Seek Good, Not Evil
Sermon
SEEK GOOD, NOT EVIL
that you may live
Adolph Hitler had a dream of a thousand-year empire. The years may make us forget too soon and too easily the terror that was Adolph Hitler. The terror was that this little man, not in stature alone, but in smallness of mind, had managed to do in an extraordinary degree what others had done before him, and what we are all capable of doing. What he did, says Kenneth Burke, was to make virtue vice, and vice virtue. When, therefore, the Nazis put six million Jews and millions of others into the ovens, they did not do it because Adolph Hitler or anyone else was holding a gun in their backs, a matter of killing or being killed. They did not do it because the killing of millions was a moral duty. They did it, says Kenneth Burke, as an act of adoration.
As life had been treasured, under the Nazis killing was treasured. Having denied infinity to God, they became infinitized men and sought to destroy all of life or to create life somehow by an orgiastic celebration of death.
Evil had not just become an incidental and accidental accompaniment of life. Evil had become national and international policy. Death resulted not from bureaucratic bungling, but from thorough planning. So twisted had become the Nazi mind that devotion to the destruction of the Jews diverted badly needed supplies from the military and helped cripple the Nazi effort on the Russian front.
The memories of the Holocaust stand as a graphic reminder how evil can be taken for the highest good and the highest good taken for evil. It happened in our lifetime.
Is the Nazi-twisted experience instructive of the twistings of the people of this text?
They wanted life. Their method? Turning sweet justice into nausea. They hated reproof of their nausea. They abhorred those who told the truth. They trampled on the poor. It was not enough for the poor to be poor. They had to be trampled on, invited being trampled on because they were poor. While the prosperous could get loans easily, the poor were made to pay every cent with usury. Someone once said, "Capitalism for the poor, socialism for the rich." Citizens on welfare must spend frugally. Industries already wealthy are entitled to, note the word, not extravagance, but to "cost overruns."
"The religion of the eighties? Success. Compassion is out," responded a national magazine. It then proceeded to detail its answer, young men and women bent on making fortunes and spending fortunes in the most profligate way.
The righteous are afflicted, not the wrongdoer. There is a readiness to take bribes. The poor man's claims, if he dare make them public, are ignored because he is powerless to press for justice.
The language is fierce, scathing. But no matter. What should provoke denial and retaliation merits only indifference, not unlike indifference in the West. How many times has it not been said, and not by Christians alone, that the wealth of our country has come not only at the expense of other countries but at the expense of poor countries whom we have made poorer still. Is that perhaps trampling on the poor? Does it not strike us as strange that we have industries producing products which are guaranteed to have little or no food value and drinks which are guaranteed to give us no more than one calorie for every eight ounces consumed? Companies are in competition to produce more and more which gives us less and less nutrition but more pleasure, more color, more pleasing texture, more pleasing taste than ever before. Alongside that are not the hungry alone, but the starving - the Ethiopians, the Sudanese, the desperate millions of others less publicized but no less starving.
"Out of sight, out of mind," used to cover much ignorance. That is no longer possible. Television, which is blamed for much chaff and rightly so, will not let us forget the hungry, the starving, the poor, the oppressed, the disenfranchised. Television has helped us see, if not realize, our intricate interrelationship. Television will not let us escape each other, try as we may.
The struggle to remain alive is a fierce drive in all of us. Elie Wiesel, the noted chronicler of the Holocaust, records vividly a concentration camp incident - a son's beating and clawing his own father to death for a crust of bread, only then to die himself at the hands of the Nazis a few moments later. It is frightening what we will do just to maintain life a few moments longer.
To live at the expense of the other, is that life? The torrential condemnation of Amos says, "No!" The good life is not life that comes at the expense of the poor, the unfortunate, the oppressed, and the dispossessed, the lonely and the exiled.
What has contributed in part to the kind of public debauch at the expense of the poor in Amos' day and in ours is that relation to God is often felt to be a private affair. Private good behavior for all of its excellence, however, does not well reckon with structures and systems which by their very nature oppress, put the poor at a disadvantage, operate with technical and legal rights while violating the moral. It has been too easy for us to do band-aid work with a good conscience while structures and systems have continued to victimize.
We have talked about the violence in schools, for example, but what about the violence of the schools? There is violence within companies, but what about the violence of companies? In recent days more than one company that has served a community for decades closed its operations overnight and moved to another place where the goods can be made even more cheaply at the cost of the new workers and at the cost of the old workers left behind.
So, Amos' words are not encouraging the dressing up of a private morality. Stalin's daughter said that Stalin loved her very much. At the same time he authorized the deaths of millions of his fellow Soviet citizens.
Seek peace! Establish justice! Speak the truth! Reprove truth! Seek good, not evil that you may live!
