Making the Best of the Bad

The scriptures referred to are Romans 8:12-25 and Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43.

Director Howard Hawks defined a good movie as one that has 3 good scenes and no bad scenes. Which means that Casablanca is one of the great movies because not only does it have no bad scenes, it has more than 3 good scenes. It also has great stars, a great story and a cornucopia of good, quotable lines. One of my favorites takes place when the Nazis decide to close Rick's establishment and tell Captain Renault to make it happen. When Rick asks, “How can you close me up? On what grounds?” Renault replies, “I'm shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” And just then a croupier walks up to the captain and says, “Your winnings, sir.”

The point is that the corrupt official is not really shocked to find out about the gambling, nor should he be. That's the kind of place that Rick's Cafe Americain is. And that line always comes to mind whenever people express shock that corporations put profits and dividends before people or that people who make or enforce the law don't always follow the law themselves or that politicians who are supposed to represent everyone actually favor their friends and those who contribute to their campaigns. Well, duh! As Lord Acton pointed out, power corrupts.

I just read a short story where it turns out someone is using magic to siphon the life force off of a innocent magical creature. And is he using this magical power to conquer the world? No. He is using it to fight his baldness and grow hair! I laughed but then I thought, yeah, I could see that happening if magic were real. It's a good thing we don't have the power to alter reality that way because even those who are not megalomaniacs would be using magic for petty things, like altering their tax bills or appearing handsomer on dates or giving the guy who just passed you on US-1 car trouble. And justifying it by saying that they deserved it.

As it is, people abuse their earthly powers. One of the things I learned on the HBO documentary series I'll be Gone in the Dark was that the Golden State Killer may have been able to avoid capture in the 1980s for reasons I never would have guessed. When this criminal changed his base of operations from the Sacramento area to Santa Barbara and his crimes escalated from rape to murder, he did not change his very recognizable M.O. But, a former detective says, because Santa Barbara was the home to rich and powerful and famous people, the sheriff had an agreement with the local board of realtors not to publicize crimes like burglary and rape because property values might go down! So potential victims were not warned nor were the detectives in his old hunting ground made aware of his new outrages. Eventually this criminal got away with more than 100 burglaries, more than 50 rapes and at least 13 murders. But at least resale values stayed high.

Bad behavior by the powerful is not new. After the release of the musical Hamilton on streaming services people got upset that more attention was not given to the fact that many of our founding fathers were slaveowners. Writer/performer Lin-Manuel Miranda has said the criticism has validity, though the subject was brought up in the play a number of times. To be fair, Hamilton is trying to cram the entire life of an amazing man into 2 ½ hours and I, for one, was surprised by how much it did cover. The musical 1776 does highlight the problem of slavery in the colonial US rather powerfully. In fact in the chilling song, “Molasses to Rum to Slaves” the Northern colonies are explicitly implicated in the slave trade for which they condemn the South. Hopefully, these plays will send people to books on the history of slavery that can set the issue out in the detail it demands.

Nor is the church immune from corruption. As I said in a recent sermon, sociologist Rodney Stark speaks of 2 churches: the church of piety and the church of power. There was probably very little corruption in the church when it was illegal and persecuted. The benefit/risk ratio was way off in worldly terms. But then Constantine made Christianity legal and the beneficiary of his favor. And later Theodosius made it the only legal religion in the Roman empire. Given that much power, corruption of the church was inevitable. And this set up what Stark sees: a conflict between the those who are in the church for what it does for them and those who are part of it because of what it does for all people, between those who worship power and those who worship the God who is love.

But why does God tolerate evil in the church, or for that matter in the world? Why doesn't he just eliminate it? In today's gospel Jesus gives us one reason. In the parable of the weeds and the wheat, a man plants good seed and an enemy then plants bad seed. When the workers ask the one who sowed the seed if they should pull out the weeds, the sower says, “No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.” In other words, the world is so interdependent that it would be impossible to destroy bad people without there being collateral damage to the good people.

