William H. Willimon - "Ordinary Sin" (March 28, 1999)

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-	Peter remembered the saying of Jesus,	0:09
	before the cock crows,	0:13
	you will deny me three times,	0:16
	and he wept bitterly.	0:20
	Measured by mere numbers,	0:25
	the final solution of the Nazis	0:29
	was not unique.	0:32
	Stalin killed many more people,	0:35
	so did Mao.	0:38
	The Hutus slaughtered a larger	0:41
	proportion of their population,	0:45
	and in a shorter amount of time,	0:47
	and so did the Khmer Rouge.	0:50
	The British wiped out	0:53
	the entire Tasmanian race,	0:57
	not a one is left today.	0:59
	And where are the Apaches,	1:02
	and the Sioux?	1:04
	And yet, I suppose the Nazis	1:07
	have a special place in our imagination,	1:10
	in our characterization of evil.	1:16
	If for no other reason than that	1:19
	they were so ordinary.	1:22
	In the words of Hannah Arendt,	1:26
	"The evil committed by the Nazis,	1:28
	was so banal".	1:31
	They weren't some kind of frenzied,	1:35
	spontaneous mob.	1:38
	The Nazis arose from of the best educated,	1:40
	most enlightenment-saturated, modern of modern nations.	1:44
	I remind you that they received their first,	1:51
	and best affirmation	1:54
	within the universities.	1:57
	The Nazis killed 6 million Jews,	2:01
	but this century's wars,	2:05
	and utopian governmental programs	2:07
	have murdered at least 150 million people.	2:11
	And paradoxically,	2:18
	I wonder if that is one the reasons	2:21
	why we are so drawn this week	2:24
	to this story of Simon Peter.	2:28
	Simon is like us.	2:32
	One fine day, he was the top student	2:36
	in Christology 101.	2:39
	That day at Caesarea Philippi,	2:41
	when Jesus had a pop quiz,	2:44
	he turned to his disciples and said,	2:46
	"Who do people say that I am?".	2:49
	And Peter's hand was the first to go up.	2:51
	"You are the Christ, the Son of God".	2:54
	And Jesus told his disciples,	2:56
	"I wish all of you could be	2:58
	"as sharp as Simon".	2:59
	And we don't like him for that,	3:05
	because who loves a nerdy little teacher's pet?	3:06
	(audience laughing)	3:09
	But this week comes the final.	3:12
	And the one giving the test this week is not Jesus,	3:17
	it's the maid in the courtyard,	3:21
	and Simon blows that one big.	3:24
	"Weren't you with the Galilean?", she said.	3:30
	And Peter responds, "By God, I don't even know the man".	3:36
	That's some denial from	3:44
	a man who Jesus once called the "rock",	3:46
	the "premier disciple".	3:50
	Surely when Jesus nicknamed him, the "rock"	3:52
	he was speaking as a joke.	3:55
	And we love Peter for that,	4:00
	because...	4:02
	Maybe it reminds us of our brash declarations of faith,	4:04
	which are also often a joke.	4:09
	"I believe", we say as we're sitting here in church.	4:14
	But then on Saturday night in the dorm,	4:18
	when there's a price to pay,	4:21
	we say...	4:25
	"You know, I really--	4:27
	"I didn't know him that well, actually".	4:30
	Some of you are ancient enough	4:37
	to remember Lloyd Douglas's novel, The Robe.	4:39
	Don Schriver reminded me how there's	4:43
	that scene on Good Friday evening,	4:45
	after the crucifixion,	4:47
	after the evil has been done,	4:48
	and it finds Peter and a Roman centurion in conversation.	4:50
	And the centurion hangs his head and says,	4:55
	"I crucified him".	4:59
	But Peter hangs his head even lower and says,	5:03
	"Oh, but I...	5:07
	"I betrayed him".	5:10
	And we can identify with that,	5:14
	because for most of us,	5:16
	the level of our betrayal	5:19
	hardly ever gets up to the level of a cross.	5:21
	More likely it's the kind of ordinary,	5:25
	everyday, denial.	5:27
	In ordinary, everyday situations,	5:32
	"I didn't really know him".	5:35
	50 years ago, Eric Auerbach wrote	5:41
	Mimesis: The Representation	5:45
	of Reality in Western Literature.	5:47
	In Mimesis, Auerbach contrasts	5:51
	the picture of humanity	5:55
	which appears in the Roman and Greek plays and poetry,	5:57
	with that that you find in the Bible,	6:03
	in the New Testaments.	6:06
	In the Classics, ordinary folk almost never appear.	6:08
	Greek drama is about kings and queens.	6:13
	Auerbach noted that if an ordinary person appears	6:16
	in a Greek drama, it's only for comic relief,	6:18
	or as some kind of buffoon.	6:22
	But, in Simon Peter, in this story	6:26
	we just read for our Scripture,	6:28
	Auerbach finds...	6:30
	a much thicker description	6:33
	of what it means to be a person.	6:35
	Of Peter, and that exchange	6:39
	with the woman in the courtyard,	6:42
	Auerbach says,	6:44
	"Here's a story that takes place	6:45
	"entirely among everyday men and women, commonpeople.	6:47
	"In classical literature, this could only be	6:52
	"a farce, or a comedy.	6:55
	"And yet here, it is neither.	6:57
	"Why does it arouse our most serious,	7:00
	"and most significant sympathy?	7:05
	"Because, it portrays something which neither	7:08
	"the poets nor the historians	7:11
	"of antiquity set out to portray,	7:12
	"the birth of a spiritual movement	7:16
	"among common people.	7:18
	"It is concerned with the same question,	7:21
	"the same conflict with which every human being	7:23
	"is basically confronted, which therefore remains	7:26
	"infinite and eternally pending.	7:29
	"What we see is a world which on one hand,	7:32
	"is entirely real and so average,	7:34
	"you can identify the place,	7:38
	"the time, and the circumstances,	7:39
	"but which on the other hand,	7:42
	"in the background it's being	7:44
	"shaken to its very foundations.	7:45
	"Its being transformed and renewed	7:47
	"before our very eyes.	7:49
	"It's what happens when	7:54
	"the extraordinary touches the ordinary."	7:55
	I love the way Alcoholics Anonymous	8:01
	teaches its members to introduce themselves.	8:03
	"I am Jane.	8:08
	"I am a alcoholic,	8:10
	"but by the help of a higher power,	8:12
	"a recovering one."	8:15
	And I think we love Peter for embodying that.	8:19
	For we are, most of us,	8:22
	quite ordinary in our sin.	8:23
