God’s in His Heaven and All’s Wrong With the World
Given by James Covington on September 19th, 2004
Watching one more hurricane bear down on the southeastern end of the nation this week, reminded all of us that for all our advances in technology, we are still vulnerable to nature’s awesome power. I kept thinking of the child’s prayer: “My boat is so small, and the ocean is so large.”
But the news from Russia last week, the pictures that one journalist described as “adults carrying dead children from yet another site of collective human failure,” forced us all to confront a harsher truth; that of all God’s creatures, man is the cruelest. Only man, blessed with the ability to reason, is capable of reasoned hate. No matter how deluded or twisted or despairing that hate may be, in the mind of the perpetrator, it is reasoned.
And of course, this is not the only heinous incident of man’s inhumanity that we have witnessed in recent months and years not to mention in all of human history. The genocidal carnage taking place in Sudan, reminds us once again how cruel and malicious human beings can be. The terrorist carnage taking place around the world, including our own nation, assaults all the hopes and beliefs I have about the better nature of humankind. Samantha Power in her recent book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, graphically and hauntingly reminds us of the genocidal horrors that have occurred against Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Iraqi Kurds, Rwandan Tutsis, and Bosnians during the past century. She raises the equally haunting question: “What is our responsibility in the face of such evil?”
And I have not mentioned the shocking humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib and the grotesque beheading of innocent civilians in Iraq and thousands of civilians maimed and killed in warfare. I am reminded of Robert Burns’s famous observation: “Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.” So what is our responsibility? God is in his heaven, and all is wrong with the world. I much prefer the original of Robert Browning’s poetic sentiment: “God’s in His heaven, all is right with the world.” There are moments when looking out the window toward the heavens into the beauty of this creation that I can truly appreciate Browning’s poetic line, but they are rarer these days. Over lunch with a couple of dear friends recently, following a bleak conversation about the state of the world, it was my friend Dan who said sardonically, “And god’s in his heaven—all’s wrong with the world.”
Will Durant, the great historian, once said that, “barbarism, like the jungle, does not die out but only retreats behind the barriers that civilization has thrown up against it and waits there always to reclaim that to which civilization has temporarily laid claim. As civilized people, we can think of no cause that justifies the deliberate taking of innocent lives, whether they are in Russia, or Israel, or Iraq or Sudan or Bosnia or Palestine or Saudi Arabia or the United States. Indeed there may be legitimate grievances by some of those who commit such carnage, but never justifiable enough to commit murder. It must never be condoned or excused by any argument of relativity. Not in my book.
Humans devise many ideologies upon which they may stake their lives for significance and power and all of them are tainted with corruptions. And while many ideologies project evil upon others perceived as threatening or different, those ideologies that embrace death over life, are beyond corrupt—they are maliciously inhumane—some would say evil. And yet, humans must be careful in how they seek to overcome evil, even when it is real and not a projection, lest we create even more evil.
So we are seeing terrible forces of nature upon on continent, but we also see almost everyday now, something worse and even more dangerous: Man’s inhumanity to man. Durant argued that, “civilization is not imperishable. It must be relearned by every generation.” I believe this is a harsh truth we must never forget.
And so on this Sunday between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, I focus on the “sinfulness” of humanity and hopefully, bring the meaning of it down to our own small selves.
According to Jewish High Holy Day tradition, God takes out the Books of Life—a very thin book in which are inscribed all the evil people, an even slimmer volume for all the good people, and a much thicker volume for the rest of us. After reflection on our choices and repentance for sins, we are obliged to reconcile with God and neighbor,–atonement—or at-one-ment. Ultimately, we all need each other.
Sin is not a word some of us feel very comfortable with, because of its traditional connotation of original guilt and judgment. The fundamentalist idea that we are all born sinners doesn’t go down well with most of us liberals. We have always resisted the idea that babies come into the world with the taint of original sin. The idea of Original Sin appalls those of us who believe human nature to be good. Lately, however, human behavior as we witness it with horror does not support such optimism.
What we sometimes fail to realize is that every culture and every religion has some explanation for human foibles. Our own Ralph Waldo Emerson acknowledged that “There is a crack in everything God has made.” It has been suggested that “The only thing that stops God sending a second Flood is that the first one was useless.” Or as Mark Twain said, “Man was made at the end of the week, when God was tired.”
For the ancient Greeks, sin was ignorance. For the Buddhist, sin comes from attachment to the things of the world. Reinhold Niebuhr, author of Moral Man and Immoral Society, put it trenchantly: “Actually the view that men are ‘sinful’ is one of the best attested and empirically verified facts of human existence.”
