Seeing Below the Surface--June 7, 2021

Seeing Below the Surface--June 7, 2021

"But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties have been trained by practice to distinguish good from evil." [Hebrews 5:14]

You would think that telling the difference between good and evil is always clear and completely obvious, right?  I mean, they're opposites, for crying out loud--as starkly different as night and day, as wide a difference as north is from south, or east is from west!  

There's something really appealing about the idea that we will always (and easily) be able to distinguish between good and evil clearly.  We want to imagine, at least, that you should be able to spot the difference a mile away.  And all the classic westerns whose heroes wore white hats and whose villains wore black hates sure made us think that the world is like that--good always clearly demarcated with one color scheme, and evil with another.

And yet--a lot of times in life, it takes a skill developed by practice and wisdom to know how to discern what is really good, and what is merely dressed up to look the part.  We might think we would know how to tell the difference between day and night, but take a picture of a sunrise and a picture of a sunset, and unless you know which way is east or west, the images might look awfully similar.  And to be very, very truthful here for a moment, evil has a certain cleverness in its ability to present itself with the trappings of goodness, righteousness, and piety.  It often very explicitly claims the trappings of religion, and if we don't do the hard work of critical thinking, we'll fall for anything that comes branded with crosses or halos or drapes itself in the pious sounding language of "defending our religious heritage and freedom."  

You probably know that famous line often attributed to Sinclair Lewis that says, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."  The point, of course, is that it's awfully easy for the worst impulses to dress themselves in symbols, images, and language that we cherish and to get us to stop looking any further below the surface to see whether it is really good, just, true, and for us as Christ-followers, whether it fits the character of the God we know in Jesus.  What's frightening is just how often Respectable Religious People--folks who claim to be skilled at discerning good and evil, and who claim to be seeking God's will--let terrible things get dressed up in the appearance of goodness or godliness, and end up giving religious cover for profound rottenness.  Christian preachers were among the loudest supporters of slavery in this country, as well as the eras that followed that were marked by lynching, segregation, and redlining.  Christian leaders in Germany--many in my own Lutheran tradition--were persuaded to give their support to the nationalism and bigotry that metastasized into the Third Reich.  Christian voices of authority have lent their support--and implicitly said they spoke for God as well--endorsing policies of pre-emptive war, ever-expanding nuclear arsenals, unchecked greed, and a not-always-subtle assumption that American lives are somehow more important to God than the lives of people half a world away.  And while it is also true that each of those moments found other Christian voices speaking up as an alternative minority report, that just proves the point--that sometimes folks who all strongly insist they are seeking to follow Jesus and to do good end up seeing very very differently what that good looks like.  Just when we want to assume that good and evil are always obvious to label, our own history reminds us how often Respectable Religious voices have fallen for evil that came quoting Scripture in support of racism, or waving Bibles around in the air like a prop, or using the language of religious piety as a cover to justify greed, violence, and bigotry.  And more often than we would like to admit, we fall for it.  

So when the writer of Hebrews talks about distinguishing good from evil as one of those subjects for the mature in faith, he's right.  It's not always easy, and it's not always clear--especially when we are tempted to settle for a shallow, surface-level reading of things.  Just because it's hard doesn't mean we can let ourselves off the hook for doing that hard work. It means we do need to be willing to invest the time and do the critical thinking to go beyond the empty slogans and symbols that sound pious. It means we don't get to buy the shallow thinking that in a country with a two-party political system, there is always one that is the "right" one in line with God's priorities, and one that is wicked and evil.  It means we don't get to settle for endorsing whichever voices are promising to give special prominence or treatment to Christians, because Jesus never sought that for himself or for his followers, but rather the opposite, sought for his community to seek the good of others, especially those on the margins.  It means, too, that we are called to do the honest soul-searching of where each of our actions and choices may be tinged with goodness and evil, righteousness and rottenness, side by side, inside us and hard to disentangle.  We always want to assume each of us is always on the side of good, but maybe wisdom means learning to see where those we most strongly disagree with have something true that needs to be considered... and where we ourselves have been fooled by wickedness that pretends to be righteous.  That's not easy, and it's not for the faint of heart.  But it is our calling if we want to be people with mature faith, so that we won't be taken in by every huckster dressed in holiness, or worse yet, by evil that calls itself greatness.

This is why we need each other, and why collectively, we need the presence of the God who has not left us to our own devices, but keeps raising up those minority report voices of prophets, visionaries, and dreamers who are so clearly rooted in the way of Jesus that they help us to see more clearly ourselves.

Keep discerning, friends.  Keep listening.  And keep your eyes on Jesus--he's the one who embodies what real good is.

Lord God, give us the wisdom and wise voices around us to help us to be able to see what is good--and what is rotten--around us and within us.