Hosea 1: 6-10; Luke 11: 11,12, 13

The good and bad in all of us

In the Masterpiece Master mystery episode of a few weeks ago, young Inspector Endeavour Morse of the Oxford England police stands on the roof of a college overlooking the city with his superior Inspector Fred Thursday.  It is the mid-fifties. They have just caught a heinous and brilliant criminal who was also very knowledgeable about Opera. That’s the Oxford crime novel scene for you.  All the criminals are brilliant. Thursday tells Morse: “find something you can defend and after you have found it, hold on to it, for that is at least something the darkness cannot take from you.”  The Inspector is referring to the traumatic personal life of the young Morse the viewer does not know anything about.  But he is talking more so about his memories as a British soldier in Italy in World War II.   Friends, there always seems to be something about soldiers who have seen the ugliness of war:  They have see the goodness in their fellow soldiers and understand the true meaning of friendship through thick and thin, but they also know the deep darkness that hides in all of us.  I think there is a certain ambivalence about many veterans.  They know pride and shame.  Not too long ago, a Jewish extermination camp survivor wrote a book about his experiences and he discussed in great detail not only what the SS made the camp directors do, but what the experience in the camp did to the victims, how it could reveal the darkness.

When Carolyn and I went to Viet Nam last October it was my first time.  One night I asked her to take me to her grandfather’s house in China Town in Ho Chi Minh City.  Even though tall buildings were going up in the neighborhood around it, the house was there just as she remembered it. It was the exact same house she had gotten stuck in during the Tet offensive.   The house was uninhabited and dark.  Later on, she said of Viet Nam:  “there are just too many ghosts.” Of course she did not mean that literally. She meant that too many people she knew there were one.

Michael Cain plays a British journalist in Viet Nam in the 1950’s  and has the closing sentences in the film “The Quiet American,” based on the novel by Graham Greene. He says:” They say every house here has a ghost and if you can make peace with it, it will leave you alone.”  Perhaps he is saying something similar as Inspector Thursday said on that roof in Oxford.

In a sense we all live with ghosts inside us, not a literal sense of course.  Sometimes we call them demons, but of course they are not demons either.  In the 1956 movie The Searchers John Wayne is Ethan Edwards. He is a confederate soldier who returns to Texas to find that his niece has been kidnapped by the Comanches. He searches for her for five years and then finds out she has become one of them.  He faces his own hatred and his own twisted views about race, but doesn’t know what to do with it.

Friends, in the book of Hosea we run head-long into the contradiction of good and bad.  The book of Hosea is about the relationship of the prophet Hosea and the woman named Gomer God orders him to marry, even though it is clear that she will be an unfaithful wife destined for wild promiscuity.  But then the story isn’t really about Hosea and his wife, it is about God and Israel.  God in a sense is married to Israel, but Israel is too promiscuous and too unreliable.  It is like the Good is marrying to the mostly not good.  Jesus in Luke makes sure to remind us that even those who are not very good in the way they live their life will still do good things for their family.  This all teaches us two things: the really bad are still capable of doing good things for certain people.  The good always have some bad in them.  The Bible calls it sin.  We are not comfortable with that, but perhaps we should be.  You see, friends, you and I go through life dividing people into good and bad. It’s easier that way.  It makes sense that way.  It is too cumbersome to be nuanced.  Writing people off is so much easier.  But God teaches us in the Old Testament that the relationship with a wayward Israel is still worthwhile.  In the New Testament Jesus teaches us that God’s goodness is dependable in spite of people’s sin.  So what’s the point for us, friends?  The point is that we must embrace the truth about ourselves. We must accept that there is good and bad in all of us and that we can never get the bad out completely on our own.  We must appeal to God’s goodness and God’s love.  The more we remind ourselves of God’s goodness, the more it is likely to rub off on us.  If we accept that we can never get rid of the bad in us, that we can never quite get rid of the ghosts or the darkness on our own, we must turn to God and when we turn to God fully aware of the bad in us, we are liberated. Then we can make friends with our ghosts and hold off the darkness.  God knows who we are with all our flaws can God still loves us; all we have to do is accept the truth about ourselves and about others and let God’s goodness rub off on us, one touch at a time.  Thanks be to God.