Guest Column by Annie Leech
“Have you ever looked at the world, read a book about a historical event or even read the news and saw something that you could only describe as evil?” The Rev. Frank Yamada posed this question at the 9:15 a.m. morning worship service Thursday in the Amphitheater. The title of his sermon was “Search Me: Justice in a World Where Evil Exists,” and the scripture text was Psalm 139:1–12, 23–24.
Yamada recalled a personal experience of encountering such evil when he learned that a good friend had been sexually assaulted in her youth by a member of her extended family. Remembering that his reaction afterwards had been to pound on the wall and cry out, “Why? Why? How could you let this happen Lord?” he noted that such hard prayers are prayers of lament. They ask, “How can evil exist with an almighty God?” Yamada reasoned that such questions are not inherently philosophical, but theological. “It is more a question of our encountering of evil as the possibility of the absence of God.”
Yamada then recalled a passage in Eli Wiesel’s Night in which the author wrestles with the question, “where is God now,” after encountering acts of unspeakable evil. Yamada found himself struggling with the same question before recognizing, “maybe that is the point. Evil should not be something that is so easily forgotten or turned off. And it causes us to wrestle with the very essence of who we are as human beings and with the existence and presence, or better, the absence or the possibility of the absence of God, in the middle of human suffering that results from evil.” Like Wiesel, Yamada finds God in the midst of his lament, saying, “Here he is. He is hanging here on this gallows.”
He then returned to Psalm 139, saying, “Now, we are not going to solve the problem of evil in a short sermon. But let us tend, if too briefly, to what this text might say to us today.” Yamada described the movement of the stanzas, noting how the psalmist moves in the first two stanzas from gratitude for God’s intimate knowledge of human life to describing God’s inescapable presence in the cosmos. In the third stanza, reflection is transformed into praise. The final stanza picks up from the opening lines the important themes of searching oneself for evil and includes a petition to God.
Yamada noted that the petition, “Oh, that you would kill the wicked, oh, God. And do I not hate those who hate you, oh, Lord? I hate them with a perfect hatred and count them as enemies,” is often left out of lectures and scripture readings. Yamada said that though the words might be troubling, they honestly reflect the movement from orientation to disorientation, a move that he said is a response to evil in the world. This portion of the psalm emphasizes turning inward and “moving from wrestling with the evil and enemies to the potential of evil in one’s self.”
Making meaning from these movements, Yamada named three “modest ideas” that we might take away from the psalmist’s reflections. The first is that evil must be confronted and not ignored. Yamada preached, “Evil must be confronted in prayer. Evil must be confronted in lament. And evil must be confronted with action.” He cited the life and works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer when he explained that this kind of confrontation is the cost of discipleship and not easy work, adding “we must also confront the potential for evil within, search with as much discipline and passion as we do when we see evil outside of us.”
The second idea to be gleaned from Psalm 139 comes from its second stanza: “No systemic evil is too elaborate, no victim is too far forgotten or disappeared. No oppressive power is too strong to be outside of God’s reach.” God is present where evil tries to hide. Yamada said that we are engaged in a faithful struggle when we encounter evil and wrestle with the hard question “Where are you God?”
Yamada closed by sharing the psalm’s third idea: “Justice starts with us but emerges from God and ultimately ends with God.” He said justice “emerges from the very heart of God who treasures all human life, for the Lord created each of our lives, forming our inward parts, knitting us together in our mother’s womb.” Invoking Micah 6:8 and Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to nonviolent action, Yamada explained that God’s justice is rooted in mercy and humility, rather than in self-righteousness. He finished by reminding the congregation that justice “starts with us when we live into the difficult truth that Jesus taught his disciples — love your enemies.”
The Rev. Rachel Erin Stuart, senior pastor of Hurlbut Memorial Community United Methodist Church, presided. Long-time Chautauquan and retired Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Cynthia Strickland read the scripture. William LaFavor and Joseph Musser performed the prelude Sonata for Piano Four-Hands in C Major by Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach on the piano. The Motet Choir sang “Judge Eternal,” by Gerre Hancock. The choir was under the direction of Joshua Stafford, director of sacred music and the Jared Jacobsen Chair for the Organist, and accompanied by Owen Reyda, organ scholar, on the Massey Memorial Organ. Stafford performed Toccata in B Flat Minor, by Louis Vierne, for the postlude. Support for this week’s services and chaplaincy are provided by the Jackson-Carnahan Memorial Chaplaincy, the J. Everett Hall Memorial Chaplaincy and the Randell-Hall Memorial Chaplaincy. Mary Lee Talbot will resume her morning worship column for the weekend newspaper.
