Lately, I have been reading several science fiction novels. It’s my favorite genre. My partner recently gifted with wonderful book called The Sparrow. For those of you who have not read it, it is about a group of Jesuits who, upon discovering the existence of an alien species, send a mission into space. I was amazed I hadn’t heard of it before. It was one of those books you can’t put down. I got the audiobook for my car, and whenever I arrived at my destination, my hand would linger on the ignition just to hang on to a few more words of dialogue. The beginning of the book is full of optimism and hope for the future. The characters are Jesuit priest and lay people who work for an observatory run by the Catholic Church (this is a real place by the way). The characters are ecstatic when they first discover evidence of intelligent life on another planet, and despite the odds are able to build and navigate a ship to lead them to a planet in the Alpha Centuri system. Upon arrival, they are enveloped by the rapturous beauty of the new world and come into contact with a noble, peaceful, edenic species with whom they form meaningful relationships. The characters traveling to the new planet can trace the paths of their lives to this momentous, historical occasion. Though each of the crewmembers had experienced their share of sorrow, frustration, and heartbreak, all the pain that they had suffered was worth it to bring them to this experience. They believed that God meant for them to be there. I have had those moments, where I feel like my path has been leading me to be a particular place, to meet certain people, to learn certain things. I was meant for this. But for the crew of the Jesuit mission, this feeling would not last very long. Everything was about to go terribly wrong.

The scholar Joseph Campbell believed that science fiction was taking the place of mythology in our culture, and that as a genre, it addresses the issues of modernity that mythology has traditionally addressed for most of human history. Science fiction after all is prophecy. It is a genre that shows us the kinds of worlds that are possible when we make the most of human ingenuity, but also warns of the worlds that are created when we are not led by our conscious concern for others. One questions implicit in much of science fiction narratives is, what is evil? And can it be defeated? This question is clearly illustrated in Joseph Campbell’s favorite work of science fiction, Star Wars. Star Wars has indeed become part of our modern mythology. Most Americans know what it means when someone says, “may the Force be with you.” Evil is depicted as being a magical energy that exists counter to the light, or the good energy. These energies make up what is called the Force. The Force must be kept balanced in order for the worst evils in the universe to be kept at bay. And there are those that ensure that balance is kept, those called the Jedi. Though the Force can become unbalanced, the Jedi always manage to find a way to restore the light. Other popular science fiction works have similar narratives. An evil is created by an otherworldly power or technology, and good guys, who usually have an equivalent power or technology, must conquer it.

Though our galaxy does not appear to have a “Force” that works in quite the same way as in a galaxy far far away, it does make us consider how evil works in our world. Are there small “f” forces that are combating each other? Both in the world and within ourselves? And with these questions, we ask, why must there be a battle at all? Why do we not exist in paradise? This is one of the first questions addressed in the Bible, and is perhaps the most troubling and unsolvable. It begins in the third chapter of the book of Genesis:

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.”

And to the man he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Some theologians believe that evil is caused by the free will of humans, and this first act of free will, the disobedience of the first people, is the reason for existence of evil in the world. However, it seems to me that evil exists before this first act of free will. The fruit contains the knowledge of good and evil, and evil therefore must have existed in order to be known. It is perhaps evident in very fact that there is conflict between the woman and the serpent. The serpent is describes as crafty, but why would one need to be crafty in a paradise where all that is necessary is given freely? He challenges the woman about God’s claim that they will die upon eating the fruit, which either means that the serpent is deceiving the woman, or God has deceived the people, perhaps to protect them, but a deception nonetheless. Maybe this is not the paradise we make it out to be. Traditionally, the burden of bringing evil is unfairly placed on the first woman, when her husband, who was in fact present, had been standing next to her the whole time. Adam is equally as culpable in this case. Adam is the first bystander, the witness who was silent.

However, I am reluctant to blame the first people in this situation at all. How can one be disobedient if one does not know the evil of disobedience? Eve had no reason not to trust the serpent, in the paradise where all she had known was goodness. She knew nothing of craftiness, deception, and punishment. I remember a time in Kindergarten when we given jellybeans to do a counting exercise. I bet you can tell where this is headed. I pretty sure most of us ate at least a few jellybeans before the exercise even started. Our teacher was so upset, or at least it seemed like it from my 5 year-old point of view. Eating jellybeans had only ever brought us joy, how could we have known that eating them would bring such wrath? Like Adam and Eve, we didn’t really understand what the consequences would be, because the importance of counting exercises had not been entirely ingrained in us.

It seems to me the traditional interpretation of the fault being placed on the two first people, particularly Eve, is due in part to the fact that it is easy to have someone to blame, even if it is ourselves. Up until now, I have used the word “evil,” which implies an intention to cause pain, rather than accidental pain. Even the text uses the word “evil,” not simply the words suffering or pain. With intention, there is the hope for change. Evil intentions can be undone with good intentions. The Force can be rebalanced if there are enough people on the light side. We can one day return to the Garden.

