Desperados--Or, An Absence of Hats

Desperados--Or, An Absence of Hats--November 7, 2017

"What then? Are we any better off?  No, not at all; for we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin, as it is written: 'There is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who has understanding, there is no one who seeks God. All have turned aside, together they have become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, there is not even one'." [Romans 3:9-12]

The old Westerns had a certain clarity to them, didn't they?  Bad guys wore black hats, and good guys wore white hats.  It was as simple as that.  In the world of those movies, you could tell if a character was a hero or a villain, virtuous or vicious, just by the color of their cowboy hats.  White hat?  Must be on the side of law and order.  Black hat?  Must be a no-good cattle rustler, bank robber, or all-around trouble-maker. Job done, dust off your hands.

Of course it wasn't just Westerns that used costumes to break the world down into simple, discrete piles of human beings: good guys and bad guys.  Indiana Jones had a certainly clarity to his world, too--the Nazis were clearly the bad guys, and Steven Spielberg drew on the pulpy adventure serials of an earlier generation to create his world of noble and daring heroes (Indy and his sidekicks) pitted against the evil armies of Hitler. There were even musical cues when the bad guys walked on screen to help you know who were the villains, and who was the hero. The Third Reich villains might have seemed a little one-dimensional, but at least you had some clarity about who should and shouldn't end up with the Grail or the Ark of the Covenant.  And for that matter, the worlds of Star Trek, Star Wars and the classic James Bond movies of the Cold War era all provided us with easily-divided, pleasantly simple universes of Good Guys (the Federation, the Jedi, Bond's MI-6, etc.) and Bad Guys (the warlike Klingons who were a stand-in for the Soviets, the evil Empire with its vaguely Nazi-esque imagery, or James Bond's classic enemies in nefarious groups like SPECTRE, or obvious Russian arch-villains).  Growing up on so many of those movies, it seemed so obvious: Nazis were bad, and Allies were good.  Empires were bad, and Jedi-led rebels were good. The Russians were bad, and the forces of the Free World were good.  It all seemed so... obvious.

Maybe the conflicts of an earlier era really were just that simple (it certainly seems at least that it was clear that Nazis were, and are, bad).   Or maybe that is part of what makes those movies such audio-visual comfort food: they offer us a world where there are only black and white hats, and where the costumes themselves can tell you who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys.  You don't have to know any backstory at all to know that Darth Vader is a bad guy--you can even walk in halfway through the movie without knowing a thing and still tell just by his appearance that we're rooting against him, and that we must be "for" whoever is resisting a Bad Guy who is so clearly bad.  Those kinds of stories appeal to us--they certainly do to me, at least--in part, I think, because we long for a world in which we can simply identify at a distance clear Good Guys to root for, and Bad Guys to hate.

The difficulty is that, as the writers of the Scriptures are quick to remind us, life isn't like that.  In the real world, there is an absence of hats.  As much as we want to--and as much as the movies make us think it is possible--there is no headgear to identify "good guys" and "bad guys."  And even more significant, maybe there aren't even clear "good guys" (at least as a group completely separable from "bad guys") out there at all in the first place.  That is to say, as the Biblical writers see it, all of us are villains to one degree or another.  All of us are part of the problem, and all of us are capable of terrible things, shocking violence, and secret hatreds.  It's the old punchline from the Pogo cartoon:  "we have met the enemy, and he is us."  And not one of us is immune or untainted by it.

That doesn't mean every person's actions are equal to every other person's actions--it doesn't mean that the guy who litters is as much of a sociopath as the one who robs banks or sets arsons.  It doesn't mean we can't call wicked the things that need to be called wicked, either--we need to be able to say things like, "No, it is never OK to murder another person made in the image of God,"  and "No, it is not acceptable to treat other people like they are disposable."  We need to be able to acknowledge that it is not right when bullies can intimidate, or the powerful can steal and hoard, or when the truth is not cared for.  These things are all true.  But the difficult truth we need to acknowledge, too, is that every one of us is affected--infected, even--by the capacity to do great harm to others.  The problem, it turns out, is that if there were hats to be given out, we should all be given the villain costume.  

