The Perils of Living In The Moment

Over the past weekend I have been challenged by a series of blog posts by my good friend Randall Sherman talking about the reactions to those Germans of the World War II era who lived through one of the most heinous regimes in modern history by their children who had to grow up with the knowledge of their parents activities during this period. As Randall so aptly pointed out, for children of American's who participated in the war, we wanted to know what our parents did, but for children of German's during the same period, their children wanted to know what their parents didn't do. I am challenged by this notion as well by being in a class that is reading the great sermons of Martin Luther King Jr. His comments about the civil rights movement while it was happening seem to mirror some of the same discussions being conducted at Randall's blog. Namely, what is evil? How do we recognize it? And what is our responsibility as citizens to confront it? And finally, to what extent are we complicit in the perpetration of this evil?

The Nazi regime and its crimes seems to be a great touchstone for modern people to discuss evil. We have awoken to the notion that for evil to exist it needs a great deal of fertilizer to grow. Some of this fertilizer comes from the use of strength and fear to subdue those that would stamp evil out. Some of the fertilizer comes from the control of information. Some comes from lies and deceit. But the greatest portion seems to come from the manipulation of our own baser instincts to hate things that do not conform to our world view. When hatemongers seize on our natural hatreds this way, an entire people can be moved to do horrendous things.

Which isn't to say that all German people did horrendous things. No. Far from it. But, point of fact, horrendous things were done by German people and a great many people knew about it and did nothing to stop it. And these people who were not doing horrendous things were normal people. They were church goers. They were respected citizens. And many of them would never even contemplate lifting a finger in violence to their neighbors. Which is what causes the mind to boggle at the nature of things that were done on their behalf.

Martin Luther King reminds us of the horrendous things being done to his people on behalf of church going, respected, peace loving citizens of America. In sermon after sermon he tells us of the evils being perpetrated to an entire class of people in order to maintain the status quot. What were your parents doing during the Civil Rights struggles of the 50's and 60's? What did they do before that period? How complicit were they in the oppression of that period? These aren't easy questions to answer.

Pastor J.D. Ward, our Christian Education leader, reminded us on Sunday night that all generations are judged by the rules of tomorrow's society. Right now we are committing evil in the eyes of generations to come. Things that we are doing, that we are not even aware is wrong, will be judged in the future as evil and we will be called to task for our complicity in it. We might be judged for the raping of the planet. We might be judged for the Iraq war. We might be judged for the horrid laws we have passed against our brothers and sisters of the Gay/Lesbian persuasion, or our neighbors from the South looking for work in this country. Or perhaps it will be something that we're not even aware of at this moment, some act of madness that we can not even imagine yet that will have its roots in our current practices today. No matter how much we try to see beyond this moment, we are still forced to live in the now and to work with the knowledge of what is good and what is evil that we have available to us.

Jesus said, "Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do." We are blind to the possibilities of the great evils that we are perpetuating right now. All we can do is pray for enlightenment before we have done too much harm.