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Then as one man's
trespass led to
condemnation for
all men, so one man's
act of righteousness
leads to acquittal and
life for all men.

For as by one man's
disobedience many were
made sinners, so by one
man's obedience many
will be made righteous.
—Romans 5:18-19

During the crisis in Kosovo last summer, I sat preparing a sermon at a picnic table overlooking beautiful Middle Cove in Essex, Connecticut. As the snowy egrets made their stately way across the shimmering sheet of water, I went through my file of clippings about Kosovo. A sentence from one of the articles caught my eye.

"Macedonia's camps are sweltering cauldrons of hate," it read. This is a snapshot of human life on our planet; a minority of us live and work in idyllic circumstances while the vast majority suffer every kind of inhumanity and deprivation. "Violence and destruction!" cries the prophet Jeremiah (20:8). For most of the world's population, life is hell. That is the situation to which Paul addresses himself in the Epistle to the Romans.

Romans is the biblical book that has most often been the source for revolutionary and transforming ideas. An issue of The New York Review of Books (June 15, 1999) contained a groundbreaking essay by Peter Brown about the fourth-century bishop Augustine of Hippo, whose reading of Romans remains a fertile field for the Western imagination. Augustine found Paul's writings to be a precise account of the human condition, at all times and in all places.

Paul the apostle, like Jeremiah the prophet before him, looks about him and sees a vast landscape of evil and godlessness. Attractive surroundings do not mask the seriousness of the situation. The human condition is grave.

The Kosovar refugees of whom I read that day presented a case in point. I think it is fair to say that most of us had enormously sympathetic reactions to the plight of the million ethnic Albanians who were treated with such ferocious inhumanity. Every night we looked at televised scenes of heartbroken refugees returning to their destroyed homes where relatives were murdered, and we considered how awful that would be. With a typical human tendency to sentimentalize, we viewed the Kosovar refugees as entirely innocent victims and did not care to think further than that.

The Bible, however, teaches us something quite different about human nature; Jeremiah says, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt. Who can understand it?" (17:9). In other words, human nature is never innocent.

My clipping about the Macedonian refugee camp tells a shocking tale. The June 7, 1999, story by David Rhode in The New York Times reports how a Gypsy family had been in the camp for several weeks, along with the Albanians who were arriving every hour. Gypsies, a despised minority to begin with, were suspected of collaborating with the Serbs. A group of 15 or 20 Albanian men assaulted two Gypsy men and beat them savagely. The Gypsies were rescued by aid workers and taken to the Catholic Relief building for safety. The mob of Albanians, growing in numbers by the minute, tore down a chain-link fence, ripped bars from the windows, and burst through the front door using a metal gutter as a battering ram. The terrified relief workers tried desperately to stop the attack but failed, and the Gypsy men were beaten again, almost to the point of death.

The mob, screaming for blood, had grown to several thousand by this time. When they discovered a 7-year-old Gypsy boy whom the aid workers were attempting to protect, they seized him and attempted to tear him limb from limb. Ed Joseph of Catholic Relief Service, who days later was still shaken, said that they had attempted to rip the boy's arms off—literally. Several aid workers, including Joseph, were somehow able to snatch the boy from the mob, and by a miracle the Red Sea parted. The arrival of several hundred Macedonian riot police and the American ambassador finally put a stop to the nightmare, but it had lasted for four hours.

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October 2 2000, Vol. 44, No. 11