In our more psychologically oriented age we have re-defined sin. Freud wrote of the triumph of the id over the Superego. Carol Rogers, in contrast to those who view self-love as the problem, posited self-the as the cause of our bad behavior. For theologian Paul Tillich sin is separation—a feeling of alienation from the Ground of Being and separation from both our neighbor and our deepest self.
I believe the concept of sin reminds us of our human finitude and our innate capacity to do harm. I believe heaven and hell are poetic concepts to describe good and evil on earth. My current understanding of human nature takes seriously our proclivity to think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think. Let us admit it: we can be so bound up in ourselves and our own notions of what is right and good, that we are hurtful to others. Let us also acknowledge that in our better moments we can exhibit gentleness toward our most troublesome neighbors and do daring deeds for justice.
I feel like the young man completing an application to a university. In reply to “List your personal strengths,” he wrote: “Sometimes I am trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.” Further down on the form he had to list his weaknesses. He wrote:
“Sometimes I am not trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, . . . . . .
Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn wrote: “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties, either, but right through every human heart.”
That is a very sobering statement, but I believe it to be a very true one. I read recently of a man looking for a good church to attend who entered one in which the congregation and the preacher were reading from their prayer book. They were saying, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.” The man dropped into a seat and signed with relief as he said to himself, “Thank goodness, I’ve found my crowd at last.”
I find it helpful to think of sin in terms of what have been called “ordinary vices.” Judith Shklar, in her book of the same title, acknowledges the traditional Seven Deadly Sins—pride, covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, sloth, but she also discusses the “ordinary vices” of cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal, misanthropy.
Cruelty is the worst vice for her, and for me. It is the willful infliction of pain upon another human being—physical or psychological—in order to put that person down, or annihilate, or exterminate for no other reason than being other or different. I equate this sort of cruelty, which surely we have seen enacted in those places mentioned at the beginning of my sermon, as evil itself. Such actions deserve the most piercing judgment, in my opinion, whether by humans or some divine source. I call it evil. You can call it something else, but the reality that cannot be debated, is humankind’s innate inhumanity.
But what about the lesser cruelties we inflict on our near neighbor? Inadvertently or intentionally, have we not hurt other human beings, including those close to us? As Anatole France once said: “It is difficult to be a saint in the midst of one’s family.”
Having said all of this, I want to say I absolutely don’t believe we are all born good or evil. We have the capacity to do either. Biologically we are wired to do either. We ultimately choose our behaviors. Obviously, social and familial circumstances are important in preparing children for becoming good and decent citizens. But given our natural egotism and instinct for survival, sin is bred in the human bone and sometimes that sin becomes truly malevolent and yes, evil.
And so what is the answer to our human conundrum—this grim, dark side of human nature? In the Jewish tradition, we seek atonement, by repentance of our sins. The societal levels of achieving atonement, I leave to another time. But on a personal level, unceasingly we must humbly acknowledge the vices to which we succumb. My favorite definition of sin derives from the ancient Hebrew translation of the word as “missing the mark,” a metaphor derived from archery. Most of us most of the time try to avoid cruelty; we try to be kind; most of us most of the time attempt to be civil; most of us mot of the time endeavor to love our neighbors. All of us some of the time “miss the mark.”
We are delicately balanced, precariously perched on the moral-see-saw between cruelty and gentleness. Some of us some of the time engage in actions which we know will hurt others—we even intend to hurt others. Here we are not even striving to be gentle human beings; we cross the line between good and evil that runs through us. It happens to the best of us some of the time. The secret is to recognize when we yield to those destructive impulses that lurk in all of us, ask for forgiveness, and to cross over once more into the zone of gentleness.
That’s when atonement happens. That’s when we realize once more that we ultimately all one. At-one-ment with each other. Atonement happens when we realize that we have so much more in common than could ever possibly divide us. Atonement happens when we realize that we all want and need love and security and freedom and acceptance. We need others’ forgiveness and understanding. All of us do. We ache in the same way. We bleed in the same way. At times, we all feel awkward and unworthy and inadequate. And we all fail at times to hearken to the better angels of our nature.
According to Forest Church, this is the centerpiece of theological universalism. To whatever extent we primarily identify with creed or nation, with race or gender, with school or political party, we betray our common humanity and forfeit promise of atonement. Instead, we opt for faction and division, we opt for the logic of retribution and judgment, the logic of hate. In short, we live in a state not of grace, but of sin. Our salvation comes when we can accept that we are all one, all flawed, all born out of mystery and fated to die, the same sun setting on each of our horizons. When we can accept this final truth and live accordingly, we are atoned. And in atonement, we save ourselves from ourselves for the greater good. Then, perhaps, speaking poetically at least, God will be in his heaven, and all will be well in the world.