"The Reader & The Rainbow"

Sermon Preached By Bruce Sanguin
March 1, 2009

Mark 9:1-9, Genesis 9:8-16

This morning begins our series, Getting Reel, Lenten sermons in which I use film as a lens through which to reflect on the nature of God and reality. Over the next six weeks I will be taking one of the Oscar nominated films and setting it in dialogue with Scripture. Films are intense snapshots of life, and if our lives are sacramental – outward signs of an inward and invisible grace, as I believe they are – then we can look at film as sacrament. We can look through them and come face to face with life’s ultimate questions. By reflecting deeply upon the best of what our artistic community is producing we may find ourselves in the heart of Mystery. This morning I’m going to be using the film, The Reader, which is a thoughtful meditation on the mystery of evil. Before I get to the film, a few words about evil.

 

One of the most abiding theological quandaries for human beings is how to make sense of evil. Every theological model must have a response to the question of why, in a world created by a good and just God, bad things happen. Sometimes the bad things that happen are natural disasters – fires in Australia; earthquakes in China; tornados in the U.S. that wipe out towns and trailer parks. The toll in human lives and on nature is immeasurable. The question is often phrased in these terms: “If there is a God who is control of the cosmos, then why are these natural disasters allowed to happen?”

 

For example, the story of Noah and the flood is an attempt by a pre-modern religious community to answer the question: “Why did this devastating flood of the Tigris and Euphrates happen?” At the time of this flood, the inhabitants would have believed that the world didn’t extend much beyond modern day Iraq and Iran. So this flood was thought of as threatening civilization as they knew it. Their way of asking the why question was not: “Why did God allow this?” That would be a modern way of posing the theological question. In premodern times the question was: “Why did God do this?

 

The answer, according to the legend of the flood, a section of which we heard earlier, was that God lamented over the violence in the human heart and simply wanted press the reset button. The irony is not lost on the modern reader that God’s solution is even more violent than human violence. I need to be clear at this point that we’re not dealing with history here. It’s one community’s stab at making sense of what was a devastating local flood – but which seemed universal at the time. In the minds of those who generated this story, the event was eschatological in scope. That’s a ridiculously long word that just means “end times”. It signaled the end of one era – the first creation – and the inauguration of a new era. In effect, God is presented as the cause of evil in the form of a natural flood.

 

But in section of the legend that we read, God realizes it was a big mistake.
God sets a rainbow in the sky as a memo to Himself never to do that again. The rainbow, as Susan DuMoulin pointed out in our Tuesday Bible study, was thought to be the bow of God’s bow and arrow. Notice that the direction of the bow is such that if God’s arrow is ever shot again, it will not be at the earth and its inhabitants, but rather into the sky. In the end, this story is about God’s repentance. “Never again”, God says – and the rainbow is God’s reminder that there must be a better solution to the evil of violence – other than greater violence.

 

Thus far we have been dealing with evil as natural catastrophe. But there is another kind, which is the evil that originates in the human heart – a conscious choice to enact, collaborate with, or acquiesce to, evil. The film, The Reader, is at core a reflection on this kind of evil. It concerns the Jewish Holocaust. The way into this historical atrocity is an unlikely romance between Hanna Schmitz, played by Kate Winslet, and a young German boy – Michael, a minor. A central part of their romance is having this young boy read the classics to her – thus the title of the film. Their romance occurs at the end of WW2. Hanna was a prison guard at the death camps, which the young boy knew nothing about, until she is arrested and tried for crimes against humanity. Years after the end of the affair, the young man is studying law and as part of his education attends these trials. He is devastated one day, while attending the hearings, to see Hanna on the stand.

 

Hanna Schmitz, it turns out, is guilty of sending hundreds of Jews to the gas chamber, a fact she doesn’t deny. But her co-guards have conspired to make her the scapegoat, and have presented evidence that will result in a much heavier sentence for her and a lighter one for them. Hannah could easily have refuted this evidence but it would involve revealing a shameful secret. Michael knows for a fact that this evidence is false, but refuses to present what he knows for fear, presumably, of being in anyway associated with her.

