u00a0 Bodily life, Christian life, does not easily allow such last minute maneuvers.<\/p>\n

This morning, we try again:<\/p>\n

Jesus meets us today along this very road of tragedy in life: of evil, grief, loss, estrangement, and failure.\u00a0 His church, this church, lives still as a community that knows in its bones how to face evil with honesty, grief with grace, failure with faith, and death with dignity.\u00a0 H R Niebuhr warned his generation to suspect the false sense that somehow a \u201cGod without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 Oddly, it is the starkness of the cross, the coarseness of Jesus\u2019 death, the tremendous sense of loss and failure and grief of Holy Week (so boldly evoked in our youth production last weekend) that is your best gift to a frightened world.\u00a0 His cross truly names the tragedy of evil.\u00a0 His cross permanently enfolds that tragedy in the larger goodness of life and the lasting goodness of God.\u00a0 His cross, especially, of course, in John, radiates a thin measure of hope, that there is life beyond brokenness.\u00a0 In our passage today this is carried on the word \u201cglory\u201d and the dismissive treatment of resurrection\u2014of Lazarus, the only reason for the quisling gathering of the counterfeit parade.<\/p>\n

Remember your baptism and confirmation.<\/p>\n

The world is good, the good handiwork of a divine goodness that passes all understanding and endures forever.<\/p>\n

Yet, the world is just not right, but somehow off track, wrongheaded, with something \u2018loose\u2019 rattling around in side it\u2014the shadow of sin, the specter of evil, the sorrow of death.<\/p>\n

We have to face both and to pray for deliverance from the latter to the former.\u00a0 So we teach our children to say both of these phrases:\u00a0 Hallowed be thy name\u2026and\u2026Deliver us from evil.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Robert McAfee Brown said so memorably (how I miss his voice):\u00a0 \u201cFriends, this is God\u2019s world, but it is a crummy world, and we have to live with both realities\u201d.<\/p>\n

To Meg\u2019s question \u201cWhy?\u201d\u00a0 I have no completely finished, final answer for you.\u00a0 But the good news is that you have an answer for me.<\/em> And if you think I do not see it you are mistaken.\u00a0 And if you think I do not appreciate or admire it you are mistaken.\u00a0 And if you think I do not respect it you are mistaken.\u00a0 You live your answer by choosing the cruciform path of faith.\u00a0 You meet evil with honesty, grief with grace, failure with faith, and death with dignity.\u00a0 You carry yourselves in belief.\u00a0 You remember that it is not the passion of Christ that defines the Person of Christ, but the Person that defines the passion.\u00a0 You remember that it is not the suffering that bears the meaning, but the meaning that bears the suffering\u2026that it is not the cross that carries the love but the love that carries the cross\u2026that it is not crucifixion that encompasses salvation, but salvation that encompasses even the tragedy of crucifixion\u2026 and that it is not the long sentence of Holy week, with all its phrases, dependent clauses and semi-colons that completes the gospel, but it is the punctuation to come in seven days, the last mark of the week to come in 168 hours, whether it be the exclamation point of Peter, the full stop period of Paul or the question mark of Mary\u2014Easter defines Holy Week, and not the other way around.\u00a0 The resurrection follows but not replace the cross, for sure.\u00a0 But the cross precedes but does not overshadow the resurrection.\u00a0 It is Life that has the last word and there is a God to whom we may pray, in the assurance of being heard:\u00a0 Deliver us from evil\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Maybe that is why Joan Humphrey\u2014you may know her by her married name, Joan Humphrey Lefkow\u2014she like Dorothy Gale of the Kansas farm, she like Billy Graham of Wheaton College, she like Ernest Fremont Tittle of Northwestern University, she like your own mother in kitchen and coffee and packed lunch, answered her daughter\u2019s question (sursum corda!) in faithful witness (hear the Gospel!) to tragedy and goodness and hope.<\/p>\n

I confess that I read her statement, weeping, in the middle of an utterly boring Board meeting, and was for several moments unsure of where I was, or whether these few sentences were read from the printed page as human comments, or were resounding in the mind and heart as divine utterance.\u00a0 Which is this voice?\u00a0 Human or Divine?\u00a0 You be the judge.<\/p>\n

Joan says to her daughter, and God says to us:<\/p>\n

I\u00a0 am so sad\u2026It is a human tragedy\u2026Honey, most people are good, most people would not think of doing this\u2026Remember the sermon years ago at the Episcopal Church in Evanston, where you girls sang in the choir and I made sandwiches for the homeless once a month\u2026The priest said, \u2018Some things are just broken\u2026they\u2019re broken\u2026just broken\u2026They\u2019re broken and you go on from there\u2026Don\u2019t think you can repair them but get up and go on from there\u2019\u2026But whoever did this, I want to look them in the eye and say\u2026How could you?…How could you do that to me and my family?\u201d*<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

*New York Times, 3\/10\/05, pps. A1, 20<\/p>\n

~The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill<\/em><\/p>\n

Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John 13:31-35 Joan Humphrey grew up on a farm in Kansas.\u00a0 She was born, the third of four children, to Donna and Jake Humphrey.\u00a0 The Humphrey farm of 480 acres, near Woodlawn Kansas, raised cattle and crops.\u00a0 Joan attended a one room school there until the eighth grade.\u00a0 She was a cheerleader at Sabetha High […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2558,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions\/2558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}