Some years ago when I moved into my first ministry from Seminary I brought with me boxes upon boxes of books. Each box was carefully labeled, according to topics. Two of those boxes were marked "evil and death" and I remember how those who had come to help us carry them in, joked about that: oh, don't open those, keep them in the box! It is with a similar feeling that I begin this sermon. I am no Pandora, who in the Greek myth opened a box out of curiosity and sent all the miseries into the world. Evil and suffering already exists out there. And when I moved here to Phoenix the boxes labeled evil, suffering and tragedy had only multiplied. We can not call them back into the box and close the lid on them, as much as we would like to do so. hough some people do try. On March 23 I read this headline in the paper: Florida town officially bans Satan. Now you may wonder exactly how you do that. The town of Inglis did it by official proclamation by the mayor. On city letterhead posted at the roads leading into town is written these words: Be it known from this day forward that Stan ruler of darkness, giver of evil is not nor ever again will be part of this town. Satan is hereby declared powerless, no longer ruling over or influencing our citizens. Well, I suppose they can't say the devil made me do it anymore in that town. I also wonder if Satan would be obliged to follow city ordinances?

No, evil cannot be legislated or wished away. The devil is a great invention but a human invention. We are the ones with horns and cloven feet and the evil we do comes from within us not outside ourselves. As does, thank God, the good we do as well. I do understand the temptation to believe in a literal devil after all, how can we ever explain fully why we human beings do such damage to one another or indeed why we do evil at all?

Let me first define what evil is not. A tragedy caused by illness or natural disaster may feel evil to us but there is no will and no choice there. Those are like God's answer to Job out of the whirlwind. God points to all the stars and all creation and tells Job this is how the world works. IT is the existential answer. We are human life surrounded by all the other life struggling to survive. Cancer cells are in a way creation gone amok as seen through human eyes. Hurricanes, with which I have more than a passing acquaintance, arise form hot air wind and water. They may feel like fury but are really only immense natural forces. Not that this is very helpful to remember as you it inside hearing the trees fall and wonder if the roof will cave in. Job must have had really good ears to hear God's voice in the storm. If I believed in a God that personally ordained these disasters I would have a much harder time dealing with such tragedies. Instead I affirm Job's innocence and our won helplessness in this and accept that this is the price we pay for living in this wondrous, beautiful and sometimes cruel world.

But tragedies brought about by human action that is different. On September 11 we watched in horror and helplessness what amount of destruction and suffering 20 men can cause given enough anger, determination and disregard for human life. And as we as a nation are embroiled in what we call a war on terrorism it seems the word evil is being used rather carelessly. Evil is willful and focused harm and suffering imposed on others. We can explore the reasons but that alone will not stop us, any more than knowing that we can blow up our world several times over ever stopped the arms race. Yes, we can each of us define evil for ourselves and at least resist it within our own lives and within our community. But even that presupposes that we want to do good.

As Unitarian Universalists we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person but does that also mean that we believe in their inherent goodness? Can we, who live in the same century that produced Hitler and the holocaust, can we still say we believe that human beings want to do good? How do we hope to stop senseless violence that puts higher value on having the right pair of sneakers than it does on a living, breathing fellow human being? It is tempting when we look at such acts and especially at the seeming callousness with which they are committed, to distance ourselves from such people, to say: these are not human beings, not worthy of our regard or compassion, put them away, lock them up, send them to the electric chair. But when we say they are not like us, somehow less than human then we too are participants in the process that devalues human life and ultimately create real terrorists. When we see someone as less than human we take one step down a dangerous road. A road that has in the past led us to the concentration camps, to burning heretics at the stake and to religious wars. The list of lamentation is long of those who call each other evil and use it to justify acts of violence and terror. Israel and Palestine, until recently Irish Protestants and Catholics, the Hutus and the Tutus, Bosnian Serbs and Muslims, Croats none blameless except the children and innocents on all sides. What empty values and loss of hope lead a young man or woman to feel that they are worth so little, so that only by wearing the right shoes or strapping dynamite to their bodies and blow up the enemy can they have respect and at last be somebody. To overcome evil we must first define for ourselves what it is, to us and then not only decide to resist it but also to acknowledge that each of us hold within us the capacity for both good and evil. It is in fact the choice that makes us human.

Martin Buber in his book Good and Evil writes: "The lie is the specific evil which man has introduced into nature. All of our deeds of violence and our misdeeds are only as it were a highly -bred development of what this and that creature of nature is able to achieve in its own way. But the lie is our very own invention, different in kind from every deceit that the animals can produce. A lie was possible only after a creature. was capable of conceiving the being of truth. In a lie the spirit practices deceit against itself." We say we know the difference between a truth and a lie, we call something good and evil. Only we among the animals have that choice, at least as far as we know. Only we create societies, religions that tell us what is good and bad, that serve as our moral measure. It is immoral to kill another human being. Immoral most of the time, except, we say, in war.

