Purification and Renewal:

 Destroying the World to Save It

A sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

On September 18^th, 2005

By the Reverend Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Readings

Two songs played over the sound system

When This World Comes to an End sung by Maggie Hammons

I believe in being ready, 

I believe in being ready,

I believe in being ready,

When this world comes to an end.

Oh sinners, do get ready, 

Oh sinners, do get ready, 

Oh sinners, do get ready, 

For the times are a’drewing near.

Oh there’ll be signs and wonders,

Yes there’ll be signs and wonders,

Oh there’ll be signs and wonders,

When this world is to an end.

The Battle of Armageddon

Sung by Hank Williams, Sr.

There's a mighty battle coming and it's well now on it's way.

It'll be fought at Armageddon, it shall be a sad, sad day.

In the Book of Revelation, words in chapter sixteen say

There'll be gathered there great armies for that battle on that day.

Chorus

All the way from the gates of Eden, to the Battle of Armageddon

There's been troubles and tribulation, there'll be sorrow and despair.

He has said, "Ye not be troubled for these things shall come to pass."

Then your life will be eternal, when you dwell with Him at last.

Turn the pages of your Bible, in St. Matthew you will see,

Start with chapter twenty-four and read from one to thirty-three.

In our Savior's blessed words He said on earth He prophesied,

Oh, He spoke of this great battle that is coming by and by.

Chorus

There'll be nation against nation, there'll be wars and rumors of war.

There'll be great signs in Heaven, in the sun, the moon, the stars.

Oh, the hearts of men shall fail them, there'll be gnashing of the teeth.

Those who seek it will receive it, mercy at the Savior's feet.

Words of Robert Jay Lifton, from Destroying the World to Save It and American Apocalypse

We can now speak of a worldwide epidemic of violence aimed at massive destruction in the service of various visions of purification and renewal. In particular, we’re experiencing what could be called an apocalyptic face-off between Islamist forces, overtly visionary in their willingness to kill and die for their religion, and American forces claiming to be restrained and reasonable but no less visionary in their project of cleansing war-making and military might. Both sides are energized by intense idealism; see themselves as embarked on a mission of combating evil to redeem and renew the world; both are ready to release untold levels of violence to achieve that end.  The war on terror is apocalyptic. Its approach implies that every terrorist on earth is to be hunted down until there’re no more terrorists anywhere to threaten us.  Then the world will be rid of evil.  The fanaticism of Osama bin Laden and other Islamist zealots has a familiarity now...their violent demands for spiritual purification are aimed as much at fellow Muslims as at American "infidels." Their attacks on the defilement they believe they see everywhere resemble past movements around the world; such sects flourished in Europe from the 11^th through the 16^th centuries. Nostradamus was the 16^th century mystic who predicted the world would end in the year 2000, according to Revelation.  Everybody uses the Book of Revelation, Nostradamus, medieval cults, Aum Shinrikyo, Heaven’s Gate, about every group you can name.  You must have violence before the Messiah comes, it can speed his return. “Forcing the end” means not waiting but making Armageddon happen – world-rejecting purification.  Only now can the apocalyptic mind take a more active form as people acquire real means of purifying the world by destroying it and so could attempt just that, always claiming to be doing so in God's name.

Sermon

In my office I have a shelf on which I keep a variety of instant solutions to life’s theological and existential Crises.  I have a tiny Ouija Board, a Magic Eight Ball, giant dice, a crystal ball and bar of Wash Away Your Sins soap (show the bar of soap).  I keep them just in case …

When I was about seven years old I decided to defy fate and go with my friend Nancy to her church.  The first thing that I encountered that chilly winter morning, as we arrived at church, was a smooth marble niche outside the sanctuary in which a small puddle of water sat.  As the people went by they touched their hands into the water and then made the sign of the cross over themselves and entered the church.  I really wasn’t sure what they were doing that for – but it was clear that they believed that the water was getting them ready for church.  I did it, too, to be polite and to see if God was going to strike me dead yet.  The night before I had lain awake in bed worrying.  I was worrying that I would be struck down by lightning for taking my little Jewish self into the Catholic church.  Now, I didn’t have much religious education but I remember my worry and confusion – was God going to strike me dead because God was a jealous God and wanted me to steer clear of church for my own good?  Or would God turn out to be angry and territorial and want no Jews on his Catholic turf?  Or – perhaps my deepest fear of all – would God turn out to exist after all and be really pissed off that, in spite of my worrying so much about God might or might not do, I didn’t actually believe in him?  In any case – whether I believed in him or not I harbored a wobbly fear that what God would find bad, wrong, or out of place God would destroy.  I survived church that Sunday – as you can see.  But ideas are harder to eradicate than people.

