The Reality of Evil.

Ignatius stresses coming to terms with evil, including our own, in view of God's healing and liberating forgiveness (Brackley, p. 21).

On Ash Wednesday, between the sermon and the marking of ashes on foreheads, we confess our sin with a lengthy litany - much longer than the confessions with which we sometimes open our Sunday worship. This extensive confession suggests that Ash Wednesday is not only about coming to terms with our own mortality - "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return" - but that it is also about coming to terms with our sin, our participation in the evil of the world. It is as if we begin Lent by facing up to the reality of evil.

I have sometimes heard churchgoers wonder, with good reason, about the worship-opening Confession and Forgiveness. Why, after all, should we confess to deeds we have not personally done?

And I imagine this is especially true on Ash Wednesday. In our confessional litany, we declared "Our neglect of human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty, we confess to you." I must confess that I felt especially weird saying this one in our congregation. After all, with our soup kitchen and nightly SHARE shelter, with our support of various social ministries in and outside of the church, we do attend to human need and suffering, and we are not indifferent to injustice and cruelty! Why should we confess to such a thing?

The reason, I think, is that we are confessing not only as individuals but as a people. We confess as the specific group of people gathered in the pews that day, we confess as the whole church gathered across space and time, and we confess on behalf of the entire human race to our shared creator. We have sinned as a people, and we confess as a people.

It is when we step back and take this wide-angle view that we begin to see the true reality of evil. It is a reality that is illustrated well, I think, by the Dan Erlander image at the top of today's post (scroll up to see it again), and by the words our companion Brackley writes on page 26:

We have organized a world that that excludes billions from the banquet table and the decision table.

It is a moral problem, the great sin of our time. We rarely think of sin in these terms. We usually apply that label first to personal actions - theft, adultery, lying, homicide - and then, analogously, to original sin, habitual sin (vice), and, perhaps, structural sin...

[But] the New Testament locates them in a wider context, as part of the "sin of the world" (John 1:29). Sin is a large-scale enterprise, a kind of "anti-reign" opposed to the Reign (or Kingdom) of God (see 1 John 5:19; Luke 4:5-6). Sin "reigns" (see Rom. 5-7) in individuals and also in relationships and institutions. Personal sin is a participation in the anti-reign.

And we participate in this anti-reign every day. Even we, who have made impressive changes in our lives, even we, who are a part of a community that has its sights set on a more just and sustainable society, even we participate in this anti-reign, for we are inextricably wrapped up in a structure of society that is horrifyingly death-dealing. It is nothing short of evil.

And so we say:

Let us confess our sin in the presence of God and of one another.

Loving God, show us our sin. Give us knowledge of the part we play in the systems of injustice. Do not let us brush it aside or pretend it is less than it is, lest we live into a lie and not into the truth which you intend for us. Be our way, our truth, our life, and set us free. Amen.