Wars have a way of instilling new vocabulary that we were happier not to have. In particular, place-names that most of us had not heard of now made to loom before us with vivid, unspeakable horrors attached: Auschwitz and Treblinka, My Lai, and now Abu Ghraib. For years it was loathed by most Iraqis. Countless victims of Saddam Hussein's government were tortured there and thousands were hanged there. Now for new reasons we know of Abu Ghraib. Our side holds it now; and despicable deeds have been done there by men and women who represent us. The catalogue of crimes includes deprivations and beatings, sexual abuses and humiliations, using army dogs on naked prisoners. Military officials say that images soon to be released show American soldiers "severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner, and acting inappropriately with a dead body." They also said there is a video tape, apparently shot by American personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys. Deaths have occurred there too, possibly some homicides committed by Americans.
Not all of our questions about why have been answered. But it's clear that the perpetrators did what they did because they were directed by personnel in military intelligence, agents of the C.I.A., and certain civilian contractors to do such things. This much is in the report of the army's own investigation. Beyond the fact that the perpetrators clearly enjoyed being sadistic, they were acting under directives to break their victims down for interrogation.
This sermon has no interest whatsoever in fixing blame. My intention today is not to adding my voice to the chorus of righteous outrage. In fact, this sermon wasn't so much prompted by what was done in that prison as by what has been said of it since. I don't know what you've been hearing, but as I have listened to the content and the tone of pronouncements on who is to blame and on what this scandal says or does not say about who we are, I have been once more amazed and distressed. The time is ripe for people like us to take what we are hearing and set it under the light of scripture. I have felt under mandate to offer a biblical/theological response for you to consider in the midst of our current national conversation.
It seems to me that much of what we are hearing, in different forms, comes down to this: this isn't us. The president, particularly in his interview on Arab television, kept making this point. "This is not the America I know," he kept saying, with an unceasing smile on his face. He described the America he does know, all in glowing terms. And the few individuals who did these abhorrent things, he insisted, are not like us, are not what we are. So the president preached to other nations and to our enemies about us.
But variations on this theme have come from other quarters. As the point gets made, rightly, that our military has higher standards than this and laws against this and systems in place to correct this, and that most of our troops act honorably as all these valid points get made, one has the sense that the speakers are pushing the perpetrators further and further distant from all the rest of us. They are aberrational, rogue soldiers, they are freaks, and they are not of us. You hear that from supporters of the war. From opponents of the war you hear something actually quite similar. The group they blame is much larger, of course, but how often are their tones self-righteous, and how stark the division they make between those who are guilty and ugly and wrong, and us whose principles are morally superior and whose hands, clearly, are clean.
I am not about to suggest that the abuses at Abu Ghraib are everybody's fault. There is very particular fault to be sorted through and named and rightly punished. There are people who are distinctly, reprehensibly culprits; and it is right, though some are telling you otherwise, to be grieved and angry at what they did. But something else is afoot here. We are witnessing something other than a nation's rightful grief and anger. From the highest official places and from many other places what we are witnessing is a strange national scramble on every hand to distance ourselves from this ugliness: to point fingers as we back away fast and say, Not us; they are not of us.
But of course they are of us, and we are of them. This is what the scriptures tell us, and this is, if we're honest, what our experience tells us.
Will you listen, please, to how the Bible understands us? Simply put, we are described in three movements. The first brings beautiful news. Scripture's first word about us, resoundingly, is that we humans are a very good creation. And not only good, but of us uniquely it is said we are made in God's own image. What that might fully mean is unclear, but at very least the claim is that there is something actually akin to the divine in us, resonance with the sacred, capacities for greatness.
The second word about us is very dark. We whose essence is good are very badly bent. The reasons for this are left largely mysterious in scripture, but the facts of it are relentlessly held up to us. We think crooked thoughts, dream crooked dreams, make crooked choices, do crooked deeds. We are shot through, all of us, with this sickness; it touches all that we do and all that we are. The biblical word for it is sin. And though the church has badly botched the truth of that word, used it in ways that are trivial, manipulative, and mean, the word stands for what is really wrong with us all. It names what is deadly in us, our hatefulness, our arrogance, our need to control, our destructive anxieties, our damaging passiveness, pettiness, self-pity, self justification, our greed for whatever we're greedy for. And if we are that sinful on our own, then put us together in tribes, races, clans, posses, parties, companies, nations, or religions, and our sins can grow truly monstrous.
