This sermon was originally preached on January 22, 2006. It has been updated.
You could argue that the first movies were what are now called “genre films.” That is, the first movies with plots weren't about everyday life but were fantasies, like 1900's Cinderella, or science fiction, like 1902's A Trip to the Moon, both by George Melies. Even the first non-fantasy film story, 1903's The Great Train Robbery by Edwin Porter, could be classified as both a Western and a thriller. As movies changed from novelties to a staple of 20th century life, genre films, though popular, have been looked down upon by critics and even those in the industry. Since their inception in 1928, the Academy Awards have rarely honored films other than dramas. Fantasy and science fiction movies might pick up technical awards for sound or special effects but they aren't considered serious films. That's why it was such a shock when the third Lord of the Rings film, The Return of the King, won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2003. It was the first fantasy film ever to do so. And it showed that even a story that included hobbits, elves and sorcerers could have important things to say about life.
Why are such stories popular even though they are far removed from our everyday experiences? The usual answer is that they are escapist entertainments, designed to help us escape mentally and emotionally from our mundane lives. If so, why do they resonate so much with so many people? Because, despite the trappings of magic, or technology so advanced it might as well be magic, speculative fiction tends to deal with ultimate values. In fact many writers, such as Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, and Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, have discovered that they can use fantasy and science fiction to explore controversial subjects, such as race, war, patriotism, religion and others, without instantly polarizing their audiences. Set the Vietnam War on a distant planet and, stripped of its identifying and incidental details, you can talk about its morality. Explore the differences within an alien species and you can get to the heart of racism. Take a current topic and extrapolate how it might shape our future and you can deal with the ethics of cloning, or of manipulating DNA, or the consequences of artificial intelligence. Fantasy and science fiction are ideal settings to explore questions of good and evil in ways that people of different cultures, politics or even religions can consider them rationally.
So it's sad that these days Hollywood tends to use the trappings of scifi and fantasy primarily to produce action films, which are all about thrills rather than thoughts. They even managed to make the life of Christ into one of the biggest action films ever: The Matrix. (Where the One dies and is raised back to life by the love of Trinity and ascends at the end. Sound familiar?) Of course the advantage of using science fiction or fantasy as the setting for an action film is that the hero can kill loads of bad guys and as long as they are machines, monsters, or aliens, he won't appear to be a mass murderer. That's why there are so few films like the thoughtful Gattaca and so many like the brainless Alien Vs. Predator. And that's why the solution to the problem of evil in these movies is usually to just kill all the bad guys. You only have to look at the Middle East to see that in real life this really doesn't work.
Are there times when the right response to evil is to fight? Unfortunately, yes. Europe would still be an Nazi empire had we not opposed Hitler by force. Again Star Trek: Deep Space Nine explored the moral problems that arise when the basically decent Federation of Planets finds itself fighting a war it can't afford to lose against a people obsessed with securing the supremacy of its race. It showed the moral ambiguities involved in fighting even when your goal is good. In the end certain enemies become allies and the supposed good guys use biological warfare to win. And yet after the war one good guy gives up the woman he loves to devote himself to curing the defeated aggressors. Though not himself religious, Roddenberry had a very religious upbringing and so every version of Star Trek has always upheld the idea that different peoples, even former enemies like the Klingons, can find reconciliation.
Evil doesn't always approach us in columns with jackboots and swastikas, though. And the way to fight evil doesn't always have to involve fists and weapons. So let's contemplate some other ways to deal with evil other than killing those under its sway.
Evil starts, as the third chapter of Genesis tells us, as an idea. It is a seductive idea and it is that we know better than God. (Genesis 3:1-6) The Greeks called this attitude hubris; most Bible translations render it pride, but a better translation would be arrogance. Unlike pride, arrogance is not simply taking pleasure in your accomplishments; it is a sense of inherent and all-encompassing superiority to others. If I win a tennis match, I really can't conclude much more than I won that match on that day against that person. If however I win lots of matches against lots of people, I can conclude that I am a very good tennis player. But I cannot conclude that I am the world's greatest tennis player unless I play and defeat everyone in professional tennis,and even then I am not the greatest for all time. Most successful people are eventually toppled or surpassed by someone new. And I certainly cannot conclude that I am in any way superior in other sports or other areas of life. We shouldn't be all that shocked when we find out that someone who is a good athlete or singer or actor or preacher or leader can also be a bad spouse or businessman or parent or thinker. Nobody is the best in everything. Only an arrogant person assumes he or she possesses unilateral superiority in all spheres of life.
So one way to fight evil is to practice and teach humility. Humility simply means having a sense of proportion about yourself and your strengths and weaknesses. A humble person can acknowledge that he or she is good at some things but not good at others. A humble person knows that thinking you are the GOAT at anything is both untrue and dangerous, to yourself and to others. Will Rogers pointed out that we are all ignorant, just on different topics. And you can say we all have weaknesses, just in different things. An arrogant person will not admit to weaknesses in any area and will see others who have notable strengths as threats to his ego. A wise person sees the strengths of others not as threats but as resources and sees other people not as rivals but as potential allies.
Another thing only a humble person does is repent when they are wrong. The Greek word for “repent” means “to change your mind” and the Hebrew word for it means “to turn around.” Since arrogant people feel they are never wrong but that they are infallible, they rarely change their mind nor do they change their direction in life.
