Jesus could have told you his own story. It happened early in his ministry. He stood up in the synagogue in Capernaum- He was what we might call a guest preacher that day. It was going very well, because unlike the other teachers who merely quoted from the authorities, Jesus spoke as one having authority. Then it happened! A demon –possessed man stood up and shouted and interrupted the worship service. He screamed and shouted and made insensible sounds.

What do we do when the community of faith is interrupted by demon of violence? We now live in a world where a relatively small group of people has been able to accomplish what the combined industrial weight of Germany and Japan during World War II were unable to accomplish a direct hit upon our nation. We cannot go about routine worship when the world around us is convulsing with the demon of violence.

As horrible as the pictures were that we saw this week, there is some value in them. The value is that sometimes we have to see a face on evil or else it lulls us. We have to see the suffering and the ones who perpetrate the suffering. At the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D. C., there was a dispute over exactly how to betray the systematic death of 6 million Jews. Initially, when the building was opened, there was not a single picture in it of a Nazi soldier. The rationale was: this is a building for victims, not predators. But this meant that Jews were being marched off to invisible evil. It was then determined that you had to put pictures of Nazis in the museum to put a face on evil.

I will never forget the time that I was stunned by seeing the face of evil. I was under contract with the University of North Carolina Press and I went to the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, to do research on a book. I happened across some old scrapbooks in a United Daughters of the Confederacy collection. There were entire scrapbooks filled with photographs of black lynching taken during the 1920’s and 30’s. Not only did these photographs graphically depict dangling bodies, but also the approving smiles of whites who were standing about. Sometimes we have to put a face on evil and see it in all of its consequences to understand it.

Sometimes people personify evil by calling it Satan. I would not argue with that, as long as people understand that even in a satanic world, we still possess free will. People may be brainwashed, but they are not in a hypnotic trance. It was the free will of people who brought down the World Trade Center. It was the free will of teenagers who caused the massacre at Columbine. It was the free will of all who committed the crucifixion. From whence does the world’s evil come? It comes from the collective hearts of people.

Evil not only comes from the hearts of people, it comes from our hearts, our minds, our imaginations. When Jesus told the disciples that one of them would betray him, we are told that they all asked: “Is it I, Lord?’ All of them saw within themselves the capacity of doing the unthinkable.

What will be a greater tragedy than the events of this past week will be if we learn nothing from it. We must recommit ourselves to the task of peacemaking. Your task is: do what you can where you are. We do this in the full knowledge that the supreme victim of violence was Jesus himself.

Sometimes worship has to be interrupted. Even Jesus found it so.

The apostle Paul wrote: Who shall separate us from the love of God. Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril of sword? Perhaps now we can add yet one more thing to that list. Terrorism. Paul’s answer is the same: No, in all of these things we are more than conquerors through Him who first loved us.

II

Second, it seems to me that our worship can be interrupted by unmet human need. The cry of suffering interrupts transcendence. Note that when the demon-possessed man interrupted worship, Jesus did not have him removed from the listeners. Worship can never become an escape from the world’s suffering.

Jesus, on one occasion, went with Peter, James, and John to the top of a mountain. There he was transfigured before their very eyes. It was a high and holy moment. Indeed, Peter did not want to leave the mountaintop. We have to have mountain top experiences, because they show us what life with God can be like. But alas, we cannot live on the mountaintop.

As Jesus and the disciples were walking down the mountain, they could see an argument taking place between the other disciples and a distraught father, The father came running to Jesus and beseeched him; My child is convulsing with fever. I took him to your disciples and they could do nothing.

Maybe the delicate balancing act that we need to keep is to maintain ourselves in the middle of the mountaintop and the valley: the mountaintop of transcendence and the valley of human need. The call of God on the one hand and the cry of suffering on the other.

The story is told of a fire in an old church in an inner city. A sculpture of Jesus holding a lamb was saved and placed on the sidewalk outside the church. It prompted a long-time member to comment: well, it took a fire to finally get Jesus out on the streets.