Suffering is perhaps more difficult to understand than evil. Suffering and pain happen regardless of intent. The hurricanes that passed through here had no intention to harm, and yet caused and continue to cause suffering. What’s worse is that suffering can come out of the best intentions. The great tragedy of the Garden is that Eve had wanted to be more like God. And over the centuries we have become even more like God than the biblical authors could have ever imagined. We have created technology that allows us to more thoroughly understand creation, from the tiniest particles to the biggest heavenly bodies. We can cure diseases that once had been death sentences. And yet, we no longer have to rely on an act of God to destroy entire populations, we can do that ourselves.

The book about the Jesuit mission, The Sparrow, is written in parallel plotlines. The author writes about optimistic beginnings of this mission in the year 2020, but alternates chapters with the mission’s return in 2060. These chapters focus on the main character, Emilio, a Jesuit priest, who is the sole person who makes it back to Earth. Emilio comes back a broken man, a victim of irreparable physical and emotional violence. From the beginning, we know how the story ends, we just don’t know why. Like Eve, the crew of this mission had hoped to gain knowledge, wisdom and insight that could be bestowed by these new life forms, and like Eve, their quests ends in suffering. Upon his return, Emilio is asked to recount his experience to the Pope. After his testimony, he presses on the Pope his anger at God for allowing this to happen, a God to whom he has given his life. He says:

“I made a cloister of my body and a garden of my soul. The stones of the cloister wall were my nights, and my days were the mortar. Year after year, I built the walls. But in the center I made a garden that I left open to heaven, and I invited God to walk there. And God came to me.” [Emilio] turned away, trembling. “God came to me–and the rapture of those moments was so pure and so powerful that the cloister walls were leveled. I had no more need for walls. God was my protection. I could look into the face of the wife I would never have, and love all wives. I could look into the face of the husband I would never be, and love all husbands. I could dance at weddings because I was wedded to God, and all the children were mine.” He came back to the table and placed his ruined hands on its battered wood and looked at [the Pope] with eyes alive with rage. “And now the garden is laid waste,” he whispered. “The wives and the husbands and the children are all dead. And there is nothing left but ash and bone.”

So we are left with a conundrum. Why create a garden in a world where gardens are so often reduced to ashes? It takes a lot of work to cultivate a garden, literal and spiritual. Like Emilio, I want to think of God as my protector, and yet parts of my garden are still ravaged by blights that seem unpreventable. The Kabbalah, the writings of Jewish Mysticism, attempt to explain the relationship between a God that is entirely good and a creation that suffers. The mystics write that if God is infinite, then God must have removed God’s self in order to create finite beings. Suffering then is not a positive opposite force from what is good, but rather the space where God is not present. Unfortunately, this means as inherently finite beings we are incapable of restoring the Garden of Eden. In fact, for the Garden to exist it had to be created with the space for suffering. As we know, it was never truly a paradise to begin with. And with more knowledge, the more we become like God, and the more we can understand this to be true. George McDonald, a 19th century theologian and fantasy author, once wrote, “The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings may be like His.”

I wish I could stand here and tell you why there is evil, why there is suffering. I have sitting on my kitchen table a dozen books about the problem of evil. Some speak of evil as a punishment for misdeeds, others say that suffering is edifying and there is always a lesson to be learned from it. A small part of me hoped that I would find some satisfactory one-liner that I could end this sermon with. But the mere fact that I was able to obtain a dozen books promising the answers meant that I would not find one. The Bible itself would not be so long! This past spring, I was in Shelly’s small group, “Bodacious Bible Blurbs.” Each week, we struggled with the stories Old Testament. The God depicted in those stories felt incompatible with the merciful, loving God we want to be close to. But so often, we live with God in the midst of horrors. We too are in the world of Job and of Jeremiah, in the world that allows Joseph to be sold in slavery by his brothers, the world that let us fall out of God’s hands. As part of a document written and collection by humans, these stories are not simply descriptions of God’s nature, but examples of how we have grappled with the reality of suffering for thousands of years. Author Rachel Held Evans describes the scripture as a place where God holds space for us, both to grapple and to rejoice. This is true of all mediums of story telling, in art and music and poetry.

Where is God then? Where is the divine that Eve wanted to reach out and touch? If, as the Kabbalah says, creation was made from the infinite, then we are each made of what is infinite. And the divine is in that place that ties us to what is eternal. In the Gospel of Matthew, Mary is promised the one who goes by the name Emmanuel, meaning “God with us.” And with this command she is told, be not afraid. This divine piece of us is a presence that holds space for our pain and for joy, to wrestle with the questions of sorrow and the wonder of love. And we, in this space, in this garden we have cultivated for ourselves, hold space for each other. Though we are not in paradise, maybe we are made whole in ways that we do not understand.

At the end of his testimony, the priest Emilio asks the Pope, “Where was our protector? Where was God, your holiness? Where is God now?” The answer was immediate, certain, “In the ashes. In the bones. In the souls of the dead. And also in the children that have lived because of you.”

Shelby Hall

June 17, 2018