The writers of the Scriptures--many of whom the apostle Paul quotes here in our passage from Romans--are clear on it:  every last one of us is prone to slide into committing injustice... every last one of us is inclined away from kindness at some point.  It's the same truth that honest eyes have recognized throughout human history, too--what is the Lord of the Flies about, after all, but the way that even a bunch of proper, upper-crust, "civilized" boys are just a push away from brutal violence if allowed to give in to the worst impulses within us?  The truth about us humans is that that we are all prone to join up with the cattle rustlers and desperados, if it comes down to the handing out of hats. 

We are all part of the problem, which is to say, we are all part of the mess.

That forces us to face two difficult implications then.  First off, it means owning the mess inside each one of us.  It means I don't have permission to cast myself always as the hero, or to assume that my motives are always pure and noble, or that my view of things is always the correct one.  Like the old cliché says, more evil has been done by people who were convinced of their goodness than by obvious, overt, mustache-twirling villains.  We have a way of doing terrible things and justifying it because we tell ourselves that we are in the right... and those people are the villains.  We have a way of whipping up imaginary black and white hats... and since we always cast ourselves as the heroes, it always leaves the villain costume for "them"... whoever "they" happen to be at the moment.  But it just ain't so.  If we dare to listen to the news that Romans 3 has to break to us, it is that the mess isn't just "out there" in those "bad guys" out there somewhere... the mess is inside me, too.

And the other difficult thing we have to face, then, is that it means the solution the problem of "bad guys" is not outnumbering them with more, bigger, stronger "good guys."  Because... there are no "good guys," not really.  We are all, to use a loaded word of church techno-speak, sinners.  And every last one of us is bent in our own selves, capable of doing terrible things, as well as capable of doing wonderful things.  It is true, as the old line from a Doctor Who episode put it, that "every life is a pile of good things and bad things," and that while "the good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things or make them unimportant."  But that means recognizing that the good and the bad, the virtuous and the vicious, are both located inside me... and inside you, too--not that I get one hat and leave you with the other.  As the famous insight of Alexander Solzhenitsyn from The Gulag Archipelago puts it, "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

The solution, then, when I see evil in the world, is neither to pretend it's not there and avoid the mess, nor is it to project the mess outside of myself, as if all the evil is "out there," as if enough "good guys" on scene could cancel out the presence of "bad guys" like matter and anti-matter annihilating each other in subatomic explosion.   The mess is "out there" AND it is "in here," too.  So if we are going to deal with the wickedness there is in the world, we are going to have to leave the imagined over-simplicity of the movie theater, and step into a world that is marked by an absence of hats.  It is not that good and evil do not matter or are unknowable--it is, rather, that we all know the bent self-centeredness of evil all too well ourselves... and the Good One who did enter into human history, well, we strung him up on a tree with the blessing of the white-hat wearing moral pillars of the religious and political powers of the day, and we made him out to be the greatest villain around. 

That is the scandal of the gospel: that in the end, God's way of saving the world is not to send in a larger army of white-hat-wearing "Good Guys" to shoot down a posse of black-hat-wearing "Bad Guys," but rather, that for a world full of vice-bent enemies like us, the living God--the Good One--chose to be executed as a trouble-making criminal "Bad Guy" between thieves... in the name of and by the supposed authority of "Good Guy" Law and Order (Rome). See?  At the cross itself--at the centerpiece of what the New Testament calls the salvation of the world--all the hats are all mixed up, with the executioners dressing themselves in white hats and putting the black hat on Jesus along with a crown of thorns, who dies giving himself away for all of us enemies of God.  It is all a mess--and the gospel is all about God's insistence on entering into the mess we have made, rather than some project of sorting the world into piles of "good guys" and "bad guys."

There is indeed evil in the world.  There is indeed a mess to be dealt with.  But I am a part of the problem, as well as someone longing for things to be put right.  And the gospel's announcement is that there is hope, not only for some imaginary people who deserve to wear white hats on account of their moral purity and uprightness, but for the desperados we see in the mirror, too.

Lord Jesus, meet us in the mess, and bring us face to face with the mess inside us so that we can see both the good and the bad within us, and within all.