All Saints / All Souls – November 4, 2018

The Rt. Rev. Mary Glasspool

Christ Church Cathedral, Vancouver

Click here to download an audio mp3 of the sermon.

Overcoming Evil with Good

What an incredible honour and joy it is to be with you all at Christ Church Cathedral and on such a wonderful occasion! Thank you, Dean Peter Elliott, Brother in Christ and Seminary classmate; and thank you, people of the Cathedral and guests and friends alike. There is so much going on here, as well as in the larger world — and I am so very aware of that fact. Today we celebrate Holy Baptism, the Holy Eucharist, All Saints and All Souls. We think about the newly-born and the lately deceased. We are asked in Scripture to think about a New Heaven and a New Earth, and about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. We are asked to think about and pray for the whole Communion of Saints: those who have gone before; those alive in our communities now; and the saints yet to come in the future — God’s future.

So perhaps it is not surprising, given this rich mosaic of all of life, that in our service of Holy Baptism, before we even affirm Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour, we renounce the powers of evil three times. I don’t know about all of you — my brothers and sisters in Canada — but living in the United States during this time, I have made the renunciation of evil a part of my daily prayer life, because never in my 64-year-old life have I felt its daily presence so palpably as now. Is evil simply human sin on steroids? Am I exaggerating the point fruitlessly?

When I was young, I thought I was very clear about the nature of sin. Sin was a series of behaviours that were to be avoided. Sin was personal. It was simple, and clear: do not smoke, drink, swear, or gamble. There were a whole set of prohibitions against sex with specific instructions about what was acceptable and what was not. The Ten Commandments were as clear as anything can be concerning murder, stealing, coveting, and taking the Name of the Lord in vain. It was exclusively personal. Sin was not presented as something having to do with “principalities and powers.” Evil as a social or systemic reality that could be reflected in the racism or economic oppression of the society was neither presented nor discussed. If everyone would just stop doing the things, they know are wrong, everything would be all right. That’s what I believed, anyway.

The problem with that belief, is that it trivializes evil. By making sin exclusively personal, we make evil far less a problem than it actually is. We create the illusion that evil is manageable if we can straighten out our own life. In some ways this lets the devil off the hook and subtly lessens the need for God! The Church becomes a self-help program rather than a community struggling with the principalities and powers of the world. By letting the devil off the hook, we give evil more territory in which to operate without opposition or critique.

The service of Holy Baptism in the 1928 Prayer Book contained a single statement of renunciation of “the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all desires covetous of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow, nor be led by them.” In the 1979 Book of Common Prayer — our current Prayer Book in the United States — the more traditional threefold form of the renunciations, originally articulated in the very first Prayer Book of 1549, is restored. And the threefold renunciation of evil gives us a much bigger picture of all the things that work against God in Christ to destroy us.

“Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?”

This is evil in the cosmos — cosmic evil. We experience cosmic evil in the unmanageability of history, and the destructive power, for example, of diseases and terminal illnesses which are not the result of human sin. Earthquakes, hurricanes, and other, so-called “natural disasters” which produce irrational suffering in the world, are not the “acts of God” insurance companies make them out to be. Fundamentally, evil is a mystery — we cannot fully explain it. But we can and should name the destructive powers at work in the world which are clearly at odds with God’s bringing all creation to wholeness. Because bringing all creation to wholeness is God’s Dream and God’s Will for us.

“Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?”

This is systemic evil. We experience systemic evil in the disordering of human affairs in the structures of society and in human relationships. Racism, sexism, nationalism, militarism, and classism are all examples. So are forms of social, political, and economic life we create with the best intentions, but which result in depriving some groups or persons of some good that God intends for them. As individuals, we do not, all by ourselves, create these systems. But we very easily are co-opted by them, living along our own lives as if nothing were systemically wrong with the world. We cannot, and should not, be unaware of the insidious ways in which systemic evil infects our lives and our very souls.

“Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God?”

This names personal evil. We experience personal evil within us in our attraction to evil, and our tendency to deny and distort the truth about ourselves, and/or our world. Acts of pride, envy, lust, violence, sloth, greed, and gluttony are examples of personal evil. So are conditions of hatred, spirits of unbelief, attitudes of jealousy, and structures of destruction. Perhaps more commonly, we call personal evil, sin — and just because personal evil focuses on the individual, it is not any less powerful than cosmic and systemic evil. Evil is insidious and powerful in all three of these forms. And we are so very vulnerable, capable, too easily, of being drawn into the powers of evil, sin, and death. We renounce all of it at our Baptism. Nevertheless, we fail, and we fail continuously.

So, what do we do? We are called to fight evil, but we are also called to know how to fight it. Evil is not effectively resisted with hatred and with guns. Evil cannot be defeated with evil, negation with negation, terror with terror, missile with missile. The process of negation must be reversed. Only affirmation can overcome negation. Evil can be battled only by good. Hatred can be laid to rest only by love. The only response to evil that has ever worked is the response of Jesus — and that was, to lead a life of love right to and through the end. It means to visit the sick, give to the poor, and help those in need. It means not only being aware of, but also working against the larger-scale forms of systemic and cosmic evil. It means being in the world, but not of the world. It means being chosen out of the world, but sent into it, in Christ’s Name. Sometimes we act as if we were simply dropped down into the world, and we have to decide how best to entertain ourselves until we die. But we need to remember that we are sent into the world by God, just as Jesus was sent. Once we start living our lives with that conviction, we will begin to know what we were sent to do.

Ultimately, we need to entrust ourselves to God, continuing to pray, as Jesus did, “Deliver us from evil.” Jesus was not concerned with explaining evil. Jesus was concerned with overcoming evil. As we pray, “Deliver us from evil,” let us remember, then, the good news of the Gospel. In Christ, we have a Deliverer, who by his crucifixion went through the worst evil any of us can know, “descended into hell,” and is alive, today, among the people who call him Lord. This is the good news we have to declare in Word and Sacrament. The Lord who teaches us to pray: “Deliver us from evil” is the One who can do it — both now, in our worst agonies, and in the age to come, when the victory will be complete, and the powers of evil totally and eternally overcome.

In the Name of God – Amen.