What the Devil?

(Uriel Presbyterian Church )

 Sermon

“What the Devil...?”

13 March, 2011

First Sunday of Lent A

 The devil lives between “my will be done” and “Thy will be done”.

Hebrew Text: Genesis 2.15-17, 3.1-7 and 22-24

2:15   The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.  16  And the LORD God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden;  17  but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”.

3:1   Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?”  2  The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden;  3  but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ”  4  But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die;  5  for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  6  So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.  7  Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. 

3:22   Then the LORD God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”—  23  therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.  24  He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.

Gospel Text: Matthew 4.1-11

(NRSV) 1 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. 3 The tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread." 4 But he answered, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'" 5 Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, 6 saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'" 7 Jesus said to him, "Again it is written, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" 8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; 9 and he said to him, "All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me." 10 Jesus said to him, "Away with you, Satan! for it is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'" 11 Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

(Play the video clip of Flip Wilson and the “Devil Made Me Do It”)

There is a whole lot of truth mixed in with a whole lot of funny in that story. Today in our readings from the bible as well as in this film clip we are dealing with temptation...temptation that is personified in something called the devil. 

It just so happens that going out of church last sunday, someone asked me “Do Presbyterians not believe in the devil any more? Why is it that we never talk about the devil? Is it just too old fashioned?”  And I thought...what a wonderful wonderful question!! The really short answer to the question is that we Presbyterians have never “believed in” the devil...we believe in Jesus Christ who is living proof of God’s power, we believe in Yahweh, the God of Israel, the one who created light and dark and separated the sea from the land. And we believe in the power and work and the person of the Holy Spirit.  But I wouldn’t say we believe in the devil. I refuse to even capitalize the word. 

But that doesn’t mean that he...or she...or they...aren’t around.  But the main question that was asked of me was: “Why don’t we TALK about the devil any more?” Again the short answer is because we want to talk about Jesus Christ, and the positive things that Jesus is doing and working in us. But again, that’s the short answer. The some what longer explanation is that in our modern day with our scientific understanding that draws away the veil from so many things that we feel that we are beyond thinking about supernatural things--we feel above it all and many many millions of us feel above and beyond that and  because of this we don’t feel that we need a devil...or even a God to inform us what we need to do.

I feel strongly that in the body of Christ called the Church..with a Big C , each group and denomination of Christians have a different gift to offer, the orthodox have much to teach us about the mystery and majesty of God, Roman Catholics through their many beautiful devotions and spiritual practices  show us how to incorporate God into every activity of our lives, the Presbyterians are excellent at providing solid scholarship and innovative thinking about the bible and about current christian life. The Quakers teach us about equality and the beauty of silence before God, and one of the gifts of our Baptist brothers and sisters is to keep our minds always alert for encroaching evil, the kind of thing that the writer of 1st Peter speaks about: “Be sober and watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”

But who is this devil? What is the truth about this entity and how do we recognize it? Well, lets take a look at what you’ve already been thinking about this morning in your bulletins (each congregant received a questionnaire  tucked in their bulletin)

I suspect it was a whole lot easier to draw the devil than God, but is this really what we should be on the look out for?  Have you ever SEEN the thing you drew in that picture? I’m curious to know about the names too. By the way, our islamic brothers and sisters have at least 99 names for God. I invite you to look those up on the internet; they are beautiful and varied, but even THEY acknowledge that God’s names are infinite. How many did you think of for Old Scratch? There’s Old Nick, Beelzebub, Belial, Lucifer,  the lord of the flies, the father of lies...and of course Satan. 

It’s this last one that perhaps the most important and oldest. Ha Satan, (the satan) is a Hebrew word (!jfh;) that means “the adversary” and it’s really important if you want to know about the devil that you realize who hasatan is in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. In each instance in the bible, Satan is the prosecuting attorney, the one who makes the case against whatever it is that God is for. Take for instance in the Garden of Eden. HaSatan opposes what God has said, and so tempts Adam and Eve to rebellion. He doesn’t use a pitchfork or fiery flames to scare them into eating; he simply states the truth, albeit a truth that Adam and Eve probably couldn’t understand. After all , the distinction between good and evil didn’t exist until they ate the fruit, so how could they understand “good” or “evil” or even the word “not”? Not that this excuses our parents, because they surely could sense something terrible in the snake’s words, since even animals today can interpret the expression in a speaker’s voice1.  So appears the great trickster, the one who twists things and deforms them, making evil seem good, and good seem insipid and boring. The adversary has a starring role in the book of Job where he puts the case against humanity as a lawyer lays a case before a judge. And this is primarily the Jewish understanding of the devil even today. In fact, commenting on the Book of Job, in the ancient Jewish commentaries, the Talmud, the rabbis express sympathy that God gave him the job  to "break the barrel but not spill any  wine."

If you look carefully at our gospel reading for today, even there, the devil is acting not as the personification of the mighty forces of evil, he is still the adversary, the one who uses the book of Deuteronomy to prove his case to Jesus.

What  and who are we seeing in the temptation story of Christ? This is one of the most fascinating passages in the gospels--it’s like that question: “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?” If Jesus is in the desert by himself, who was there? It’s also fascinating because nowhere else in the gospels do we peer into Jesus’ head, with the exception of Jesus time in the garden of Gethsemane before his arrest.  Every where else we the hearers of the story are standing a far off observing what Jesus is doing outwardly. But here we have a glimpse into Christ’s soul.