The communal water at the entry to the Catholic Church was holy water meant to purify and re-baptize the faithful who were entering on Sunday.  It was a vehicle for spiritual purification and being renewed in their covenant with their God.  Innocent enough – surely – water is such a life-affirming element – such a gentle reminder of the fount of every blessing.  And yet it is tied intimately with the fear of wrath that I worried over in the deep shadows of the night. One blessing intoned over that water before it is poured into the fount on the wall is this:  "Thou shalt sprinkle me, O Lord, with hyssop and I shall be cleansed; Thou shalt wash me, and I shall become whiter than snow. Have mercy on me, O God, according to Thy great mercy."

Whiter than snow is quite an aspiration.  Perhaps an impossible aspiration – but one that seems common among the world’s religious traditions to one degree or another.  The differences between the religions are differences in definition and degree.     These differences and degrees have us and our world by the throat.

In the 20^th century the impulse to purity met the age of technology and people could be erased in large numbers with efficiency – on a scale so large as to make nightmares real.  On a small or large scale the impulse to purity is dangerous.

In the western world we’ve struggled with this idea of purity and the ability to eradicate evil for ages.  The Hebrew Bible is centered on this question.  I think of the God of the Hebrew Bible as the personification of our questions about the world and of our attempted answers.  When God sees evil abounding in the world he sweeps it away in a terrible flood, destroying all of life except for a chosen few that he thought to be worthy of saving.  Mostly that story is told out of context –as though the point is that God promised not to do it again – but that he had to punish humanity really big once to prove his power.  But that is reading out of context. The lesson of the flood needs to be learned in the fuller context – the flood – doesn’t work!  Evil creeps back in sullies the rainbow, breaks the covenant.  No matter how God rages, no matter how the prophets rave and lament, the reality of evil – of human error, human cruelty, oppression and suffering – remain a reality of life.  The lesson, then is that – sweeping away evil is an illusion – it can’t be stamped out or washed away with soap or by flood… no matter how thoroughly we sweep impurity remains – because we were made of both dust and breath, wonder and ignorance, sleeping and waking, good and evil and endowed with the power to choose.

In spite of all that was learned from Hebrew scriptures, the teachings of Jesus were taken out of their context and then put into another context in which – in a huge act of purification and renewal -- the blood of Jesus was used to wash away the sins of the world – so that we might all be redeemed from the sin of Adam… 

Christian Scripture ends with the book of Revelation – echoing the wild visions of the Book of Daniel – visions of a final contest, an ultimate battle between good and evil, the terrible storm before the final calm – the final peace, the end of time.  Humanity is haunted by the wish to purge, to scourge whatever seems at the moment to be the flaw, the fly in the ointment, the sin, the, evil.

This is our spiritual challenge as Unitarian Universalists.  We must have something to say to the rising tide of apocalyptic thinking that surrounds us.   On December 31, 1999, the world fed and faced its collective fear of death from hour to hour as the clock struck midnight in one zone and then the next.  The end of the world did not come – but since then there have been all too many who have tried to hasten the end – to bring time to a stop – and they’ve done so in the names of many Gods and many visions. 

In early 2001 Robert Jay Lifton published his book Destroying the World to Save It.  I don’t know who read it or if they gave a moment to heed his words.  Lifton’s book was a study of Aum Shinrikyo – the group which released poisonous gas in the Japanese subway system.  It was a religious group which began in a vision of harmony and non-violence and slowly transformed – under the hand of its guru – Asahara – until they believed that they must trigger the third world war for the possibility of peace to come to pass.  Such an idea evolved in the group beginning with fasting and self-purification, then growing to include the criticism and self-criticism that were the hallmarks of many proto Marxist organizations.  Then Aum Shinrikyo began to kill people who got in its way and to justify the killing in the name of an ancient Buddhist concept of poa in which the spirit of a person who dies is released. According to Aum Shinrikyo a person whose soul is lost or strayed is actually saved by being killed: the killer would absorb the soul and redeem it by living a more virtuous life than the victim.  The killing would bring merit to both killer and lost soul.  More than 200 deaths were finally traced back to Aum Shinrikyo.  More than 200 “mercy killings” before the group developed the technology and organization to set off a highly toxic poison gas in the Tokyo Subway to try to end time. 

