I was talking with some friends this past week and asked them, if they didn’t mind, to tell the rest of us their earliest memory. After a while I noticed a pattern emerging. No one described a mundane memory. Instead, the memories were either fun or painful. One man remembered his first horse ride and how exciting it was. But my earliest memory is of my mother crying. I was probably four years old, and there were five of us kids, ranging from three to eight. My mother was usually unflappable. She was a schoolteacher, then a principal, and it took a lot to rock her world. But I remember one day when we were bickering with one another, our mom bursting into tears and saying, “I can’t take this anymore,” and locking herself in her bedroom. When we knocked on her door, she said, “Leave me alone. I need a minute’s peace and quiet. Just one minute.” So we ran to the living room clock and watched as a minute passed, then ran back to her bedroom and knocked on her door again.
Haven’t you ever wanted just a minute of peace and quiet? When you have grown so weary of the drama, so tired of yet another crisis, that all you want to do is bury your head in the sand, and your phone and television with it? I have a close friend who says his mental illness of choice is anxiety. I know exactly what he means. I can’t wait for this presidency to end so I can go back to worrying about simpler things, like global pandemics and climate change.
This morning I want to talk about our desire to escape difficulty, even though human thriving is usually the result of our ability to persist through difficulty and hardship. I want to begin with a story that maybe some of you have heard, but it’s a story I return to time and again, especially when I am tempted to bury my head in the sand. It is the story of Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier. Though the capability had existed to achieve the speed of sound, no pilot had done it, because as the airplane approached the sound barrier, it would shake so violently the pilots feared the airplane would disintegrate, so they would slow down. But Yeager believed otherwise. He believed that if he persisted when things were falling apart, and not only persisted but went faster, the airplane would pass the sound barrier and the flight would smooth out, which was exactly what happened.
So while it makes sense to flee our troubles, to hide from our difficulties, to ignore unpleasantries, and perhaps to even retreat from them, it is more likely that facing our difficulties head on, confronting them directly, and pressing forward, will lead to our growth and ultimate well-being.
Someone asked me not long ago if I believed in Satan, and I said, “Probably not in the same way you do. I don’t believe in an underworld evil being bearing a pitchfork, urging us to do evil.” Of course, when I said that, they looked at me as if I were Satan.
But I do believe, as a Quaker, that if the light of God is present in all people, it also seems possible that the potential for evil is within all people, that it speaks a language we understand, and too often heed. I do believe evil is sometimes so profound and pervasive, we tend to personify it. But let’s be clear, the greatest danger to us isn’t the encouragement to do wrong. The greatest danger to us is the encouragement to do nothing. To be silent when we should speak, to be indifferent when we should care, to sit still when we should stand up, and finally to prize peace and quiet amid the tumultuous roar of evil. While we don’t know who first said it, we nevertheless know it is true, that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing.
I understand, in times like these, the strong temptation for peace and quiet, the desire to retreat and hide ourselves away, to lock ourselves way and not come out, if only for a minute. But if we are weary of evil, if we are ground down to the nub by tyranny and injustice, we dare not run from it, but confront it, face it, battle it, day after day, until it is vanquished. Some weeks I am so weary of our current struggles I would love nothing more than to stand in this pulpit and speculate about the number of angels on the head of a pin. I know a fellow Quaker pastor who does just that. Every Sunday he mounts the pulpit, but never acknowledges the evil staring us in the face. He has decided to do nothing, to sit when he should stand, to fall silent when he should speak. It is, in my mind, a complete abandonment of the pastoral responsibility to speak truth to power.
I asked him, “Why don’t you address these matters.”
He told me, “Ten years ago, my congregation told me not to, so I haven’t.”
What a weak and puny gospel that is.
The greatest danger to us is the encouragement for us to do nothing. To be silent when we should speak, to be indifferent when we should care, to sit still when we should stand up, and finally to prize peace and quiet amid the tumultuous roar of evil. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing.
The first summer Joan and I were married, I got a job at the state highway picking up roadkill. It was a low man on the totem pole kind of thing. Everyone had to do it. There were guys who’d been there 30 years, and we’d talk during lunch. We all packed our lunches and would find a tree to eat under. So one day we were eating lunch and several of the old-timers began reminiscing about the Blizzard of ‘78. This was only six years later, so they remembered it well.
I asked one of them, “How did you ever clear all the roads.”
He said, “Well, it was like this. No matter how much snow fell, we kept plowing away. That’s the only way to keep the roads clear.”
Friends, we cannot lock ourselves away, as tempting as that might be. We must press ahead, even when it feels as if the plane is falling apart. For as long as the snow falls, we are going to keep plowing and clear the roads. We are going to run and not grow weary; we are going to walk and not be faint.