Sermon: The Devil Made Me Do It

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The Devil Made Me Do It – II

By Charles Rush

March 18, 2007

[ Audio (mp3, 6.4Mb) ]

en I was a child, Flip Wilson played a sassy, black woman named Geraldine that was always flirting with the men she was with and telling them to watch out because her boyfriend 'Killer' would return any time. Every once in a while she would admit that she was doing something she wasn't supposed to be doing. When questioned about it, she would look at the ground and say 'The Devil made me do it'. That covered just about everything… Or as a friend of mine says, 'The Devil made me do it the first time, after that I did it on my own.'

What are we to make of the Devil? Few of us have direct experience of demonic possession, except those who have watched their ex-spouse morph into a monster during custody hearings or those of us foolish enough to let our spouses coach baseball in the Summit Little League. In both cases, we see an evil that we never knew they were capable of, also knowing that there is some sense in which we asking for it unwittingly.

The Devil has a curious history in Western Civilization. Technically speaking, the Devil doesn't make an appearance in the Bible until pretty late in the game. We have 'Adversaries', the literal translation of 'Satan' but they are usually people, and usually given a definite article as in 'The Adversaries'.

It is only in the book of Job that God finally comes face to face with an Adversary with something like a proper name, Satan. And the Book of Job was written after the Jews had been exiled to Persia, modern day Iran. The Persians believe in Satan. Their religion was all about the wide-ranging battle between good and evil. They believed that this battle was being waged cosmically and that we humans were only playing it out on one dimension of the multi-dimensional universe and so we couldn't really see the complexity of the drama that was unfolding around us.

This way of looking at the universe has the obvious appeal that it sees the universe as far more complex than we can actually understand or explain. It has a double appeal to people that like to think about the world as a great conspiracy, that there is a story behind the story that only the elite are privileged to understand.

After the Jews got back, they started to see the Devil in other places in scripture. So the Rabbi's said that the snake in Genesis 1 that tempts Eve was actually satan. They said that the Angels in Genesis that reportedly procreate with humans to produce a race of debauched people were actually the legions of Satan.

In the Old Testament, the figure of Satan was always problematic because Jews believed in Monotheism, that the whole world ultimately coheres in God. Ultimately, they believed that there is one source of our creation and our destiny.

The figure of Satan works better for dualists, which is one of the reasons that the character Satan is more prominent in the New Testament. The New Testament was written with a Roman audience in mind and Romans were much more interested in demons in general.

Those of you who watch "Rome" on HBO have seen a bit of this and the show is to be commended for giving a pretty realistic view of religion in that period. Their religion was very different from ours in that it focused as much on cursing as it did on asking for protection or blessing. Prior to the advent of Christianity, religion was much more involved with the negative power of the transcendent.

There was one episode in Rome, where one patrician family damages another patrician family and the elders meet in a confrontation. One says to the other 'By the power of the furies I curse you and the house of Scipio'. Often this oral curse would be enhanced by a visit to a temple where you would pay the priestesses to conduct a full religious ceremonial curse, sometimes replete with a substitutionary torture or maiming of a doll. Likewise, you could have another priestess open the entrails of an animal and discern from the examination of their contents exactly the future fate of those you had cursed.

The daily life of Romans was very sharply proscribed by religious rituals. This is why they were said to be a pious people. They spent a whole lot of their time cursing their enemies, warding off the curses put against them, discerning their future, and making offerings to the gods so that their business and their love lives and their families might do well.

Even in their daily routines, they were very intent on repeating certain prayers to avoid divine retribution. They had lots of sayings like the children's refrain, "Step on a crack, you'll break your mother's back" and each of these sayings had to be accompanied by a quick action to avoid the curse. We wouldn't say quite that they were pious… Today we would say that they were very superstitious. They believed that demons surrounded all of us and that they affected our behavior, taking possession of us in a variety of ways. I suppose the only remnant we still have of this belief comes when we sneeze and someone says 'God bless you'. That expression comes from the Middle Ages when people believed that demons could enter the body when you sneezed and "God bless you" protected you. Perhaps you would make the sign of the cross. No doubt, this Medieval practice comes from a similar ancient Roman practice.

If you think of the world as transcendent forces, the object of religion becomes one of harnessing those forces to advance your fortunes and bringing them to reign herd on your enemies. It notably lacks the moral component of Christianity that spiritual formation should mold our character so that we become kind, loving, compassionate, forgiving, peace-embracing, justice oriented people. Romans just didn't think of religion as forming character quite like that. By the way, neither did Celtic religion or Teutonic religion or Nordic religion, the faith of our European ancestors… Nor did it, as far as I can tell, in the religions of West Africa. All of them shared a common assumption that religion was harnessing transcendent power to bless us and curse our enemies.

Today, we would find it astonishing the number of things that ordinary people sought divine assistance for: pregnancy, healing, spouses, new homes, new businesses, after tragedies, before war- just the big ones- but right down to daily routines, that called for special imprecations to be said, special rituals to be followed, and special gods that were in charge of each of these areas of life. And when the Romans met other people from Iran or Egypt and learned about their gods, they just kept adding to the divine pantheon, so that in the late empire, the list was certainly longer than I could keep up with, so that you really get a sense of just how controlled and ritualistic the daily lives of people must have been.

When you read the Gospels, and remember that they were written for a Roman audience, you see Jesus in a bit different light. The gospel writers have Jesus casting out demons. Romans would have wanted to know that he had that power. But he doesn't do it teaching us any esoteric formulas to be repeated when we encounter the same problem. It is his very presence. And all he says is 'be gone'. And what happens, only that these people are suddenly sober or they are healed. And there is no cursing at all, just healing. And there is no special bubble force around Jesus that keeps him immune from torture or injustice or the vagaries of nature. No, it just reinforces love, compassion, understanding- the qualities that keep us humane.