War is another human invention. In the movie "Schindler's List" the German Concentration camp commandant is a nearly perfect picture of evil, of a human being seemingly without conscience. He shoots people at will and randomly, for target practice, out of boredom. He does without regret. They have no value to him, the young man walking across the compound, the woman peeling potatoes that fall as so many rag dolls to the ground. Schindler, the imperfect hero of this movie tries to explain this man's behavior to one of his potential victims, a Jewish accountant. "He is not all evil," he remarks, "he is really not a bad man. Like most of us he has a good side and a bad side. It is the war; it has brought out all of his bad side. If this war had not happened, if Hitler had not come to power, he would have kept his good side." This is a tempting solution, blame it on the war. And it certainly has some truth in it, look at any war, and see what behavior becomes normal, becomes possible. But there is a qualitative difference between cruelties committed by otherwise good men in the heat and fear of battle and the cold, calculated, systematic violence sanctioned by a society that has lost its soul. For that is one lesson from that movie, evil can become institutionalized, can become what is normal in a society so that it is the good that seem insane. Emile Fackenheim in his article "To Mend the World" writes: In the Holocaust world a gentile's decency, if shown toward Jews, made him into something worse than a criminal - an outlaw, vermin-just as were the Jews themselves; and as he risked or gave his life there was nothing in the world to sustain him, except ordinary decency itself." Schindler, who in reality did succeed in saving 1200 people's life, was a very imperfect hero. He was a womanizer, a profiteer, a man who loved the luxuries of life and cared not too much how he got them. Shady business dealings, bribing and profiting from a war bothered him not at all, but he stopped at killing and at cruelty and ended up spending his ill gained fortune on buying people out of concentration camps. This same war that brought out all the sociopathic tendencies in the commandant brought out a hidden decency in Schindler. The difference is not in what he enjoyed, both he and the commandant shared a love of women and wine. But Schindler grew to realize the value of human life. There is a poignant scene at the end of the war when he realizes that he could have done more. He looks at his car and says: "There are two more people, why did I keep it, why didn't I sell it, I could have done more, why didn't I do more?"

The irony is that so much suffering has been caused by people who thought they were doing good, it all depends upon how you define it. Hitler tried to create what would be in his eyes a perfect world, populated by healthy perfect people. To do so he needed to eliminate all those he deemed less than perfect the Jews, the gypsies, the mentally ill, and the homosexuals. Osama Ben Laden and the Taliban wanted a perfect and inhuman Islamic state where all the great gifts of Islam, algebra, science, poetry and quest for more knowledge would be outlawed in the name of purity.

Treblinka Commandant Franz Stangl said that the purpose of all the humiliation and cruelty was to make the killing easier on the operators. "It is easier to kill a dog than a man, easier still to kill a rat or a frog, and no problem at all to kill insects." This is well known to all war propagandists, the demonization of the enemy makes killing possible and desirable. Not so long ago during the Gulf War a T-shirt was printed with the words: Iraqnophobia (spelled I R A Q nophobia, fear of Iraq) nothing a little Raid couldn't cure." It is one way we handle our own shadow side, project it onto our enemy, make them carry all those traits we despise in ourselves. If they are no better than roaches, then we can do anything to them. This tendency runs like a bloody thread throughout our human history as we burned heretics and hanged witches, as we fought wars singing of how "God was on our side." If our enemy is no longer human, any behavior is justified. Yet one has to wonder what is it in us that can make us do this to another human being? Is it a sense of power, a kind of seduction of our senses so that we enjoy cruelty or is it simply that we convince ourselves that these people are no longer human? I say us, because each of us has a shadow side only perhaps we are lucky enough to live in times that do not test us in the extreme way that Hitler's world did. Who can say with certainty how each of us would react under those circumstances?

To resist evil can be very simple. But we cannot do it without recognizing its seduction and its power. Evil is more than the absence of good; it is a reality in itself with its own distinctive and often terrifying quality and power. There is impersonal evil, such as the suffering caused by an atomic bomb and personal evil exemplified in cruelties done by one individual to another. I do not know what frightens me more. But I do know that we must resist if we are to remain human. As there are societies created in which cruelty become the norm so too are there societies in which common decency is the norm. As war can bring out the worst in us, so can a just society create conditions that encourage the good within each of us. Many of those who rescued Jewish people during that war are not known, nor would they want to be known. It was simply the only decent thing to do, they would say, of course we did it. We need to develop our own inner sense of right and wrong, an inner moral compass that will guide our behavior. We need to develop that same sense and guide in our children. Sadly there are those who never will have a conscience, who for whatever reason have not even connected to other human beings enough to feel any sense of guilt. It is with such people as if they are lacking one of their senses, and they may never be able to understand what those emotions others talk about are really about. They pretend well, are great manipulators but ultimately are empty inside, trying to escape that emptiness by almost any means. We call them sociopaths, a fancy name for someone who has not developed a conscience. They like the Commandant see no evil in themselves, only in others. It is others who are wrong, never them. They are beyond the rules, above them and only a sense of power can fill their emptiness. To resist evil, we must first recognize our own potential for it, acknowledge our shadow side and at the same time see the good in others. We need to see even our enemy with a human face, our face.

A Japanese friend of mine in Seminary would always bow carefully from the waist to greet each of us. When we asked him the meaning of this he replied: "I am bowing to the Buddha nature in each of us." The Buddha nature that is serene and good, that will not harm even an insect. That is also within each of us. The choice is ours.