Aum Shinrikyo was haunted by visions of the end of time unleashed by the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – devastation justified by saying that it would bring a swifter end to the War.  The group was convinced, as other groups have been, that there must be a final confrontation between good and evil and that many people, perhaps most, would suffer and die but that they’d be spared to be citizens of a new world order. 

Aum Shinrikyo was small – but it garnered the resources to commit an act of terror.  Lifton says that only because of accidental failures in planning did scores more people did not die.  Their dreams – more rightly nightmares -- were large but they were not quite ready to make them real. 

When Lifton published his book – he warned that Aum Shinrikyo had crossed a line that other small groups would also cross with weapons of power.  A few months later the pilots of Al Qaeda brought death in the name of Allah into our American landscape.

Now – there’ve been many acts of terror in our nation – we have erased peoples to fulfill our manifest destiny, we have enslaved whole people’s for their own good and for our own greed.  We produced Timothy McVeigh, the prime mover of the Oklahoma City bombing, a man who saw himself as an American Revolutionary who could hasten the final conflict in which the evil in the system could be eradicated and a new era of justice would come.  In return we eradicated Timothy McVeigh, as though that would rid us of his evil – as though it were contained simply within his own person and the full body of American myth had not given birth to him.

When the pilots flew into oblivion on September 11^th 2001 they were simply acting out the same wild dreams as generations of men.  Two weeks ago I quoted Pope John Paul II who spoke of time’s arrow leading to the end of time – the final conflict before the final peace.  He said: “like a directional arrow which points them towards their target: Sunday foreshadows the last day … In fact, everything that will happen until the end of the world will be no more than an extension of what happened on the day when the body of the Crucified Lord was raised by the power of the Spirit.”  As long as this history in which we are presently living is no more than an interlude, a means to a grander end, as long as our brothers and sisters on this planet are no more than dust along the road toward glory to be swept aside as vision persuades us – as long as we  are more than certain that there is ONE way and we have the right way and if it is not your way you will be taken out of the way – we are hell bent for leather on the road to suffering. Not the end of time – though.  Stephen Jay Gould rightly points out in Conversations About the End of Time – that the end of time is rather a human conceit – that time is about us.  The world may spin without us and history will be made on other planets and by other species.  Only human time is at risk – but it is especially at risk as long as humanity holds dear a vision that there must be a final and perfect reckoning and that then at last evil will be gone – gone gone and all suffering will pass and every where will be Eden once again.  Lifton calls this sort of wish – nostalgia for the future. 

Each time we return evil for evil hoping to eradicate evil we are falling into a trap – and extending the reach of evil.  This does not mean that you’d never defend yourself – but it means that serious reckoning is called for before you purify the world outside your own heart. For the risk of extending the evil in the world is far greater when one is trying to erase the evil OUT THERE.  In the 2^nd world war the killing of so many Japanese civilians was seen as a necessary evil – but it was a grandiose evil – not one but two nuclear bombs.  Hitler taught that the eradication of the Jews, gypsies and others would purify Germany and the world – but that was – simply – a grandiose evil.  For Aum Shinrikyo Jews and Freemasons were the evil.  For Al Qaeda the evil is the perceived licentiousness of the western world that must be purged.  For the current administration the evil is terrorism which must be utterly eradicated – even if the world is destroyed to do it.  At one time whole villages in Vietnam were destroyed to save them from Communism.  Buddhist communities in Tibet were leveled by Communists to save the Tibetans from Buddhism.

When the thing to be saved is destroyed to save it – you can bet that you are witnessing a deep human sickness – a fever. We are mixed creatures – as long as we we think and act as if evil it OUT THERE, them – we overlook our own fallibility and harm others.  It’s when we’re humbled by seeing our own arrogance, our faults, our wholeness that we can begin to act in ways that truly can redeem the world – a few souls at a time.

We are too powerful a nation not to pay attention to our failures and errors.  Too powerful to overlook the possibility that we may be mistaken. 

