“WHAT ABOUT EVIL?”
He was sixteen years old when his parents brought him into the hospital emergency room. He had not been eating, sleeping or talking for several days, and they didn’t know what to do. They were frightened because the older brother had taken his own life just last summer, and they feared it was going to happen again. Staff psychiatrist M. Scott Peck met first with the boy Adam. It was a struggle to get him to talk at all. Finally he tried asking Adam what he had gotten for Christmas the week before. Most everyone will talk about a gift they have received. But Adam still responded with just a word or two, mumbled with eyes and head lowered, his voice barely audible.
“A rifle,” he muttered.
“What?” responded the doctor.
“A rifle.” The boy repeated. “Is that what you asked for?” asked Scott.
“No.” said the boy. “I asked for a tennis racket, but they said they didn’t have the money, so they gave me my brother’s rifle.”
“Your brother’s rifle?”
“Yeh. It’s the one he used to shoot himself last summer. They gave it to me for Christmas.” Scott knew he could hardly believe what he had just heard and tried not to let his face show his outrage. “Let me get this straight. Your brother killed himself last summer with his own rifle, and now for Christmas your parents have given you the same rifle?”
“Yes sir,” he said, voice muffled, eyes lowered. “They said they couldn’t afford a tennis racket.”
“Adam, I have to be very direct with you. Are you thinking about using it to kill yourself?”
“Not too much,” he said. “Well sometimes.”
Following his interview with the boy, Scott met alone with his parents. “Why,” he asked, “did you give a depressed boy a rifle, when his own brother used it to kill himself?” The question made them angry. “We’re not made of money!” they retorted.
“Weren’t you worried that he, too, might try to kill himself?” They didn’t respond.
Scott left the room and returned to Adam. He told him that he would need to be hospitalized and treated for depression. He asked him if there was someone else in his family that he might like to live with. The boy brightened. “I think that Aunt Helen would have me.”
Scott called Aunt Helen right there and she immediately said yes, indicating that she wanted to visit Adam while he was hospitalized for treatment. I’m happy to say that young Adam did well. He grew up in Aunt Helen’s home and had less and less contact with his parents over the years.
M. Scott Peck tells this story near the beginning of a book entitled People of the Lie. In this book, he explores his understanding of human evil from several different perspectives. He explains that in his clinical judgment, he had to make a diagnostic decision to try to help the person who could accept help. He did not see any motivation for change in Adam’s parents, so he chose to help the boy and turn his back on the parents. While this choice may seem harsh, Scott Peck claims that people who are unaware of their own destructiveness are the most dangerous people.
In today’s Gospel readings from Matthew, Jesus both promises that we can have all that we need: “Ask, and it will be given you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you.” At the same time, he also warns that evil is a force which must be reckoned with when he teaches the disciples how to pray and says “rescue us from evil one.”
One of the strongest ideas of Puritan New England was the ideal of the church as the most perfect community possible on earth. Strict rules of admission for church membership were designed to exclude all but the purest and most faithful persons, to such an extent that the 17th century Puritan church is often referred to as the community of “visible saints”.
No one gained membership into the church without proving before the pastor or deacon that he or she was worthy of salvation. The only problem with this approach was that after the first generation of immigrants, it seemed that hardly anyone was truly worthy of membership and the early new world church would have died, had not the rules been softened.
Today, I suspect that the notion still lingers that while we realize that some people and ideas are evil, the church should be exempt from such difficulties.
This September 15th in
For years the media characterized Christopher Hightower, who was ultimately convicted of the three murders, as a Sunday school teacher at our local Congregational church. Occasionally they reminded us that he was also a soccer coach to his children’s team. And in the wake of this and many other wildly publicized incidents in the world, we find ourselves asking, “So what is the face of evil like? And how will we know it when we see it?”
Scripture teaches that the capacity for evil resides in every one of us. Paul pleads with the Colossian church members to be absolutely grounded in Jesus Christ as a sure antidote to being captive to this or that current theory of power and control. He reminds them that they are all dead in their own trespasses without their saving baptism in Christ through the cross.
Over thirty years ago, Dr. Carl Menninger published his book, “Whatever Happened to Sin?” charging our American culture with forgetting that we are all capable of harming one another and the world.
Jesus tells the story of the person who sees a flaw in another person, he calls it a speck in their eye, while failing to recognize the log in their own. Of course we know that Jesus loves to teach with images and exaggeration. Today psychological theory maintains that whenever we cannot tolerate looking at the most troubled places in our selves, we see that same fault in someone else. Thus the distraught parents in Scott Peck’s story cannot get beyond their own grief for their lost son to see and comfort the sadness in their one surviving son.
Our Puritan ancestors were terrified of evil. They wanted the church to be free of evil persons. They wanted the church to be safe from sin. In
Today, I do not see that we have learned very much. We lower the bar in naming children as criminals, seeming to create prisons and detention centers to house those we are so sure are unfit for our society. In every church I have served, I have known parishioners with adult children and grandchildren in prison. In many instances, it is a secret they rarely share. While many of us hear stories of “country club” prisons, some of us know from visits to prisons that prison experience is often degrading and destructive rather than corrective and life building. As a teacher and minister, I feel sure that we could build strong children with a sure commitment to early education and a determination that we will not give over our children to games of violence and self destruction. Every time we, as adults, seek out ways to solve our differences, we show a child that there is a better way.
Jesus always holds out a hand of generosity. When others shun and try to exclude a person, Jesus says no, let them come in. In the face of his own first century punishing, condemning, excluding culture, he says again and again, “Ask and it will be given, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you.” Always, the way of the cross is to build life. Always, the way of the cross is to include the outsider. Always, the way of the cross is to forgive the one who seems to us to be unforgivable. In the Lukan parallel to our passage from Matthew, Jesus’ final injunction is: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will God be able to give the Holy Spirit to anyone who asks?”
Some of you know that one of my own heroes is Fred Rogers who influenced millions of children on his show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” After my own children had graduated, Fred received an honorary doctorate and addressed the graduating class at
“WHAT ABOUT EVIL?”
Text: Matthew 6:7-15; 7:7-11
Rev. Kathleen S. Henry
Second Sunday after Pentecost
June 10, 2007
