A sermon preached by J. Stuart Taylor III
St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church
March 5, 2006
The 40 days of Lent always begins with the story of Jesus in the wilderness being tempted by Satan. Upon the season of Lent in years past, I have preached on this great moment, focusing on the on the specific temptations faced by Jesus and what they ultimately revealed about him. But I have yet to focus on the tempter himself, the one the Bible calls Satan. Do you believe in Satan? Recent polls have suggested that there is a growing number of Americans who believe in the existence of an evil personality called Satan. But maybe the question is not so much do you believe in Satan a two-dimensional bogey man with horns and a forked tail whose sole obsession is with human vice and sins of the flesh? The true question is how are we to name the evil of our time and of all times that has become so gigantic that it has virtually outstripped our ability to symbolize it. How do we name an evil so pervasive that it has become beyond our ability to comprehend? This issue is not so much whether one believes in an actual personality called Satan but whether or not one is able to identify in the world and the actual events of life that dimension that the ancients called Satan. This morning I would ask us to journey into the desert to be tempted with Jesus. And with Jesus let us seek to face and name Satan. Let us seek to unmask evil in ourselves and in our world.
There are actually different images of Satan in the bible that seem contradictory. In the book of Job Satan is portrayed as a partner of God, whose mission is to test human beings in order to reveal and expose the truth. Satan plays the role of the prosecutor in the divine court of justice, a scary but important partner with god. I was a chaplain in a psychiatric hospital for a year and I had a supervisor with the ominous sounding name of Hadyn Howell. Hadyn was a self-described redneck from N. Georgia who had a devilish sense of humor, a bona fide mean streak and a penetrating insight that would obliterate any self-deception or pretense. I remember seeing Hadyn one day and saying “where you been Hadyn?’. And he said Oh I have been going back and forth across the face of the earth. I thought what a weird response. And then I realized these were the very words that Satan had answered God in the book of Job. Hadyn was not an easy person to get along with and he could be a brutal supervisor but he helped me grow in my pastoral identity because he forced me to face the fallen-ness of my humanity. Hadyn Howell helped me understand that sometimes we can become conscious of the divine will in our lives only by coming up against an adversary who prods our illusions, who press us on our choices, who provokes our awareness. This is one way that the Bible describes Satan. Satan is God’s partner, serving the divine purpose as god’s enforcer, prosecutor, and agent provocateur.
But then Satan the tester of the truth as God’s partner does not fully describe for us the reality of evil that we experience in our world. The Bible testifies to a power of evil in human experience that cannot be finally humanized, cured or integrated but only held at bay. This we know about: We have experienced in our world the genocide of millions of people. We have experienced terrorism directed against innocent civilians. We have seen the violation of human beings through torture. We have watched the nations of the world learn to comfortably accommodate the possibility of nuclear war or the chronic death-dealing poverty of billions. We look around our immediate community and we know we are in the midst of an epidemic of domestic violence against women and children. How do we name such evil when we read in the newspaper of a landlord who deliberately attempts to blow up an apartment building full of tenants by opening a gas main in order to end their rent strike? Or we read of a teenager trying to get off drugs whose friends spike her candy with a fatal dose. It is important to name evil in the world because we cannot resist it until we name it. M Scott Peck the renowned therapist author scandalized the therapeutic world when in his book People of the Lie he described as evil certain personalities that he had encountered in his practice. Peck encountered what he called an “extraordinarily willful spirit of malignant narcissism” that had so completely taken over these individuals that there was no longer a recognizable self. Therapists of our overly psycholigized culture rose up to denounce what they perceived as Scott Peck’s judgmental stance that condemned people. I for one appreciate Peck’s willingness to look more deeply into the reality of evil, beyond and deeper than all the immediate causes and consequences. Here in lies the challenge of naming evil. If we say this person is evil or that person is evil, we run the risk of legitimizing whatever we need to do to stop that evil doer. When we point to evil out there, somewhere else; we also run the risk of ignoring our own shadow side, of refusing to recognize our own complicity with evil.