The speaking for good is to be a passion. We are to be burned up with the desire and will that good will reign. We are to be consumed by the same kind of passion that consumed our Lord.
The purpose of the text and of this sermon is not the development of a new program in niceness. It is a seeking after life itself, as God describes and designs that life. To live, to be alive means to seek good, not evil, to establish justice, to uphold righteousness, rather than cast it down; to be exacting in charity rather than in covetousness. That's but a partial description of what it means to be alive. That is certainly what it meant to be alive for the people of Amos' time. The textual phrase is, "And the Lord God of hosts will be with you." That there is to be no mistaking about what God meant by life, there is the Christ. He said that life is not possible unless we lose it. And he lost his life in the pursuit of justice. His way of righting wrong was to die for us the wrongdoers that we might be justified in the eyes of God through his death. Christ did just the opposite of the people of the text. He did not make justice bitter but made it richly sweet. What a way God chose to make clear his sense of justice - to give us that which is too good to be true, to give us that which we do not deserve.
He has given us the gift of life, that is the gift of himself. That is life to give oneself for the other as he has given himself for us. Or in the words of Amos, to seek the good of others as he has sought our good, to speak the truth to others as he has spoken the truth to us, to see that the poor get their due as he has seen that we have gotten our due, to establish justice as he has dealt justly with us, to praise the righteous, to see that the needy's needs are met.
Seek good, not evil, that you may live. In short, be like God.
Hear, you peoples, all of you; hearken, O earth, and all that is in it; and let the Lord God be a witness against you, the Lord from his holy temple.
Woe to those who devise wickedness and work evil upon their beds! When the morning dawns, they perform it, because it is in the power of their hand. They covet fields, and seize them; and houses, and take them away; they oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance. Therefore thus says the Lord: Behold, against this family I am devising evil, from which you cannot remove your necks; and you shall not walk haughtily, for it will be an evil time. In that day they shall take up a taunt song against you, and wail with bitter lamentation, and say, "We are utterly ruined; he changes the portion of my people; how he removes it from me! Among our captors he divides our fields." Therefore you will have none to cast the line by lot in the assembly of the Lord. "Do not preach" - thus they preach - "one should not preach of such things; disgrace will not overtake us." Should this be said, O house of Jacob? Is the Spirit of the Lord impatient? Are these his doings? Do not my words do good to him who walks uprightly? But you rise against my people as an enemy; you strip the robe from the peaceful, from those who pass by trustingly with no thought of war. The women of my people you drive out from their pleasant houses; from their young children you take away my glory for ever. Arise and go, for this is no place to rest; because of uncleanness that destroys with a grievous destruction.
(Micah 1:2, 2:1-10)
As life had been treasured, under the Nazis killing was treasured. Having denied infinity to God, they became infinitized men and sought to destroy all of life or to create life somehow by an orgiastic celebration of death.
Evil had not just become an incidental and accidental accompaniment of life. Evil had become national and international policy. Death resulted not from bureaucratic bungling, but from thorough planning. So twisted had become the Nazi mind that devotion to the destruction of the Jews diverted badly needed supplies from the military and helped cripple the Nazi effort on the Russian front.
The memories of the Holocaust stand as a graphic reminder how evil can be taken for the highest good and the highest good taken for evil. It happened in our lifetime.
Is the Nazi-twisted experience instructive of the twistings of the people of this text?
They wanted life. Their method? Turning sweet justice into nausea. They hated reproof of their nausea. They abhorred those who told the truth. They trampled on the poor. It was not enough for the poor to be poor. They had to be trampled on, invited being trampled on because they were poor. While the prosperous could get loans easily, the poor were made to pay every cent with usury. Someone once said, "Capitalism for the poor, socialism for the rich." Citizens on welfare must spend frugally. Industries already wealthy are entitled to, note the word, not extravagance, but to "cost overruns."
"The religion of the eighties? Success. Compassion is out," responded a national magazine. It then proceeded to detail its answer, young men and women bent on making fortunes and spending fortunes in the most profligate way.
The righteous are afflicted, not the wrongdoer. There is a readiness to take bribes. The poor man's claims, if he dare make them public, are ignored because he is powerless to press for justice.
The language is fierce, scathing. But no matter. What should provoke denial and retaliation merits only indifference, not unlike indifference in the West. How many times has it not been said, and not by Christians alone, that the wealth of our country has come not only at the expense of other countries but at the expense of poor countries whom we have made poorer still. Is that perhaps trampling on the poor? Does it not strike us as strange that we have industries producing products which are guaranteed to have little or no food value and drinks which are guaranteed to give us no more than one calorie for every eight ounces consumed? Companies are in competition to produce more and more which gives us less and less nutrition but more pleasure, more color, more pleasing texture, more pleasing taste than ever before. Alongside that are not the hungry alone, but the starving - the Ethiopians, the Sudanese, the desperate millions of others less publicized but no less starving.
