“Deliverance From Evil"
Facing down evil bears a cost we must pay
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, November 6, 2005
Text: Matthew 6:5-13
In Kurt Vonnegut's troubling and yet equally inspiring novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the hero witnesses the most horrible carnage, fires and destruction following the dropping of a bomb on a city. The hero is scarred emotionally as a result, and is unable to deal with the memory of those events. He subsequently has a dream in which the bombers take off from their point of departure, but as they enter the sky, they are like a movie being rewound, flying backwards, not forwards. They come across enemy fighter planes that are also flying backwards, and you see the shrapnel and the bullets that had hit the planes and gone through the fuselage into the skin of the pilots exiting and returning to the guns from which they had come. The planes continue to fly backwards until they get over the city, and then the doors from which the bombs were dropped open, but this time, magically the fires on the ground are extinguished.
Those who had been suffering on the ground have the bullets taken out of them, the shrapnel and the burns disappear, and the bomb is recreated and goes back into the plane. The plane continues to fly backwards until it gets to a point where it can land, and the bombs are taken out and put underground, as the hero says, “so they may never hurt anyone again.”
It is a marvellous vision. It is a beautiful vision of war being reversed, of death being wiped clean, of the slate being totally and completely changed, of everything beginning again as if it had never happened.
We are not afforded such reality in life. We cannot have that gift, as much as we might want it. You can't have a revision of history that denies what has happened as if it had never occurred. Such great gifts are not given to us. Rather, we can only dream forward, not backward, and the dreams that we have of the world to come and the world to be, they can, yes, be like Vonnegut's dream, but they cannot rewrite the past, and they cannot change the script of history as we have received it.
No, indeed! We may only be able to dream forwards, but we must in our dreaming remember. We must remember precisely, in order that our dreams might be informed. To help us today in this examination of the dream and the remembrance. I chose a text that we probably have recited a thousand times before. We have repeated it so often it doesn't even go through our consciousness before emerging from our lips in church nearly every Sunday - the Lord's Prayer. In it, there is a phrase that on a day like today comes out and really changes your heart. It really does reach you in the depth of your being. It simply says, “deliver us from evil.”
Now, evil, biblically speaking, is not a speculative thing. It is not an abstract idea. Evil isn't something that is ethereal, that is “out there,” that has no bearing on human life. On the contrary, evil in the Bible is very personal. That is why I have always preferred the translation “deliver us from the evil one,” for as Jesus says rightly in the Gospel of John, it is the Evil One that comes to kill, and to steal, and to destroy. It is not an abstract idea; it is something that is very real. When evil comes, it changes dramatically the lives of individuals, cultures, societies, groups and entire nations. Very often they do not realize that they are grasped by it: Such is its subtlety that people cannot discern that they are on the side of evil or performing evil. Evil is seductive, and it can easily and surreptitiously change even good to evil. One need only ask, for example, those who went to the ovens of Auschwitz. If only they could speak, they would tell you that evil is real, and is not abstract. One need only ask those who are in the graves in Srebrenica. They cannot speak, but if they could, they would say evil is real. If you could ask the people buried under the city of Kigali in Rwanda, they would tell you that evil is real, and that evil can grasp you. If they could cry out from those places, and from the many other sites of massacres throughout history, they would say, “Somebody, please, deliver us from evil!” Evil is not an abstract idea: it is a reality, a reality that strikes all races, all ethnicities, all classes and all cultures, touches all languages, and affects all religions.
None of us are immune to it; none of us can say that we, in our lifetime, have never seen evil. Evil knows no bounds. Therefore, when we ask in our prayer, “deliver us from evil,” we should mean it. When we pray that God “deliver us from evil,” we must then seek that deliverance. Now, I know that, theologically, the source of evil will never be greater than the source of good. I know that when I look at the cross, and see the final victory has been won of good over evil, of life over death, of light over darkness, and of peace over violence, I still know that we wait for its final consummation, and as we wait, evil still takes the lives of the innocent.
We can never be as naïve as Sara Teasdale was in her poem, There Will Come Soft Rains, and just hope and pray that wars will never exist, that the innocent will never suffer, and that someday the birds will sing, the nice gentle rains will come, everything will be beautiful and all of nature will be happy, for we know that is not reality. No! Sometimes evil is so forceful and so strong that it takes the life of the innocent. When evil begins to take the life of the innocent, and suppresses, kills and destroys, is it not incumbent upon those who see it for what it is to stand in its way and say “No?”
Just two weeks ago I had dinner with a member of this congregation who just the week before had visited our troops in Kandahar, Afghanistan. He told me it had been a life-changing experience for him, and that he would never be the same. Just outside the Canadian base in Kandahar there was a compound housing Afghani warlords. As he watched, he saw one of the warlords and his wife arguing over the way she cared for the sheep, and he ended by dragging her by the hair, beating her, kicking her, and our fellow member had to stand there and do nothing. He wanted to, but at that moment it would have been too dangerous, and who was he to do it, anyway? Yet, in his heart he said, “I knew there was a reason why we were there, and it was difficult and it was painful, but when you see something that horrible and that evil, you want to step in the way and stop it.”