Let's says God decides to strike dead every slave owner among the founding fathers. There goes Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence. There goes George Washington who lead the Continental Army. There goes James Madison, who was pivotal in the drafting of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And there goes Benjamin Franklin, who owned slaves up till 1781! Eventually Franklin came to change his position, divest himself of slaves and became the president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. He even signed a petition to the First Federal Congress calling for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade. But if cancel culture had existed in 1776, there never would have been an independent nation that declared all men were created equal and had rights, and which has been slowly and imperfectly trying to make that ideal a reality. We're still not there. But we wouldn't even be close if we insisted that first the people involved had to be free from all sin.

No one meets that standard. Your grandparents were not perfect. If God decided to eliminate them, you wouldn't be here. And if he waited till they had your parents before taking them out, your parents would have been orphans. But your parents weren't perfect either. Neither are you. We are all sinners. Do we really want God to start wiping out people not completely good? I remember the X-Files episode where Mulder finds a genie and for his wish he asks for world peace. He finds an earth emptied of all human beings.

Ok, maybe God shouldn't get rid of us everyday sinners but what about the really bad ones? Like Adolph Hitler? The British did have plans to assassinate him. The logistics would have been difficult but the real reason they mothballed Operation Foxley was this: while Hitler may have been a political genius, he was a military moron. He had good generals but as the war turned against the Third Reich, Hitler was vetoing their suggestions and dictating how they should fight. And the British realized that they were much more likely to win the war should Hitler stay in charge. Take him out and someone more capable might be directing the German military. So rather than weed out Hitler, it made more sense to let him continue to lose the war to them.

Also smiting sinners right away makes nonsense of any free will we have. Does God bump us off before we do a bad thing? That smacks of the Pre-Crime police in the Tom Cruise film Minority Report, where people are arrested before committing the crimes they are predicted to be about to do. Is it fair to punish people for things they haven't actually done?

Or maybe God kills the person right after they did something bad. That would pretty much stop people from not only doing wrong but also from doing anything they fear might turn out to be wrong. Moral courage would evaporate, especially in ambiguous situations. If I think someone is about to do something bad, do I try to stop them? If I'm wrong I might be punished. So it might be best for me to let them do what they are going to do and let them take the punishment if it is wrong. But then would I get punished for the sin of doing nothing to stop them? A situation like that generates only anxiety and moral paralysis, not goodness.

And besides sparing good folks from the collateral damage of obliterating the bad, maybe another reason God is holding back judgment is that he wants us to learn to do good in bad situations. C.S. Lewis calls this complex goodness. Certain forms of goodness can only be learned in the presence of evil. Mercy, forgiveness, healing and certain forms of understanding others are species of goodness that are responses to evil. In the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy a Coke bottle is discovered by African bushmen. They have never seen anything like it. They find it is useful in so many ways, like mashing vegetables and making circles and even for making music. But it is unique and soon they are fighting over it. One person hits another with it and so they conclude that the bottle is evil. The movie then follows the quest of one bushman to dispose of it. But there is another thing they could do. They could learn to share it. But rather than learn this complex form of goodness, they go for the easier action: get rid of it.

And while God chooses not to simply eliminate bad people, human beings do. Those that are troublesome we get rid of. We lock them up. Or we execute them. Or we go to war against them and try to eliminate as many as we can. You know where Hitler got the idea for his concentration camps? From the Indian reservations created by the US government. Getting rid of troublesome folks is a policy as old as mankind. Cain saw Abel as troublesome. So he got rid of him. And we never want to take that possible solution off the table, do we? We refine it, make it subtler, make it more technological, make it legal. But we never get rid of the option of getting rid of others.

Our passage from the book of Wisdom says, “Your care, O God, encompasses all of creation...Although you rule in boundless power, you administer justice with mildness; you govern us with great forbearance though you are free to act without constraint. You have taught your people by such deeds that all who would be righteous must be kind. You have filled your children with good hope by stirring them to repent of their sins.” Maybe that's why God doesn't get rid of us, as troublesome as we are: so we can learn to administer justice with mildness, as he does, and to realize that those who would be righteous must be kind, as he is.