But regardless of whether there are ontologically independent entities that are able to direct and control us from beyond, and whether or not these ontologically independent entities are controlled themselves by one Supra-transcendent entity, Satan, there is no question as to the reality of collective evil to which they refer. And the Romans were very well acquainted with that reality as they were simply a violent people that became more and more so as Rome began to decline. It was that experience of war, more specifically war that was unrestrained by the rights of the vanquished, the collective experience where something is unleashed in the collective activity that crosses over and takes on a life of its own. That is what they were trying to describe.

And we have seen this too, so often in the past century. I remember the first time I saw it watching the films that were made of the night time rallies at Nuremberg, with the huge military parades through the wide boulevard lined with teutonic war bonfires. The masses in the night, Hitler giving voice to the anger and frustration of the Germans after the 1st World War… Having said A, we must say B, and thus say C, on and on it went until he was proposing not only the unthinkable, but the masses were in a frenzy to act on it. You could feel a line had been passed over and a collective force had been unleashed that made Kristalnacht, the actual day in 1938 that Germans attacked Jews to begin the Holocaust, inevitable.

The Japanese didn't leave us such a vivid documentation like the Germans but something similar was unleashed during the rape of Nanjing, if the witness of the victims of that gruesome occupation are accurate. They also describe the manner in which systemic violence morphed into wanton abandonment where ordinary soldiers find themselves participating in acts they didn't think they were capable of committing.

Neither do we have documentation of the institutionalization of terror, just the memoirs of the Gulag from the likes of Solshenitzyen, that describe the systematic isolation of friend from friend, relative from relative, as you were most afraid of those who knew you the best as these were the people that would create lies about you to save themselves from interminable prison sentences. His life work was really describing how a movement, Communism, took on a ruthless implementation and eventually engulfed an entire society.

The Cultural Revolution in China that claimed the lives of millions. Pol Pot in Cambodia. The Serbs in Bosnia. The Hutu's in Rwanda. The Arabs in the Sudan as we speak. The host of child soldiers across Africa like the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda that force/train children to become wanton and ruthless killers. Robert Kaplan, the international reporter on war and chaos, was stopped in Sierra Leone by a group like this. He wrote that there is nothing more frightening in the world than 3 dozen 13 year old orphaned boys with AK-47's- they can and will do anything.

No, collective evil is a very real, very powerful phenomenon, and we perhaps have more direct experience of it than at any time since the fall of the Roman Empire. The reality is that you open yourself to it, you participate in it, then you find yourself changing in ways that you can't undo.

I forced myself to watch the HBO documentary on Abu Ghraib as they interviewed the privates that took pictures of themselves with their inmates in those now infamous photos. They explained how they began changing, like characters descending into Dante's Inferno, and became more enured to humiliation and torture. They were remarkably candid and reflective. They realized that you lay down these tracks on your character and they leave an indelible impression that can never be entirely erased.

Watching them, I was reminded of a volume I read written about selected people that were interviewed following World War 2, all of whom had run concentration camps and death camps as officers. One of them had just finished a detailed description of the perversions that he developed exercising arbitrary power over prisoners. At the end of it, he started to break down as he explained that he found himself not wanting to return home to his family on the weekends because he couldn't turn his perversions off and on so easily. He finally said, "I can never be normal again."

No, if we collectively indulge ourselves in violence, power, and lust there comes a point where it jumps to a new dimension, seeming to take on a life of its own, and when we participate in it, we come away changed. It is as though our unconscious character viscerally knows this dimension of ourselves is dangerous and it needs social permission to loose itself and once loosed, we can scare ourselves on who we can become.

It is demonic… in the root sense of that word. Demonic means 'to be controlled by something from without'. Romans thought they were genii that controlled us. Their description is not that different from a guy I once heard talking about his cocaine addiction. He said, there is the normal Kevin and then… there is the other Kevin, the one that steals family jewelry from his mother and lies to her straight up about it. He feels possessed and driven in ways he would not normally proceed.

It is in this sense that the biblical depiction of evil is decidedly realistic… It is realistic about the problem of social evil and the way that it changes us more than we know. It is realistic about the degree to which we are shaped, wittingly and unwittingly, by the structures of organized power that we build for ourselves. And it is realistic about the subtle ways that we hide this awareness from our conscious selves.

Jesus tells us that God would have us be freed from these controlling forces. Jesus taught us that God wants us freed from compulsions, addictions, our autonomic responses conditioned by our culture and our social organizations. God offers us a freedom to be authentic, to respond humanely out of who we are. God offers us the possibility of being, nothing more and nothing less, than children of God.

In our story, Satan tempts Jesus with three of the things that routinely distract us humans: food, riches, and power. They are levels on the hierarchy of need. We don't think about food until we haven't had any for 24 hours and then it is pretty much an hourly occupation. And money… for the vast majority of us, there is never enough… And if we are really successful, the exercise of power, the sweep of command that we can get things done.

Jesus renounces them, not that we can't use food, money, or power- but they are distractions for him getting in touch with himself and finding the spiritual force of authenticity of who is at home when all these distractions are gone. He took 40 days to find out, sensing that he would need all of those spiritual resources to complete his life with integrity.

And how about you? Who are you really? Without the identities that you have adopted? Who are you really when no one is around? Aren't you curious to find out really? Amen.