"Out of sight, out of mind," used to cover much ignorance. That is no longer possible. Television, which is blamed for much chaff and rightly so, will not let us forget the hungry, the starving, the poor, the oppressed, the disenfranchised. Television has helped us see, if not realize, our intricate interrelationship. Television will not let us escape each other, try as we may.
The struggle to remain alive is a fierce drive in all of us. Elie Wiesel, the noted chronicler of the Holocaust, records vividly a concentration camp incident - a son's beating and clawing his own father to death for a crust of bread, only then to die himself at the hands of the Nazis a few moments later. It is frightening what we will do just to maintain life a few moments longer.
To live at the expense of the other, is that life? The torrential condemnation of Amos says, "No!" The good life is not life that comes at the expense of the poor, the unfortunate, the oppressed, and the dispossessed, the lonely and the exiled.
What has contributed in part to the kind of public debauch at the expense of the poor in Amos' day and in ours is that relation to God is often felt to be a private affair. Private good behavior for all of its excellence, however, does not well reckon with structures and systems which by their very nature oppress, put the poor at a disadvantage, operate with technical and legal rights while violating the moral. It has been too easy for us to do band-aid work with a good conscience while structures and systems have continued to victimize.
We have talked about the violence in schools, for example, but what about the violence of the schools? There is violence within companies, but what about the violence of companies? In recent days more than one company that has served a community for decades closed its operations overnight and moved to another place where the goods can be made even more cheaply at the cost of the new workers and at the cost of the old workers left behind.
So, Amos' words are not encouraging the dressing up of a private morality. Stalin's daughter said that Stalin loved her very much. At the same time he authorized the deaths of millions of his fellow Soviet citizens.
Seek peace! Establish justice! Speak the truth! Reprove truth! Seek good, not evil that you may live!
The speaking for good is to be a passion. We are to be burned up with the desire and will that good will reign. We are to be consumed by the same kind of passion that consumed our Lord.
The purpose of the text and of this sermon is not the development of a new program in niceness. It is a seeking after life itself, as God describes and designs that life. To live, to be alive means to seek good, not evil, to establish justice, to uphold righteousness, rather than cast it down; to be exacting in charity rather than in covetousness. That's but a partial description of what it means to be alive. That is certainly what it meant to be alive for the people of Amos' time. The textual phrase is, "And the Lord God of hosts will be with you." That there is to be no mistaking about what God meant by life, there is the Christ. He said that life is not possible unless we lose it. And he lost his life in the pursuit of justice. His way of righting wrong was to die for us the wrongdoers that we might be justified in the eyes of God through his death. Christ did just the opposite of the people of the text. He did not make justice bitter but made it richly sweet. What a way God chose to make clear his sense of justice - to give us that which is too good to be true, to give us that which we do not deserve.
He has given us the gift of life, that is the gift of himself. That is life to give oneself for the other as he has given himself for us. Or in the words of Amos, to seek the good of others as he has sought our good, to speak the truth to others as he has spoken the truth to us, to see that the poor get their due as he has seen that we have gotten our due, to establish justice as he has dealt justly with us, to praise the righteous, to see that the needy's needs are met.
Seek good, not evil, that you may live. In short, be like God.
Hear, you peoples, all of you; hearken, O earth, and all that is in it; and let the Lord God be a witness against you, the Lord from his holy temple.
Woe to those who devise wickedness and work evil upon their beds! When the morning dawns, they perform it, because it is in the power of their hand. They covet fields, and seize them; and houses, and take them away; they oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance. Therefore thus says the Lord: Behold, against this family I am devising evil, from which you cannot remove your necks; and you shall not walk haughtily, for it will be an evil time. In that day they shall take up a taunt song against you, and wail with bitter lamentation, and say, "We are utterly ruined; he changes the portion of my people; how he removes it from me! Among our captors he divides our fields." Therefore you will have none to cast the line by lot in the assembly of the Lord. "Do not preach" - thus they preach - "one should not preach of such things; disgrace will not overtake us." Should this be said, O house of Jacob? Is the Spirit of the Lord impatient? Are these his doings? Do not my words do good to him who walks uprightly? But you rise against my people as an enemy; you strip the robe from the peaceful, from those who pass by trustingly with no thought of war. The women of my people you drive out from their pleasant houses; from their young children you take away my glory for ever. Arise and go, for this is no place to rest; because of uncleanness that destroys with a grievous destruction.
(Micah 1:2, 2:1-10)
