“The Dangers of Outsourcing”                                                                      Vance L. Toivonen

READING                       Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.' You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition." Then he called the crowd again and said to them, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile."

For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."

READING       Stephen Batchelor, Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil

Just as you peer out beyond yourself to scrutinize others, so do they gaze from their interiority to wonder about you…Others are the mirror in which I most vividly glimpse myself. The consciousness of being the person we are unfolds from our interactions with others…However vividly I seem to stand apart from you, without you there would be nothing from which I could stand apart. “I” without “you” makes as little sense as “here” without “there.”…As we embark on the seemingly endless quest of mutual understanding, we become a chapter in each other’s story, figures in each other’s dreams, creators of each other’s self. To know another intimately is not achieved by dissolving the differences between us but by allowing the space to draw them out. Such differentiation is realized through probing and being probed by the otherness of the other…When caught in Mara’s snare you prefer not to see this. Over time, you tend to enclose the other within limits that define then according to your own needs and desires.

SERMON

One of the greatest blunders of our current age is that we have, as a collective people, as a nation, allowed ourselves to be lulled to sleep by the siren song that evil resides out there somewhere, and that we, who are, of course, as pure as the driven snow, must therefore protect ourselves from the scourge of “the other.” I realize as I make this opening statement that the genesis of this predisposition to locate evil “out there” is firmly rooted in my own behavior. I conspire with this idiosyncrasy every time I make a judgmental statement about another human being. In so doing, I close the door to every opportunity to better understand myself by looking deeply into the soul of the other; the one, or the collective of ones, whom I seem to be hell bent upon demonizing.

This behavior in my self is a learned behavior. My father is better at it than I am, and, perhaps, the same was true of his father, and so on. Generations pass this penchant on to one another, and it becomes institutionalized, not only in families, but in churches and schools and government agencies. According to Stephen Batchelor, a former Tibetan and Zen monk, Mara’s strategy is to “reduce the other to a manageable “it,” thereby avoiding the threat of intimacy.” Mara, by the way, is Buddhism’s version of Christianity’s “Devil,” or Islam’s “Satan.”

I heard someone on public radio the other day suggest that what we need to do is sit down and talk to some of these terrorist leaders, look into their eyes, and listen to their points of view, rather than demonize them without any meaningful conversation whatsoever. Some would argue that a meaningful conversation is not possible. I have done this right here in my work at Hope. I have done as much writing off of those who would take an opposing position to mine as they have. It’s a stand-off, a stalemate, and nobody wins. I dig my heels in, and you yours. We spin our wheels and get nowhere.

I have done much better at insisting upon being my own person, and will continue to do so, than I have done at celebrating the diversity around me. I think this is one of the reasons that the universe insisted upon my coming to the Hope community. What is currently on the table for our future together is the engendering of more and more ways for us to openly listen to one another, disagree with one another, hear one another’s completely different perspectives, and allow the other to be our teacher. I need desperately to invite these behaviors into my life. So I feel extremely fortunate to be here in a community that values such processes, and wants to grow in this direction.

In order for that to happen I must also unlearn a half-a-lifetime of counter-productive behaviors. In order for this transformation to take place we must, as a community, run counter to the divisiveness that swirls all around us culturally. We are in that season of political advertising, which seems to be more and more determined to demonize the opponent than to offer any real ideas to the culture. This behavior is the antithesis of what Jesus or the Buddha would have us invite into our lives. It is playing right into the hands of Mara who salivates every time those ads air on the tube.

Again, I say, I have done plenty of this in my own life, from the fundamentalist Christian to the guy driving like an idiot in front of me. If I do not consciously pause whenever the compulsion arises to demonize the other and tell myself, in the words of Pogo, that I have seen the enemy, and the enemy is me, then I too have given in to the desires of Mara, and have, all by myself, incarnated the devil.

This is the work for me, and for all of us; to locate the source of evil in the world within ourselves. Each of us makes our contribution to the global and social ills that surround us. The task of discerning our connections to the greater manifestations of Mara’s work is a significant part of our spiritual growth work. As we approach the anniversary of 9/11 I still grieve the fact that we have not, as a nation, been willing to engage in this work openly. There are pockets here and there where this work of self-examination and reflection have been attempted, but the process does not seem to have leaked out into the culture at large, and certainly not out into institutionalized religion or politics. What if that woman on public radio is the voice of God saying, “Look into the eyes of your enemy, talk face to face, and perhaps you will learn about yourselves from one another.”?

The connection with the first reading is quite obvious. Jesus is speaking to those who would define the world around them by a set standard, namely their own, and judge the world accordingly. He suggests that these external means of evaluating others are bankrupt, and that the only real path to understanding others is through understanding ourselves. It is not how we look, or the rituals we engage in, or the language we use to communicate, or the tempo or volume of the music, but rather the intent of the heart that Jesus zeros in upon. Jesus quite simply concludes that “all evil things come from within.” Not just from within you, but from within me, too.

We have been taught to see the other as a threat, someone (or some thing) not to be trusted. The opposite of this would be to give ourselves to one another, and to accept the other not as a menace, but as a gift. I can choose to awaken every day to the possibility, and more often than not the probability, that every soul I encounter throughout the day is my coach, my teacher, my tour guide through life. I can choose to open myself to every exchange of words, every offering of thought, every display of emotion. We saw this in action last week here in this room, each of us guiding one another into deeper wisdom and enlightenment. This can become the norm rather than the exception for us, if we will choose this path not only as individuals, but as a community.

Stephen Batchelor concludes, “In the end, we humans are the only adequate metaphor for the devil.” Ah, but then the opposite must also be true. In the end, I say in reply, humans are the only adequate metaphor for angels as well. We are all angels and demons, one and the same, and all at the same time. Even the most seemingly pure and innocent among us are fraught with evil, and even the most heinous of our species give residence to the angelic qualities of truth and hope. We must simply understand this about ourselves, that we are both of these wrapped up in the same package of flesh and blood.

Martin Luther referred to this in Latin as simul justus et peccator, which literally means we are simultaneously justifiable and sinful as hell. My Lutheran roots are still good for something now and then. This concept has been with me throughout my adult life and has helped to keep me grounded. It puts every human being on an equal footing, on common ground from the get go. Understanding ourselves in this manner will aid us in the process of engaging one another as gifts to be opened. It will also keep us from being surprised any time someone behaves in an unbecoming manner. At the end of the day there are no bad people, and there are no good people…there are just people.

Stephen Batchelor puts this another way,

To live with the devil is to plunge into this elusive, beguiling, obstructive, giddying, unreliable, bewitching, sublimely ephemeral world. To survive in the midst of such dazzling contingency requires that one understand, tolerate, and love this world. For were the world not this way, there would be no path, no awakening, no nirvana, no freedom. Mara and Buddha are intertwined with each other. To pretend that either can exist in isolation is to fall prey to Mara’s oldest trick: tearing a conditional thing out of the matrix in which it lives and raising it to the status of an unconditioned truth. (Stephen Batchelor, Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil).

We will be healthier as individuals and as a community when we know ourselves as fully as possible, devils and angels all. The challenge for each of us is to so thoroughly and deeply gaze into the mirror of our own souls that we see all of the darkness as well as the light. Perhaps the most effective means for doing so is to stop every time we bristle at the behavior that surrounds us, every time we look aghast at the shadows of our neighbors, and realize that such recoiling is a golden opportunity to discover a little more of the devil in our own details.