Resentment or Evil? The Fourth Sunday of Easter April 21, 2013

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Resentment or Evil? The Fourth Sunday of Easter April 21, 2013 This is a piece that Marianne Thompson created in response to Boston Marathon Week 2013.

1 Resentment or Evil? The Fourth Sunday of Easter April 21, 2013 This is a piece that Marianne Thompson created in response to Boston Marathon Week She writes: "This was a sketch I worked on throughout the Boston Marathon week. My thoughts ranged from the horror that occurred on our city's streets, to the memories of what was endured in New York on 9/11, to the multitude of similar and more catastrophic violence that was happening in too many countries this week and in many cases routinely. Contemplating how we build big, cold concrete cities over stands of biological life - but our healing and the healing of the earth is still rooted in the unfathomably complex natural world. Contemplating the pilgrims and the First Nations, the prelates pious, proud, and/ or perverse. The triumph of compassion, courage and CARING, crumbling the facades of concrete isolation - finding at the root of this city and this planet a heart that can beat as one." It fits in our reflection at St. Luke's of the same week this Sunday. The Rev. Dr. Don Thompson St. Luke s Episcopal Church Darien, CT

2 Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; For you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. (Psalm 23, v. 6) Today is what is called Good Shepherd Sunday. Not only do we say the 23 rd Psalm together, but also we sing various versions of it as a hymn. Why are we asked to reflect on that, when this is the fourth Sunday of Easter? Aren t we an Easter people? Hasn t the Resurrection occurred? Death s mightiest powers have done their worst, And Jesus hath his foes dispersed; Let shouts of praise and joy outburst. (Hymn 208) But if death s mightiest powers have done their worst, What happened this week at the Boston Marathon? What happened last fall at Newtown,Connecticut? What happened at 9/11? What happened at Auschwitz? Surely death s mightiest powers are still doing their worst! Well, there is a reason that this Sunday points us once again to seek the abiding presence of God, as God is imaged in Psalm 23 as our Shepherd. We still very much live in a world where much remains in the shadow of death, the threat to life, the challenge to existence. Evil and death may well have been dealt an irrevocable blow in Easter, but those threats to life are very much still around, as a sort of constant shadow. We are by no means in the full sunlight yet. Jesus told his disciples: See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so you must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. ( Matt. 10:16) What does being wise as serpents mean? I think, above all, that it means we have to be wise about how to live lives of goodness and love when the opposite arises still very much in our midst. And the events of this week have only made us even more aware of it. What are these things that so continuously threaten life and existence? The term evil starts surfacing after event such as Newtown and now Boston.. At times of war, our leaders often invoke the term evil.

3 Winston Churchill named Hitler and the Nazis as evil. George Bush used Axis of Evil to describe the menace of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea in the last decade. There are several leaders on the other side of the world who regularly refer to the United States and its allies as The Great Evil. What is this threat called evil, and where does it come from? Of all the attempts to understand and explain this thing which we call evil, the most common and accepted understanding is that it is an absence of something. In particular, it is the absence of good, it is the absence of truth it is the absence of life it is the absence of love. When any of those positive values which we associate with life - (and life-enabling) - when they absent themselves, then we postulate that evil somehow takes their place. You don t need much more of an image than the crushing power of a vacuum, a space from which all the air is removed, to see the tremendous power that this absence creates. Remember what an implosion is; simply the reverse of an explosion. And it has all the same power, except that the power goes inward and not outward. The same sort of image is used to describe the so-called black hole of space, where light and matter are drawn into an engulfing hole swallows it all up. In the realm of human affairs, the same crushing reality occurs, when there is an absence of something, such as the absence of love, the absence of recognition the absence of the basic necessities of life the absence of human respect. And the great void created by this absence, produces some very bizarre and disastrous results. I have been thinking of this during the week of post-boston Marathon of what sort of thing causes such appalling events to occur. The precursor to modern Psychology was the field of Moral Philosophy, and its task was to look objectively at the issues of human existence, and try to identify its phenomena. One very interesting phenomenon that Friedrich Neitzsche, Soren Kierkegaard, and Max Scheler all investigated in the late 19 th and early 20 th century, was what they all agreed could only be described by the French word ressentiment (it is far more a visceral word than the little English word resentment, which sort of describes an irritant.). They used it because no English or German word came close to describing the power of this human emotion. Max Scheler wrote the best description of it in 1912 in Uber Ressentiment und moralische Werturteil trans. W. Holdheim. New York: Schoken Books, 1972 which translates as About Resentment and Moral Value Judgement. It describes a commonly recurring human attitude which arises from a cumulative expression of feelings such as hatred, revenge, envy and the like.