Because evil starts as an idea, one way of combating it is using God's gift of your mind. Since evil is a distortion or a diminishing of what is good, we need to be able to recognize its telltale lies. We need to spot lines of thought that seek to justify evil ways of doing things simply because they have noble goals. We have seen the disastrous fallout when our country has undermined the democracy of other countries, like in Iran and in Latin America. Cult leaders routinely convince people that it's OK to break the commandments against adultery, theft, lying and even murder because they are speaking for God or are themselves God. But those are God's commandments, so why would he break them or tell others to break them? As James tells us, God is not tempted by evil nor does he tempt others. (James 1:13) Anytime someone says some noble end justifies whatever means it takes to achieve it, they are tempting us to do evil.
We also need to refute any system of thought that reduces people to mere animals, or alternately exalts humans into gods. We need as well to refute any system of thought that narrowly defines what is good as whatever benefits me and mine and does this by neglecting or exploiting or harming others. And in general, we should question anything that promises to be a panacea and solve all our problems by its simple application. We must also realize that all ideas need to be analyzed this way, even if they come from a supposedly Christian source.
So one way of fighting evil in thoughts is to learn the gospel, the good news of what God has revealed in Christ. It is important to learn it well enough to think Christianly, that is, by using scripture first but also looking at what Christians in the past have said and done for inspiration and by using our God-given reason. The Bible is not an encyclopedia and you are going to encounter things you can't dismiss with prooftexts. Today we are facing completely new things, like the ability to alter human DNA and to create artificial intelligence. They have the potential to do great good and to do great harm—and there is nothing in the Bible about them! So we must use its timeless moral principles and figure out how to apply them to new situations. We should also look at how God responded to evil. He didn't take up arms against evil people; he became one of us and showed us how to live. After we killed him, he rose again and now he lives in us through his Spirit. Our creator is creative in dealing with evil and so must we be.
Evil thoughts become evil words and so spread to others. So we can fight evil with words as Jesus did. I don't just mean by debating the ideas. I mean by using positive speech as well. We need to learn to articulate our faith and learn how to communicate it. There are a great many good books out there that put the gospel into non-technical, non-churchy language. There are books by C.S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers and Paul Little and William Barclay and N.T. Wright. The “Outline of the Faith” in the Book of Common Prayer can help.
It is also essential that we read the Bible, regularly, intelligently, curiously, and prayerfully. Don't stick to one translation. None of them can fully express all the riches and wisdom to be found there. There are also a number of good study Bibles out there. There are loads of translations and Bible helps and commentaries online for free, like William Barclay's Daily Study Bible. I highly recommend the Bible Hub app. The Logos app offers an entire library of books that will help you with almost any question and both apps are free to download and use.
But if we are to communicate our faith we need to translate it into terms that we ourselves use everyday. Very few people speak or understand Elizabethan English or theological terms. So we shouldn't use them to talk to people outside the faith. We need to find ways of talking about sin, repentance, redemption, atonement and holiness that people can understand. We need to take the concepts behind such words and relate them to ordinary life. After all, as J.B. Phillips said, Jesus is God's Word in terms we can understand, like time and space and human personality. Sharing the good news of God's love, forgiveness and new life in Christ is a way of counteracting evil.
Another way to fight evil that often gets forgotten is encouragement. Sure, we should expose evil and warn people about it, but we shouldn't neglect encouraging people to do what's right. If doing the right thing all the time were easy, we wouldn't be discussing evil. So it's vital to support and encourage good actions on the part of others and to stand by them when doing right is hard.
Among the physical ways of fighting evil that don't involve Kung Fu is comforting those who are hurt, supporting those who are unsteady, restraining those who are angry, hugging those who need love, playing with children, helping with a task, etc. These are all little things that are also powerful ways to communicate God's love and faithfulness to those around us when words are not enough.
These are just a few of the ways you can combat evil with your mind, your words and your actions. But the best strategy is to combine all three. Think up a way to fight evil, communicate it to others and then implement it. There was a boy who made sandwiches and gave them to the homeless. Other people joined in and a simple and effective way to fight hunger was born. There was a wealthy man and his wife who wanted to live more Christian lives and decided to partner with the poor in building homes. Today Habitat for Humanity is a worldwide Christian answer to the lack of affordable housing. A Christian rockstar met with world leaders about a pressing social concern. Bono has used his celebrity to convince wealthy countries to forgive Third World debt, freeing up some of the poorest countries to use their natural resources to help their own people.
There are many ways of fighting evil: through healing, through education, through invention, through example, through law, through art, through organization, through fundraising, through parenting, and through peacemaking. God has given us hundreds of gifts in billions of combinations. We can choose to waste them or use them selfishly or destructively--that's basically what evil is--or we can use them to make the world better.
Why is it that the good guy in the genre stories we love is almost always a warrior? As we've seen there are countless other ways to fight evil. And we haven't even talked about the most radical way God has provided for us: forgiveness. The way that evil perpetuates itself is through a neverending cycle of injury and retaliation. It's rather like how a gang war increases and spreads. Damaged people pass the evil done to them along to others. Forgiveness stops evil cold. If you forgive someone the cycle of pain comes to a halt. But it's hard. It is perhaps the hardest thing God asks us to do. Still that's how God himself did it. From the cross Jesus asks his Father to forgive those who were in the process of killing him. In the Lord's prayer we ask God to forgive us to the extent that we forgive others. We can only accomplish this by calling on the power of his Holy Spirit working in and through us to change us and our relationships.
Wouldn't it be great if in a big movie when the hero arrives, the bad guys put down their arms, defect and join the side of good? That's how God wants the story to end. He wants his enemies to become his allies. He wants us to stop harming each other and his creation and start restoring it. The Christian hope, as N.T. Wright points out, is not the fiery end of everything but a new beginning. (Revelation 21:1-5) We look for a new heaven and a new earth, a new city of God, and a new kind of life, where neither pain, nor regret, nor anger, nor arrogance reign but the God who is love rules in our hearts and in our minds and in our lives.
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