I want to talk to you this morning about something difficult. It is a subject that most Episcopalians avoid.
I want to talk to you about the devil.
There is no denying that the Bible depicts another being. There is God and there is humanity but there is also someone else. From the Garden of Eden, where the snake lures Eve to conceive of disobedience, to the final book of Revelation, there is clearly evidence of a presence.
The word devil means the tempter. This presence is also called by other names: Satan, the adversary, the Evil One... I know that the word devil might sound medieval to you, too simplistic, like a caricature. But I want to use the word because that is the word that Luke uses in the gospel for today. And because, I do believe that there is such a thing as the devil.
Jesus had just been baptized. At age 30, everything that God had in mind for him was about to begin. He had so much work to do! There were people hungry for the word of God, people in need of healing, people who wanted to follow him. No one had more of an excuse to get to work than Jesus. No one had more important things to do. How strange that instead of launching into his ministry, instead of teaching and healing and rounding up his disciples, the first thing that Jesus does is nothing at all. He goes out into the desert, fasts and prays.
Jesus goes out into the desert to be alone with God, but someone else is there. If you read the gospel carefully, it says that the devil tempted Jesus for 40 days. I had always assumed that the devil showed up at the end, but that was not the case. The devil was there the entire time. Just as the devil is often there whenever we sit down to pray.
The work of the devil happens inside the human mind. You cannot even begin to identify temptation unless you get to know your own thoughts.
A thirty-one year old woman just died. From what? You ask. She died from drinking coca cola. You see, she drank it all day every day for a decade. If she did not get her cokes, she would begin to shake and get irritable. Her family begged her to stop, but she would not. She drank more than a gallon of coke every day. Eventually, all that sugar and all that caffeine made her heart stop. What in the world was she thinking? How could she justify pouring those chemicals into her body in such grotesque amounts? What was going on inside her mind?
We all are tempted, just like Jesus. We all can be not just distracted from God but tempted to do things that are not at all good for us or for others. How do you know when you are being tempted? Here are some clues for how to identify the tempter.
Clue #1 The devil always focuses on the self. It wants you consumed with yourself, either by feeling like a failure or feeling like a great success. If you are thinking about your success or your failure, whether people like you, how you are feeling, generally, it is temptation. Praying for others, well, that doesn't work so well for the tempter. Jesus is tempted in three ways. He is tempted to feed himself when he vowed to fast. He is tempted to worship the devil for power and success and he is tempted to kill himself. All of these temptations are about himself. Never does the devil suggest that he think of anyone else but himself.
Clue #2 The devil is not original. Temptation usually sounds like a broken record. Unlike God, whose revelation is always new and creative, the devil will say the same things over and over again. So if you are having a thought that you have already heard over again, it might be temptation. (You probably could rattle off some phrases that come up from time to time in your mind...or feelings that you are a looser or something like that, too fat perhaps, too stupid?)
Clue #3 The tempter tends to think everything is a crisis. Whatever is happening in your life is not just bad, it is awful! Patience, taking time, these are not things that the devil wants. The devil wants you to rush, to panic, to think that everything will NOT be OK. The devil does NOT want you spending time alone with God and you can bet that when you sit down to do so, you will be attacked by temptation. The devil does not want you to think about the meaning of your life or whether you are treating your loved one well or anything like that. The devil wants you so busy that you do not know that you haven't had a meaningful conversation with your spouse in a week. Or that your job is consuming your life, or that you have become desperately unhappy. The devil wants you to be too busy to notice.
Did you know that a frog, when placed in a pot of water, will stay in the water and allow its body to be boiled to death if you simply increase the temperature gradually? The frog never knows that his reality, the substance in which he sits, is becoming toxic, because he does not take himself out. If you never spend time alone, how will you know when your busy life has become toxic or when the tipping point has occurred and you no longer know yourself? If you fill your days with noise, how will you listen?
Final clue: The devil does not love. That means that if you are having a thought that is hyper-critical of yourself or others, something that has no connection to love itself, then it is probably from the tempter.
When Jesus went to pray, he was accosted. Naturally, we avoid quiet time too. Who wants to hear temptation? It's easier just not to listen. To be quiet is to walk into a battle-ground with our own minds. Even if all your thoughts center around is the laundry that you have not done, nevertheless, it is a battle as part of your mind tells you to get up and the other tells you to sit still. No wonder we are so afraid of silence, of doing nothing. Doing nothing means doing the most important thing, identifying the voice of darkness within our own minds and letting it go.
But the most important step in battling the devil is identification itself. Once you know that what you are hearing is temptation, it makes it easier to say no. So we must have the courage, like Jesus, to find time alone with God, knowing that devil will also come, at an opportune time, and we will have to learn to say no.