How do we even know this story? Because the disciples had not even met Jesus yet and certainly the gospel writers weren’t out in the desert with him.  So how did Matthew know what happened?  We don’t know who the source for this story is. Is it Christ as told to the disciples? Is it a part of the oral tradition of the Gospel before it was written down?  Is this a way for the gospel writer to talk about Jesus as entirely human, subject to the same temptations as ourselves? There was no Jewish prophecy or tradition that Jesus needed to be tested by Satan, and while conflict with the devil in the new testament is not limited to this passage alone, in Matthew there are only three or four places where Jesus refers to the devil or demons or the evil one.  And here, satan is still the tempter, not the demonic force that will push back against the gospel message.

 So where does the prince of darkness grim get his fire and brimstone? The seed of the answer lies outside of the New Testament, in the Apocrypha, that part of the bible that we Protestants don’t read. In the apocrypha we find stories and events that didn’t make it into the final version of our bibles. There there is a reference to Satan being a fallen angel, with a host opposing God.  And in Revelation, which just barely made it into the bible, Satan is portrayed as the great dragon who is hurled into a lake of fire.

But it took an  Mediaeval Italian and an 17th century English poet to give the devil his due, so to speak. Dante Alighieri, wrote three volumes of poetry based on a dream he had in which he wandered down through seven layers of hell and up through seven layers of heaven, and described the fiery pit in  such detail that centuries of christians have confused his accounts with gospel truth.  Then there was John Milton, a English puritan who wrote the story  called “Paradise Lost”. I can remember as  a child on Sunday afternoons, leafing through the huge victorian parlour table copy that we had at our house, getting scared by the copperplate engravings of the devil. It was Milton that made the devil beautiful.  Milton went back to two obscure sentences in Genesis 6. in which this nephilim race of beings is described. To explain about these would be the subject of a whole Sunday School class, but he wrote that Satan was the most beautiful of all the angels in heaven and then created a whole mythic history around his anti-hero.  For our great grandparents and grandparents, the demon of the fiery pit and the fallen angel from these old poems are  what they passed on to us.

But here is the hideous problem with giving you this information.  It doesn’t touch at all on the the very real truth of pervasive evil, that miasma that flows through our lives  and our souls and our relations with each other, nor does it give you a clear picture of the source. 

Humans are creatures of duality.  This duality comes from our nature and our nurture; our observations of everything around us, and like Adam and Eve an almost primitive sense of  the deeper meaning of things that we can’t see, or smell, or taste or touch, but which we know to be there. It’s not unreasonable for us to understand this in terms of duality: there's a day, and on the opposite there’s night; we can see the bright side of the moon, but there is a dark side. There is a season when everything will grow, and a season when nothing grows. there is life and there is death. Even our computers are composed of binary bits that are either zeros, or they’re not! These opposites are part of the nature around us so we see things in duality. So it’s very thinkable for us to conceive that if there is a divine being constantly craving  our salvation and promoting our goodness that there would be an opposite force  that works for our perdition and our loss. In  a certain way that makes sense to have that balance, hence we make the devil in an image that fills that void the best. 

In the 21st century we have other concepts of the devil. We still have our duality, but most modern people think that we fulfill the function of the devil quite well ourselves. We are the ones who are striving against God just in our very natures. We are the ones who invent systematic evil like apartheid and the Spanish Inquisition. We are subject to the corporate evil that can take over whole countries and groups of people driving them to devilish madness; like Cambodia under Pol Pot or Jim Jones in Guyana.

 Maybe it’s not nearly so important WHO the devil is, but WHAT the effect of that ultimate darkness is upon us. It is sin and despair, violence and apathy, the things that we give control to and the faults that we delight in cultivating. I would put to you today that it is unsafe for your soul to believe and trust too much in a physical devil because it lets us off the hook way too easily . Take a look at the last question on the questionnaire: “What individuals, (historical or living), and which groups of people are/were in league with the devil?” What did you put down? I’ll lay dollars to doughnuts that if you’re like me, that was very easy to think of. When we can see the devil in others; when we can demonize “them”, then it is far to easy to ignore the devil in ourselves.  But there IS no “them”. On the most basic level, they are US--flesh, blood, love, hate, spirit-filled, mothers and fathers, who put their clothes on before their shoes just like us. Yet I will in no way deny that there is evil present there. 

There is SUCH evil around us and against us and in us. But the bottom line is that God subverts and overthrows the works of evil and of that agglomeration that we call the devil.  Satan is not God, and has no independent existence . From the very beginning, God takes the evil that we have done and recasts it, God’s very next act is to provide for our parents, giving them clothes, and while an angel stands between Eden and the first humans, God continues to have regard for them and provide them what they need. In Jesus Christ, evil is subverted and overthrown, by his example and by his teaching, but more than that through his unnecessary suffering and death--for he was completely innocent--by our understanding of God’s law, sin follows death, and Jesus had no sin. Finally there is Christ’s  resurrection the promise of the overthrow of the kingdom of this world and the inauguration of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Is satan passé? The idea that “the devil made me do it” is a literalism that tricks and distorts the very thing it is trying to prove, but don’t allow yourself to be lulled into a complacency. An excellent practice this lent, if you feel like you want to get rid of the devils that are screwing around in your life, I would suggest that you read a short little book by C. S. Lewis called the Screwtape Letters. The author of the Chronicles of Narnia provides a brilliant series of lessons in the importance of taking a deliberate role in living out Christian faith by telling the story of a new Christian with all his temptations and failings, but he tells it as seen from the devils' viewpoint.  Each chapter is a letter written from Hell giving encouraging advice to demons who want to succeed in their chosen career path.  And it is subversive Christianity at it’s best. 

Amen