It's humans who in the name of justice have created the electric chair, the gas chamber, the gallows, and the cross. And it was humans who decided a troublesome person like Jesus should be put on a cross. But Jesus didn't retaliate. In fact, at his arrest, when Peter cuts off the ear of the high priest's servant, Jesus says, “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:52-53) Christ could have gotten rid of those evildoers but didn't. Instead he heals the man's ear. (Luke 22:51) And Jesus lets them take him to be tried and crucified. That's the contrast between God and humans. One heals and the other kills. One is kind and the other isn't. And yet it is the one with all the power who doesn't use it to harm the other.

All analogies break down and that's true of the parables. In real life, weeds never turn into wheat, but bad people can become good people. Just as Benjamin Franklin changed his mind about slavery, we can change our mind about continuing to do wrong. And that's another reason God doesn't get rid of bad people. At least not by killing them. He prefers to get rid of bad people by giving them the chance to become good people. We can become followers of Jesus and children of God. And, as Paul says, “if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” Talk about amazing grace: we will get what Jesus will get!

Paul continues, “—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” Never forget that God did not exempt himself from suffering. In his son he took the brunt of the evil in the world. And since the way of Jesus is to be kind in a cruel world, we who follow that way can expect to suffer. We must turn the other cheek. We must go the second mile. We must give to those who ask. Like he did. Real righteousness is kind. God's justice includes mercy. Jesus said, “Blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy,” (Matthew 5:7) Only a fool thinks that mercy costs you nothing. It's not only the wicked who suffer; the good suffer as well, often for a good cause. And if it is a good cause they find it's worth it.

Paul suffered a lot worse than most of us will, yet he says, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.” And then he goes on to talk about birth. That's a form of suffering that women regularly undergo and yet find the result worth it all. And many women go through it more than once. Because they think having children, their children, is glorious.

Paul says the whole creation is groaning in labor pains. What is it giving birth to? A new creation. And as the new children of God, we have the “first fruits of the Spirit.” The first fruits of the harvest were selected as representative of the harvest and offered to God. They can also be seen as the down payment and guarantee of one's inheritance, which is how Paul is using it. We are to be proof of concept, to show that a people led by the Spirit of the God who is love can be the core of the new creation. First God is recreating us as citizens of his kingdom, then comes the creation of the kingdom itself. First God is making new people able to live in love and capable of complex good, before he gives us the new heavens and the new earth in which to put those things into practice.

The Bible, the story of God and humanity, begins with creation and ends with the new creation, and in the middle, Isaiah 65, we get a glimpse of what that will be like. God says, “For look, I am ready to create new heavens and a new earth! The former ones will not be remembered; no one will think about them anymore. But be happy and rejoice forevermore over what I am about to create! For look, I am ready to create Jerusalem to be a source of joy, and her people to be a source of happiness. Jerusalem will bring me joy, and my people will bring me happiness. The sound of weeping or cries of sorrow will never be heard in her again.” (Isaiah 65:17-19) Compare this with John's vision in Revelation: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had ceased to exist, and the sea existed no more. And I saw the holy city—the new Jerusalem—descending out of heaven from God, made ready like a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying: 'Look! The residence of God is among human beings. He will live among them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will not exist anymore—or mourning, or crying, or pain, for the former things have ceased to exist.' And the one seated on the throne said: 'Look! I am making all things new!'” (Revelation 21:1-5)

Poetic and true. In fact, perhaps only poetry can express how glorious the new creation will be. And all the suffering and sacrifice and working to bring good out of bad situations will be worth it: all of our skills at learning complex goodness, all of the ways we have learned to make peace, all of the ways we have learned to express love to every person in every situation. We will fulfill our purpose to love God and enjoy him forever. And he will find joy and happiness in us, his beloved.