 

One particularly gripping moment in the trial stands out for me. She is asked to explain herself and her heinous behavior in the camps. But she is confused by the facile question in its refusal to appreciate the larger political context: “Should I never have signed up at Siemens?” she responds. In other words, she needed a job, she responded to an ad by a respectable German company, who itself was part of the Nazi initiative – this was her way in to the death camps. Her response expands the circle of guilt exponentially.

 

It reminded me of the Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt’s, book on the trial of Adolph Eichmann, a man who was tried and found guilty for his work in the death camps. The subtitle of the book is The Banality of Evil.  Eichmann was just an ordinary, if soulless citizen, doing what he had to do to make a living. He had nothing against Jews in particular. He was just following orders. Both the book and the film are chilling accounts of evil, precisely because collusion with it is so easy. There is the explicit, icy evil of Hitler’s hatred for Jews. But there is this other form of evil that is so banal – that shows up more like acquiescence. We simply follow orders – or the norms of the prevailing culture, but the atrocities everywhere evident don’t penetrate our hearts. Romeo Dallaire wrote about this as well in his memoir, Shake Hands with the Devil, about his experience of being rendered helpless as a commander of a UN force in Rwanda during that genocide. The evil did, however, get through to his heart, and caused him to have an emotional breakdown.

 

Michael’s heart remained frozen throughout his life. For in a way he still loved Hanna. He continued to tape record the classics for her and send them to her in prison during her entire 30-year sentence. Was it a guilt offering for not being able to speak up and thereby be stained with her guilt by association? Was he, therefore, any different really than her? She couldn’t stand up to the Nazis. But he couldn’t stand up for her – when she was clearly being scapegoated, not just by her co-guards, but by an entire nation, who found it more convenient to situate the blame in the moral failure of a single person than look at the collusion of an entire nation. His acquiescence, in a small way, paralleled the silence of an entire nation.

 

Silent collusion as a form of evil is difficult to see when we’re living through it. I wonder if subsequent generations might not look back at our own and wonder what we thought we were doing as we presided over the destruction of the ecosystems, of entire forests, of the extinction of species. Many believe there is a kind of planetary holocaust going on under our noses, while we go about our business and daily routines. Where is our cry of “never again” to match God’s promise after the Flood? Never again will we preside over the extinction of another species. Never again will we acquiesce to the status quo, drive our gas guzzlers, let precious heat escape our sanctuaries, never again will we stand-by as our rainforests and oceans are sullied and our animal kin lose yet another habitat. It’s tough isn’t it?

 

In the story of the Flood, the heart of God thaws. God repents and makes a promise: Never again. The Christian story can be imagined as the way that God kept that promise. Rather than return the violence of humanity with divine retribution, as in the story of the Flood, God chooses to take that violence into Godself in Jesus of Nazareth. The cross of Good Friday can be understood as the symbol of God keeping the ancient promise. Holocaust becomes holy cross – the breaking open of the sacred heart. Jesus’ baptism and subsequent temptation in the desert that we heard about in the reading from Mark can be understood as Jesus preparing his heart to embody this covenant to choose suffering rather than violence. Jesus is God’s wide-open and wounded heart for the world. Jesus is God’s “never-again” to reactive violence as a solution to anything. He is God’s way of refusing the path of silent acquiescence to evil on the one hand, and on the other, refusing to turn to violence into a default setting.

 

But this Lenten journey is not just about telling the story of how Jesus embodied God’s “never again”. The journey through Lent is about our commitment to become like Christ for the world – to ask ourselves individually and collectively what it would mean to enter into the “never again” covenant of God. If the rainbow is the sign of God’s covenant, then during Lent we consent to be God’s prismed light for the world. The light of Christ hits us and our own hearts form a bow of protective light across the planet. We consent to become for the world a source of hope – God’s bright reminders that there is an alternative path.

 

In the last scene of the movie there is a shred of hope. Michael makes a pilgrimage with his daughter to the church cemetery where Hanna Schmidt is buried. There he begins to tell her a story of evil that touched him, how it included Hanna Schmidt but spread to touch everybody, how it caused his heart to freeze. It would have been a story more subtle and nuanced that she could have imagined for such a terrible reality as evil. It would have been both a confession and a caution: a warning that the capacity for evil is never far from the human heart, and a caution about looking for its source outside of oneself. Rain is falling as he shares his story, but one senses it is a cleansing rain. A heart is opening.