But nevertheless, the challenge is still before us: How do we name and therefore take seriously the reality of evil in our world and in human experience? Walter Wink writes that “There is something sad in the moralistic tirades of fundamentalist preachers who terrify the credulous with pictures of Satan lurking in the shadows, coaxing individuals to violate rules which are often satanic in themselves and need to be broken. And at the same time these preachers ignore the mark of the cloven hoof in economic or political arrangements that suck the life out of whole generations. . When television evangelists could try to terrorize people with Satan and then speak favorably of SA apartheid we knew something was wrong. But Wink goes on to reflect that so-called Liberal Christianity has so reacted to the misuse of Satan image by fundamentalist circles that it has tended to throw out the notion all together. To kill off Satan is leave ourselves vulnerable. The absence of any really profound way of imagining evil has left us at the mercy of a shallow religious psychology that is naïve, optimistic, and self-deceiving. Evil must be symbolized because it cannot be thought. Unless we name Satan evil can not be brought into conscious awareness and thus consciously resisted.
We have journeyed into the desert with Jesus to be tempted by Satan. So how would we name and unmask this evil that resides in us and in our world? What is this evil at its deepest core but violence. Violence is at the very heart of the matter. For the fundamental temptation that Satan places before humanity is the temptation of violence. Violence is best defined, writes John Dear a Jesuit theologian as the act of forgetting or ignoring who we are. We forget that we are brothers and sisters of one another, each one of us a child of God. Violence occurs in those moments when we forget and deny our basic identity as god’s children, when we treat one another as if we were worthless instead of priceless. This morning in our adult education class on non-violence we sought to name the evil of violence what is violence? Violence is emotional, verbal, or physical behavior which dominates, diminishes or destroys others or ourselves. Violence crosses boundaries without permission, disrupts authentic relationships, and separates us from other beings. Violence is motivated by fear, unrestrained anger, or greed to increase domination over others. Violence often provokes new violence. Social and personal scripts often propel the spiral of retaliatory violence that tells us there is simply no other option. Whether we like it or not, most of us enrolled in a class called Violence 101. This class is not confined to a particular setting or time of day. Nobody asks us if we want to attend. It is taught everywhere, open to all. Our teachers are the media, with their flow of violent images and messages, and our society’s values of consumerism, rugged individualism and superiority. In America especially, violence is almost like mother’s milk. We are born into a national history and experience, which many historians have said, is founded on the myth of redemptive violence. The myth of redemptive violence is the idea so pervasive in our culture that violence is a justified means to a higher end. Consciously or not we are continually being schooled in the logic and practice of emotional, verbal, physical, or structural violence.
As we face and name the evil in our world we are not just talking about violence between individuals. There is institutional violence, which the theologian Walter wink calls the domination system. When Jesus said I am in the world but not of the world, we could accurately translate that today as I am in the domination system but not of the domination system. This domination system is played out wherever power is used to dominate people in anyway. Why should Satan content himself with violence between individuals when Satan so effectively presides over entire civilizations and societies that systematically erode and attacks human rights? Satan presides over a domination system that treats people as robots for producing and serving things. This domination system denies not only the spiritual but also even the poetic, the artistic, the inward. Satan the ruler of this world propagates belief in the ultimate power of money and has organized an economic system that exploits most of the people of the world. Satan is the god of this world because we have made him god as a consequence of our willfully seeking our own good without reference to a higher good or the good of others. Satan is the collective shadow, the sum total of all the individual darkness, evil, unredeemed anger, and fear of the whole human race. We are not dealing here with a literal person of Christian fantasy. Satan is the world’s corporate personality in, which resides the entire complex of evil existing in the world.
For 40 days in the desert, Jesus successfully resisted the temptation of Satan to twist and distort his messianic identity. I don’t believe Jesus left the desert knowing everything about his future or what God’s purposes for him would be. But he did know who he wouldn’t be and what he wouldn’t do. And so as he began to proclaim and to practice this Gospel of Non-violent love, the authorities declared him an enemy of God. When he cast out demons and declared this to be a sign of the in-breaking of God’s kingdom, Jesus was accused of being in cahoots with Beelzebub. When he declared sins forgiven, he was called a blasphemer, and when he violated the Sabbath, he was damned as a lawbreaker. When he identified himself with women as equals, took children seriously, ate with tax collectors identified with prostitutes how else could he be viewed by the status quo except as satanic. Jesus lived out this gospel of nonviolence in creative and powerful ways. Jesus gospel of nonviolence was and is an act of faith in a non-violent god and a way of experiencing this compassionate God whose will is for peace and justice. Jesus gospel of non-violence helps us to remember that we are all children of God, meant to love and be loved. Jesus gospel of nonviolence calls us to a spiritual journey during this season of lent, from fear despair, and greed to compassion, balance, and wholeness. Jesus invites us to join him in this journey.