	And no redemption would do people	8:27
	like us any good,	8:29
	if it first required us to be pure, or heroic.	8:31
	We need a higher power willing to get	8:37
	its hands dirty in the ordinary.	8:40
	And maybe the first step towards redemption,	8:45
	the first fumbling steps,	8:47
	is the one AA encourages members to make,	8:50
	it's just simple honesty.	8:53
	Some of you were here on the first Sunday of Lent.	8:57
	We had a lively guest preacher	9:02
	tell us all we're sinners.	9:03
	The whole lot of us.	9:06
	And now it's been pretty much like that	9:08
	for the last 40 days of Lent.	9:10
	When the church has been using its	9:13
	various means, the hymns,	9:15
	the prayers, the Scripture,	9:16
	to try to get each of us to say,	9:19
	"I'm Will, and I'm a sinner,	9:22
	"but by the help of a higher power,	9:25
	"a recovering one."	9:29
	The Church always told us that Simon Peter	9:32
	was the foundation of the Church,	9:35
	the first disciple.	9:38
	The Pope in Rome says that	9:39
	he sits in direct apostolic succession from Peter.	9:41
	I don't know if the Pope is so closely connected to Peter,	9:48
	but we sure are,	9:52
	we ordinary, unspectacular, betrayers.	9:54
	If I were writing the Gospels,	10:02
	I think I would have been tempted	10:05
	to kinda clean up...	10:06
	The rock of the Church,	10:09
	the spiritual great-great-great-grandaddy of everybody here.	10:12
	But no, the Bible is truthful and honest.	10:17
	It tells the whole story of who we are.	10:23
	And it's so hard	10:29
	to tell the whole story.	10:32
	It's a child saying to me the other day...	10:36
	that he was thinking about	10:41
	going to school that morning- an 8 year old-	10:42
	and said, "I just hate it when we start out the day	10:45
	"with self-esteem class."	10:50
	(audience laughing)	10:53
	See he's smarter than the school system.	10:55
	Back in the 1960s when the Civil Rights Movement	11:00
	began to impact the American South,	11:04
	and some of us, for the first time,	11:06
	began honestly to review our past.	11:08
	To admit that our parents, and our grandparents,	11:12
	did wrong in participating in,	11:15
	and benefiting from,	11:18
	racial segregation.	11:20
	I remember Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi complained,	11:23
	that of all the critics of the south,	11:28
	the worst were the southern-born critics.	11:30
	He said, "You people are thieves,	11:33
	"you are stealing the dignity, and the honor	11:36
	"of your dear, dead ancestors".	11:39
	And in a way, Governor Barnett was right.	11:42
	Honest Christians...	11:47
	look back at our past,	11:50
	and beg, by the grace of God,	11:52
	to tell our story,	11:54
	in ways that deprive our ancestors	11:56
	of their alleged innocence.	12:00
	There is no greater sin, we feel,	12:04
	for a people to claim that we are without sin.	12:06
	That we are innocent.	12:10
	That there is no blood on our hands.	12:12
	It is a great spiritual feat,	12:15
	to be able to tell our story	12:17
-	our story-	12:20
	and to be able to tell it straight.	12:21
	Thus, as Peter scurries into the night,	12:25
	cursing Jesus, all of us betrayers,	12:29
	oh, we love him,	12:34
	and we thank God that the Church	12:36
	had the guts to leave his story	12:38
	in our history.	12:42
	Dietrich Bonhoeffer paid the ultimate price	12:47
	for his opposition to the Nazis,	12:50
	and we rightly celebrate his witness,	12:53
	we rightly call Bonhoeffer a saint.	12:55
	But, maybe even more we ought to celebrate a poem	12:59
	that Bonhoeffer wrote	13:03
	one dark night, in 1944, in a Nazi prison cell,	13:05
	a poem he called Night Thoughts in Tegel Prison,	13:09
	in which this saint confessed honestly	13:14
	his own complicity in the sin of Nazism.	13:18
	He wrote, "We saw the lie raise its head,	13:26
	"and we did not honor the truth.	13:29
	"We saw brethren in direst need,	13:33
	"but we feared only our own death.	13:36
	"We come before thee as men,	13:41
	"as confessors of our...	13:44
	"sin."	13:48
	It takes someone extraordinary	13:51
	to confess such ordinary sin.	13:54
	Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners	14:01
	struck me as a compelling book.	14:07
	It's a chilling account of how ordinary, everyday Germans	14:10
	participated in Hitler's final solution	14:14
	of the Jewish problem.	14:17
	But it was only later that I realized	14:21
	what was wrong with Daniel Goldhagen's book.	14:23
	And what was wrong was Goldhagen's attribution	14:27
	of the massacre of the Jews	14:30
	to something that was sort of peculiar in the Germans.	14:33
	He calls it their "special brand of eliminationist	14:37
	Anti-Semitism" that infected German culture,	14:41
	in a peculiar, particular way.	14:45
	Oh, if there were only some special,	14:49
	peculiar, attribution of evil.	14:51
	Then the evil that would be deeply regrettable,	14:57
	but the main thing is it wouldn't be ours.	15:00
	It would be like, peculiar to the Germans.	15:05
	It would be their particular problem.	15:09
	No.	15:13
	The horror was that the Germans were so normal.	15:15
	The evil was so horribly, undeniably...	15:19
	Typical.	15:23
	And we're so ordinary.	15:24
	And our sin in so typical.	15:27
	I've always thought that one of the most chilling phrases	15:32
	was that term "domestic violence".	15:35
	It's the domesticity of our evil that is so chilling.	15:41
	And, this week...	15:48
	this week we wonder,	15:52
	what would God do with sinners	15:53
	whose betrayal is so utterly ordinary?	15:56
	What shall become of us	16:02
	in our ordinary sin?	16:04
	Jesus was being led away to torture,	16:10
	and to death,	16:15
	as his own twelve best friends	16:17
	scurried into the night.	16:19
	You remember what he said to them?	16:23
	"I give to you, as my Father has given to me, a kingdom".	16:26
	To the very ones who had forsaken him, and denied him	16:34
	and betrayed him, in their oh-so-ordinary sin.	16:38
	He promises...	16:43
	to us...	16:46
	"I go now, to prepare a kingdom..."	16:48
	For you.	16:53
	Amen.	16:56

