Our reading tonight was about Moses and his reluctance to carry out God’s plan and follow God’s instructions.  Moses is one of the characters in the Bible for whom I have a strong affinity. I’m talking about the same Moses we have just read about, who when instructed by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, did not gratefully accept the task.  Instead he said: “O Lord, I have never been eloquent.  I am slow of speech and tongue.”.  What Moses was really doing was offering his poor public speaking skills, his lack of eloquence, his speech impediment as an excuse for not being able to do the job assigned to him by God, which was to lead his people out of Egypt.  Moses was anxious that because he did not speak well the Israelites would not be prepared to listen to him.  Now, God had spent some time deciding that Moses was the one for the task and he tried to reassure Moses that, as his Maker, God had made his mouth and knew what his potential was and what his powers of speech could be.  Yet Moses persisted with his resistance, and angered God by saying:  “O Lord, please send someone else to do it.”’

In fact, when Father Kevin asked me to deliver the sermon this evening, my first inclination was to say, “Please let someone else do it.”  Let someone, who is more comfortable doing this sort of thing, do it; someone who feels more at home in this environment - standing up here in front of all of you - someone who might have a more relevant message or to whom you might be more inclined to listen.  I had to be really firm with myself.  It’s not that I think I have nothing to say, nor that I’m afraid of having to do the preparation; it’s rather that I don’t really like the limelight, and being the focus of attention.  It’s much easier to pass the buck and let someone else do it. But unless we tackle things, we avoid making use of the opportunities we are afforded of being able to contribute.  And life is about making a contribution, and our responsibilities as human beings towards ourselves and towards other human beings.  And this is what I want to talk about, tonight. 

To get back to Moses, when he resisted God’s instruction, on the grounds that he was not a good speaker, God offered to help him, but he didn’t let him off the hook – he offered to assist him, so that he could still carry out his responsibilities towards his people.

Helen Keller, the woman who was both deaf and blind from infancy, never forgot the help she received from her teachers and friends.  She spent her whole life helping others in repayment for the help she had received as a child.  Not only is she remembered for her courage and her remarkable achievements, despite her physical handicaps, but she is also remembered for this very powerful statement: 

According to Helen Keller apathy is the worst possible evil and I think we can understand why she of all people would have felt that.  Had it not been for the passion of her teachers and the people who cared about her, Helen Keller would have been unable to communicate with other human beings, in any way at all, but her teachers and friends did not give up on her, they did something. They did not stand around tut-tutting about the impossibility of teaching someone who was unable to see or hear - how to speak, to read and to write. As a language teacher, I can only imagine how extraordinarily difficult their task must have been, and how creative and innovative they must have had to be in order to find new ways of teaching, to accommodate someone with such handicaps, but they rose to the challenge. They did something - it worked. And it changed Helen Keller’s life forever.

To follow on from Helen Keller’s comment about the evils of apathy, I would like to add a quote by Simon Wiesenthal who is famous for saying: “For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”  Now, of course, he is using the word ‘men’ in the generic sense of meaning people – all of us.

This is a frightening thought because I would imagine that most of us, if not all of us, in this chapel would consider ourselves fundamentally good people.  Granted, we don’t always get it right, we make mistakes, we mess up, but basically we don’t regard ourselves as bad,  but the suggestion in the quote, “For evil to flourish it only requires good men to do nothing”  is that we, through our own apathy, constantly let evil flourish around us.  We don’t necessarily perform the actions that can be regarded as evil, but we are accomplices in that we don’t prevent them from happening.   We adopt the attitude: “Why should I worry, when it doesn’t affect me?”

Pastor Niemöller reminds us of how often we ignore things around us until they touch us directly, but by then it is often too late.  As he says: “Then they came for me” – BUT BY THEN, of course, “there was no one left - to speak out for me.”   

In other words we seem to lack the ability to empathise with others - to feel with them or identify with them - unless we have had exactly the same, or a very similar experience.  This is a real indictment of human nature because it does not only reflect negatively on our lack of EQ, our emotional intelligence, when it comes to our dealings with other people, it also reflects negatively on our lack of imagination. We seem unable to identify with others or to relate to what they are feeling or experiencing, if we cannot imagine what they are feeling!  The moment we cease to do this, of course, we cease to be human.  We lose our humanity, because when we cease to identify with others, we cease to care – and it doesn’t matter what religion we believe in, or even if we believe, a basic tenet of human society is that we care about our fellow human beings.

Those of you in Form 4 and 5 will be familiar with the novel ‘The Kite Runner’ and a number of others will have read it as well. An important incident in the novel occurs when Amir, the central character, watches his servant and closest friend, Hassan, a young boy of 12, being held down, and raped, by a bigger, stronger boy, Assef, who is the embodiment of evil in the novel.  Amir who is witnessing the incident, and knows what is about to happen, says: “I opened my mouth, almost said something.  Almost.  The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had.  But I didn’t.  I just watched paralysed.