4 Actually one of the oldest examples of this is found in the Old Testament (Genesis 4:2) with Cain killing his brother Abel. Do you remember how when Cain perceived that God showed a higher regard for Able in his offering (but not for Cain), Cain became very angry, and his countenance fell? I am sure you have seen, or even yourself experienced, that immediate shift from joy and pleasure, to complete let-down and discouragement. When it says his countenance fell you can just feel his total defeat and sense of abandonment. We don t even know whether it was justified, but the point is that he felt let down. And he killed his brother. The comment by the writer of scripture is : if you do not do well, sin is looking at your door; it s desire is for you, but you must master it. This is what Scheler and others found so interesting, that even though one is looking towards something or someone in love and respect, when it seems to be denied and taken away, then the very thing which you wanted and loved - - you now hate - -, absolutely, viscerally. Hatred and resentment are bred whereever there is a void or absence of love, respect and goodness. And suddenly values in one which are life-enhancing, are suddenly reshaped into life destructors. Suddenly a champion of the most positive of things, becomes the champion of destruction. Scheler labeled it man's inherent fundamental moral weakness. (He gave a philosophical description of what we call sin.) He wrote that it can be taught, but it also can be caught, as in psychic contagion. It has long been used to animate warriors and soldiers in battle, because it can become stronger than one s value of human life itself which is why warriors are so bred, so that they do not notice all the death and destruction that they wreck. This is also why so many soldiers do not wish to talk about, with how they were able to do what they did in battle. This is where the hatred of human life itself comes from. And it can be harnessed, used, and manipulated. And I think it belongs to a field like moral philosophy which assumes that we should come face to face with it, as a real aspect of human existence. But if it becomes taken over by the field of Psychology, it becomes categorized as a form of disease or sickness, and we are supposedly no longer responsible. But human beings are responsible for ressentiment. And it happens often because it is bred. And not only does it arise within our own personal lives and living, but it is even more provoked by cultural, social, economic and power inequities around the world. That is where many international and terrorist movements come from. There is a deep resentment of the life and benefits of another: Damn them, we say!. Hence the need to bring down the Twin Towers. Hence the need to kill children. Hence the need to destroy athletes. This absence of the good becomes a very wild canon on the stage of world relationships, and we have seen just that.

5 Thankfully there is another human response that we have seen, as local, national and even international empathy gathers in support of those who have been so tragically harmed. Remember when Jesus said : O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city which kills the prophets, and stones those who are sent to it; How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings (Matt 23:37) There is a similar image in the Gospel today, of the Good Shepherd and the sheep: My sheep know my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. (John 10:22-30). In the face of such blatant disrespect for human life and living, human strangers suddenly bond together in comfort, protection and defense, just as the hen gathers her brood under her wings. A bond of the value of life itself emerges, and all other differences seem so little and pithy in comparison. The same thing occurred after the death of Jesus. The followers, first despairing, but then enheartened, came back into the presence of Jesus who they still felt close to in the breaking of bread. The human community of his followers went about as he had done, giving health to the poor, healing to the lepers, releasing the captives, giving sight for the blind, and raising the dead. In one sense, things hadn t changed: Jesus was crucified and had died. But there was something in the clarity of the real meaning of human life as a gift from God that thereafter could not be destroyed. And this is what we work towards, as we to become an Easter people in our time and day. People still are killed, destroyed. People starve and die to death and disease. But there is still this thing called life, and living, and goodness, and truth that is the very essence of all the best we know about life and living. We were taught it through our faith. We learn it through our own experience. We try to implement it in our lives. And we will inevitably go through more of those valleys of the shadow, and Jerusalem s of our day, where the prophets are still killed. Verse 5 of Psalm 23 suggests that there is a table spread in the presence of those who trouble us. It is like a defense and dike that enables us to face whatever evil there is, however devastating it may be. With that safety and security we can say surely your goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.

6 But there is a condition That I dwell in the house of the Lord forever. All the values of life and goodness are there, and ours is to live within them and cherish them. For as Christians, we know that evil and sin have not gone away. Which is why we must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Call it as we see it. Look up ressentiment on Wikepdia. See what is inherent in the human condition. And with that table of clarity spread before us, let us live with the Lord as our Shepherd, Even as we walk through the valley of the shadow. Amen The Rev. Dr. Don Thompson

How to Overcome Fear I Samuel 17:32-47; Mark 4: June 24, 2018 By Dr. David B. Freeman, Pastor Weatherly Heights Baptist Church

How to Overcome Fear I Samuel 17:32-47; Mark 4:35-41 June 24, 2018 By Dr. David B. Freeman, Pastor Weatherly Heights Baptist Church The date was January 15, 1933, just before Hitler came to power in Germany.