Item Info

Title:

William H. Willimon - "Ordinary Sin" (March 28, 1999)

Description:

Sermon start time: 00:09. Sermon end time: 16:57.
We are like Simon Peter, ordinary in our sin. People in Nazi Germany’s time were ordinary people too. We should not be surprised by the great evil that ordinary people are capable of. Yet God’s redemption is for the ordinary people and will transform ordinary people into the Church. (Abstract created by Duke Divinity School staff.)
Key quotation: “We are, most of us, quite ordinary in our sin. And no redemption would do people like us any good if it first required us to be pure or heroic. We need a higher power willing to get its hands dirty in the ordinary.”

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https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4rn30n9f

Date:

March 28, 1999

Speaker:

Willimon, William H.

Liturgical Calendar:

Biblical Book:

Luke

Chapter and Verse:

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Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 CS-0951
ref10059_mo1
uachapelsermaud
duke:321047
dcrau001595
ark:/87924/r4rn30n9f
39a9abe2-cd11-495b-b232-3cd5404b4c9e

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Duke Chapel Recordings

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Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

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United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

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The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

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CC BY-NC 4.0

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This recording may contain 3rd party materials, such as music or readings that are therefore not covered by the Creative Commons license indicated here. For more information see https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

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William H. Willimon - "Ordinary Sin" (March 28, 1999)

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1. William H. Willimon - "Ordinary Sin" (March 28, 1999)

Duke University Archives

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William H. Willimon - "Ordinary Sin" (March 28, 1999)

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Duke University Archives

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