Amir chooses to run. Amir shuts his eyes, pretending not to see what is taking place.   He bites on his fist, instead of speaking out. He runs away from the alley, leaving his friend to face his fate.   But of course, the one thing that Amir does not manage to run away from, is the guilt.  The problem for Amir is that he has to live with himself, with his lack of courage and his apathy - and he spends the rest of his life trying to atone for his lack of action.

Now you might be wondering why I have chosen what appears to be such a radical example for our time together tonight, but if we think about it a little: rape is really about a show of power, about degrading and humiliating another human being, about belittling and violating another person’s dignity, space, physical and mental being.  And in a metaphorical sense how often don’t we see just that happening around us?  How often don’t we see people being humiliated – ‘cutting’, for example.  How often don’t we witness the mental or physical bullying of others?  What you like to call ‘sledging’, ‘dissing’ etc also springs to mind.  There are a myriad other slang names for much the same sort of thing.

I think we would all agree that rape is one of the most heinous of crimes and that when someone gets raped there is physical damage, which can cause death. But by far the worst damage, it would seem to me, would be the psychological damage and the loss of self worth as a result of the victim having been degraded, humiliated and violated.  And this damage can last a lifetime – a fate, worse than death, - perhaps! 

What we must remember is that some of the things we say and do, can, can inflict lasting wounds on people and can shape the way in which they relate to others for the rest of their lives.  Would we like to have that on our conscience?  Would we like to have on our conscience the fact that we, like Amir, just stood and watched while someone was brutalized and like Amir ALMOST said something, ALMOST, but didn’t.  And here I am talking about the supposed little things that I have already mentioned like ‘cutting’, ‘dissing’ etc. that we do in the confused interpretation of the spirit of camaraderie,  or a misdirected application of the term ‘brotherhood’ etc. - and we must not fool ourselves about our intentions either – the moment we are doing what we are doing at someone else’s expense, and it is obvious, or even likely, that they are not enjoying it, that we are making them unhappy - then we should stop what we are doing immediately, or if we are not the perpetrators we should speak out against those who are, on behalf of the victim, and put a stop to it!

If you think I am over-dramatising the situation, let me tell you a story.  Some years ago when I was still running the English Department, I invited, as the poet in residence, an Old Boy, who had left Hilton some 35 years before.  He was both excited by my invitation and terrified, because in those 35 years, he had not once, ever, wanted to return to Hilton College, not even to put a foot on the property - and he was very anxious about what he would feel when he did. His experience as a boy at Hilton had left him scarred, not physically, but mentally.  

He was a highly intelligent, very competent academic and a squash player, while at Hilton, but he had not found his stay here easy- and as an adult 35 years out of school, he was still hurting! Having spent a week with us, he said that his return to Hilton had helped him to lay some ghosts from his past. He also commented that it seemed a much more enlightened, tolerant place than the Hilton he had attended as a school boy. He was delighted to see how many boys were involved with drama, debating, music, and were producing poetry - in addition to playing sport – and he felt that his was a move towards encouraging, embracing and appreciating people with a range of different abilities and interests.  He felt that Hilton had certainly changed since his day, but we don’t want that to be only a perception, a superficial change.  We want everyone to have a feeling of belonging and that can only happen if we all take an active interest in the well being of everyone.

I appear to have moved a long way from Moses, but we need to remind ourselves that like many of us when faced with difficult situations, Moses first of all tried to duck the responsibilities of leadership.  And certainly in Moses’ opinion he was not the obvious leader in the situation, but God made it clear to him that apathy, that passing the buck, or leaving it for someone else to do, wasn’t an option.  God offered to help him but he insisted that he do it – one way or another. Often we do need help, like Moses did, in doing the things we have been assigned to do, or the things we know we ought to do - like leading by example, or having the courage to say or do what we know to be right.  Sometimes we need to speak up for ourselves or for others when we, or they, are being badly treated. These things take enormous courage and it is hard to be courageous, but like Moses, we can solicit help.

We don’t have to do it all by ourselves.  We can solicit help - the help of friends, parents, teachers, colleagues, on a human level, or we can solicit the help of God, but we need to tackle things.  We know that more than 35 years on from the experience of the poet in residence, whom I mentioned earlier, there are still boys who leave Hilton because they are unhappy here, and there are boys who stay here although they are unhappy, because others belittle them, humiliate them and violate their dignity.  Instead of just shrugging it off, and saying, “Oh well they obviously need to toughen up, if they can’t take it,” we should seriously be asking ourselves whether we have deliberately or unthinkingly contributed to another person’s unhappiness because of what we have said or done, or because of what we have not done.