The creed of the United Church simply says that we should resist evil. There is no question that when the innocent are being hurt, someone has to bear the cross and stand in the way, but believe me, when you do that it is costly. It is not a trivial idea to resist evil; it is not an abstract idea: It can take your life. I was reading through First Drafts, the story of Arthur Lapointe, a Quebec soldier on the frontline in France in 1917. He wrote home as he was about to embark upon a battle. This should leave you with chills!
The battalion has returned to Marqueffles after sustaining heavy casualties during night duty on the front line at Lens. Now I know why we have set up so many munitions depots near German lines. We are going to attack the left flank of the city of Lens. Today we are getting ready for the assault, repeating many exercises over and over. The plain is dotted with various coloured ribbons that indicate enemy trenches. A and B companies will be part of the first wave, so I will be one of the first to reach German trenches, if I am not hit in no man's land. During the rest periods between exercises, I chat about the affair with veterans who have lived through tragic times; they are a little anxious, but they also show flashes of pride. They tell me that Lens is probably well defended. The enemy, which has been there since the beginning of the war, must be well entrenched. In the afternoon the men in my platoon go to the armoury to have their bayonets sharpened. Brrr…it gives me a chill! I have a feeling that this time It's going to be rough... This evening I climbed a hill lined with bushes just to be alone for a while… I don't have any combat experience. This is my first… and maybe my last... I know that many… of us will not come back. Will I be one of them? As I went down the hill.., I thought how good it would be, when the war's over… to see the people I left back home.
Here is a young man feeling the chill of the cold of the bayonet on the end of his gun. Believe me, a cost is being borne when evil is counted.
Let us not think that all this is just in the deep recesses of the past. Let us not think that it is only the veterans of WWI and WWII who have suffered such things. To stand in the presence of evil, to stand for the victims and the innocent, is a costly thing. It is not only in crosses lining the winding roads of Normandy; it is not only at the cenotaphs when we remember the names that are read out loud of those who gave the gift of life on our behalf: Sometimes it is in the mind, sometimes it is in the heart, that the scars of war are felt and experienced.
Another Canadian book about battles tells the story of a young man who went to Rwanda in the early 1990s with General Dallaire. Hear what he had to say and you will see the pain that is borne from confronting evil:
My first week in Rwanda was spent sleeping in an abandoned building in downtown Kigali amongst of hundreds of Rwandan refugees, injured people, corpses, dead rats and across the street from where the battle for Kigali was taking place.
On Day Two of our visit, I was providing the headquarters in Ottawa with a situation report by satellite phone from the United Nations HQ in Kigali. As I was talking to XYZ in Ottawa, an RPG round (antitank rocket) was fired at the building. The round impacted on the wall of the room next to the one I was in.
The impact was extremely loud. It threw me off my feet and I lost the handset of the phone. When I took the phone back, [Ottawa] was still at the other end, yelling my name; he thought I had been killed.
One day in Kigali, near a refugee camp, I was subjected to machine-gun and rifle fire. Crowds of refugees poured into the building nearby. As I turned to follow the crowd and seek protection, an 8-to-10-year-old boy standing next to me was shot in the leg. I remember him flipping over and collapsing on the ground yelling in pain for help.
Upon my return from Rwanda, some of my peers and superiors at work noticed some changes in my behaviour. I had little patience, I was tense and was often visibly angry at superiors.
By then, I started having nightmares, and some nights my wife would have to wake me and shake me out of the nightmares.
I was not happy at work. I found my job back in Ottawa irrelevant and did not find any of my past hobbies interesting. I eventually closed down my woodworking business, which I had started before my departure for Rwanda.
The nightmares are to this day pretty standard—lots of killing, lots of dead bodies. I relive the shooting incidents and see the boy suffering and many other scenes too often.
One particular night, however, I had a nightmare in which I could see myself killing people, as opposed to only witnessing the horrors being committed by others….
For no apparent reason, I start daydreaming about what I could have done differently in Africa that might have changed things and saved a couple more people. I wonder how come I was never injured or killed, given all that happened to me.
I have difficulty concentrating…. I snap very easily at my children and spouse for reasons that I find trivial after the fact. I have no tolerance towards others, and have lost my ability to make and keep close friends….
I am always very tired and have little energy left at the end of each day for family activities.
If people think that there is no cost for standing against the forces of evil, if they think that it is all simply an abstract idea, then they have it very wrong. The pain and the scars and the cost and the suffering and the memories, they go on, not only in the hearts of those who were in battle and those who observed it, but in the hearts of their children and their childrens' children. Be under no illusion, my friends: We might dream of a better world - and we ought to, and we must - but we cannot do it unless we remember. When we do remember, let us remember to keep our souls. Let us realize that there are some things that are worth dying for; that the innocent are worth saving; that a nation is worth loving; that our comrades are people who are worth our lives. If we don't, we are like the man described in the words of Sir Walter Scott:
Breathes there a man with a soul so dead
Who never to himself has said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart has ne'er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there breathe, go mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,
Despite those titles, power and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored and unsung.
Today, we remember those who will not be unwept, unhonoured or unsung. We remember those who have stood in the face of evil, who have stood between it and the innocent, and have given their hearts and their souls and their minds. May we dream of a day when the bombers go backwards and the killing stops, but may we go forward remembering the cost that has been borne, when we say “deliver us from evil.” Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.