We are a powerful nation with enormous resources yet, faced with a catastrophe of biblical proportions we were near paralyzed as Katrina tore down our walls and wrought havoc.  The poor were herded into arenas and abandoned.  Did the terrible flood, the poisoned water, the chaos and lawlessness, the lost lives – did those things merely confirm for evangelical end timers like our president or Walt Hartwich, in the Journal and Courier yesterday – did those tragedies merely confirm that the end was near? 

“In these last days”, Hartwich wrote – we’ve heard those words from countless fevered spirits throughout time.  Last days…! If we could telescope all of earthly history into a 24-hour day humanity would only appear in the last ten minutes!  We shouldn’t be at the end of time – but at the beginning of our real learning.  But that idea – that there is anything to learn, search out, understand – that is anathema to end time thinking.  End timers need only stand on a street corner pointing out what they see as signs of the end – as evil, as twisted. They needn’t wrestle with ethics or foster peace and understanding – they seek the peace that passeth understanding.  Well, that’s a sight easier than having to actually build, heal, create a better world in the present – such flawed and thankless work.  Really we know that our work is imperfect and impermanent, our results are uneven and floods, hurricane, earthquake and folly can destroy our best work.  You know that the real work that gives our lives meaning is not the grand revolutionary gesture, not the purging act of destruction that brings for the new world.  In these last days…

Hartwich is a perfect example of end time thought – he spoke of a straight way with all the certainty he could muster.  But, you know, even Jesus lacked utter certainty – even his hours were at times tormented by doubt and sadness.  When you’re certain in your rightness it’s easy to tag others as wrong and once they’re wrong, shown to be sinners, and lost they can be saved – at all costs – even if it means destroying them. 

So there’s no simple answer.  We must act on our convictions and try to bend the world toward justice.  But what we can do is to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly.  To walk humbly because the one thing you can know for sure – is that to violate life for moral reasons is to play God and it doesn’t matter whether or not God exists – to play God is to become a demon.  And it is not God that strikes down with anger and punishment – but humanity that brings the most deadly bolt of lightning. 

I do long for a future – of realism in which humanity is able to understand – perhaps one congregation and community at a time that we’re not at a cosmic bus stop waiting for a lift to heaven – we’re in heaven and it remains to us to shape it in accord with the most loving, most respectful of teachings, the paths that lead to peace.  The real work that saves the world and brings forth the new world are the many acts of mercy, loving-kindness, generosity, understanding, and respect that extend the goodness in the world. 

Robert Jay Lifton says to take steps to avert the dangers of such world destroying impulses, to avert the dangerous side of purification and to affirm real renewal -- begin by resisting anyone’s claim to total knowledge and to ownership of our lives and deaths – to resist anyone’s claim to dispensing life or death with certainty.

We cannot look to a flood to bring more than suffering and cries for healing.  As Unitarian Universalists we have a message about the capacity of humanity for evil – but far more for the good.  We have a message that seeking for truth is a sign of wisdom and that placing a lock on it is folly. We have a message that the world and all life is precious and must not be destroyed in order to save it – no lightning from the hand of a god.  We have a message that we need not wait for some other appointed hour for the world to come – it is here and now and in our hands.    There’s no place on my shelf of instant solutions for life’s big challenges for what will really save us, make us at peace with the world and with one another.  There’s no room on my shelf of instant solutions for real answers – I cannot seat you all on that shelf and you hold and are the answers.  In your hands and hearts live the paths we must walk toward wholeness, holiness.  And the paths will lead us – will lead you beyond this church and into the world – with our messages.  Yes!

What will cleanse us will not be final nor permanent – nor preceded by signs and wonders – it will be a sea change – a tide that will move us -- it will be our salt tears of recognition and awakening – that the choice to move in the direction of peace that is possible was within us all along.  Will be our tears of grief for all those who have fallen in a dream of cleansing violence and a vision of the purging that leads to perfection.  Will be our tears of remorse for past silence and our tears as we find our voices and speak of a wiser, harder, but truer path.  Our tears of uncertainty and of hope.

Here are all our signs and wonders

Here are all our signs and wonders

Here are all our signs and wonders – for this world that has no end.

We will write another chapter in our hearts and in this time

We will make another chapter and peace will come in acts that shine

We will take our hours slowly and we will move through them so lowly

We will take our steps so holy that sweet peace in time will be our friend.

Here are all our signs and wonders

Here are all our signs and wonders

Here are all our signs and wonders – for this world that has no end.