According to scripture, we are so far gone that even when we mean to do good our sickness insinuates itself. Taking a sober look at the messy mix in our motives and actions, Isaiah laments, "All our righteousness is like filthy rags." We are never purely doing good. Which is also to say, there is no hope for us in our goodness. Only grace can save us. The best among us are in deep need of somebody's grace.
And that's the third word about us, that God offers grace. The first word about us is good, which is so deeply valued that God goes to greatest lengths to redeem us. The second word about us is sin, which is so fixed and so deadly that even God can't wave it away but bears it into awful death. That's what the mystery of atonement is telling: the utterness of our worth and the utterness of our sin and the utterness of love in the One who died taking hold of them both. So we do have redemption from our sin. Being accepted, we may find new freedoms from certain old sins, we can get better. But never does it happen apart from facing fully what we are, confessing it always, and living in the honest humility of sinners who are being redeemed.
This is what the Bible knows about human beings. One of the many reasons I cherish the Bible is its absolute and unrelenting realism about us. It sees and sings of the real beauty that can shine in the human, and it knows and names all that is miserably wrong and deadly in us. If you were raised to think that all of that was to make you feel guilty, I'm sorry, you were misled. It's there to help make us honest and to keep us honest, for if we're deceived about ourselves, we have no hope.
Such self-deceit is positively epidemic among us now. On every hand is this blind naivete, dumbly assuming our own goodness. The irony of it is that this is precisely how terrorists see themselves. Their murderous violence, by which we have been freshly appalled this week, flows from their absolute confidence that they are righteous and we are evil. The name for that form of naivete is dualism. Dualism is a view of the world that divides people rather neatly into the good and the evil. You can find touches of dualistic language in the Bible. Psalm 1 has it; the book of Revelation has it. But the Bible as a whole yields the picture we've described today: good and sin thoroughly mixed in us all. To regard the world primarily as a dualism we're good, they're evil is anti-biblical and a deadly dangerous deceit.
The language of dualism has been constantly used to promote the war against Iraq. We hear our enemies constantly referred to as evildoers even as we constantly call ourselves good. And when it becomes clear that there are evildoers on our side, we deny they are us and still, smiling falsely to the world, call ourselves good.
What I am saying, incidentally, doesn't exactly amount to a case against the war. I have opposed the war from this pulpit, but we're in it, and the message today is a different one. Let me put it this way: if a war should have to be made by our nation, and if the people waging it were to believe their cause was actually righteous, they would still need to confess at very least those who follow Jesus would need to confess that our nation too is covered in guilt, that our own history is rank with evil, and that even when we mean to do good we sin against God and against our enemies and against ourselves. I think you and I should be making such confessions. We know that evildoers are Americans too, including ourselves.
And perhaps we will tremble to recall that Christ was once a prisoner abused by his keepers before he was executed by them. He has suffered lately at the hands of Iraqis and at the hands of Americans. And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
If we face this in him and so face the truth about ourselves, we are ready to take up some new relational work much closer to home. What has gone wrong between you and someone in your family? What has gone wrong between you and someone at church, at school, at work? To live with Christ means we forsake the naοve presumption that begins with how wrong they are. Sinners who are being redeemed begin always with themselves; we confess our sins, we move to forgive as we are forgiven. In this humility we may discover that Christ really is redeeming us, and redeeming others too.
"I am losing faith in such a simple thing as despising an enemy with unequivocal righteousness. . . . We are all beasts in this kingdom, we have killed and been killed, and some new time has come to us in which we are called out to find another way to divide the world. Good and evil cannot be all there is." Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder, 6
"Ultimately considered, evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves." Reinhold Niebuhr, cited in William Sloane Coffin, Living the Truth in a World of Illusions, 64
The most dangerous thing in the world is sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." Martin Luther King, Jr.
" .God's anger is conventionally reduced to mechanistic retributive principles of punishment, as though certain acts automatically produce reactions of punishment. What is missing in such a picture of reductionism is that this is our God, our progenitor, our hoper, who is affronted. The very God who gives us unspeakable gifts is the affronted party. Because of such gifts abused, prophetic rage bespeaks the hurt that our waywardness on earth evokes in heaven. Judgment that is not understood as a form of unendurable hurt misses the point of the biblical drama."
