A few months ago, we had a tragedy in my family. My son Jacob’s beloved gecko died. Now you may think that this sounds like a small deal, but it was not. Jacob is ten years old and he loved that little African fat tailed gecko, his name was Sunshine. And when Sunshine’s light went out, when his tail got thin and he would no longer eat, there was real despair in our house.
The afternoon that the gecko died, Jacob stood with the tiny creature in his hands, and Max, my six-year-old, tears pouring down his face, said, “Oh, why did Adam have to eat the apple?”
Sometimes, I want to say the same thing: Oh, why did Adam and Eve have to listen to that snake?
Where did that snake come from? He was somewhere in Eden, waiting. Waiting to disrupt perfection and separate us from God. He was somewhere amidst the creation that God made. We are not told how he came to be. And all that snake does is introduce a thought, an idea: disobedience. He simply poses a quesetion:
What would it be like to disobey God? What if it made you like God?
That snake introduced a bad idea. Whenever we try to be like God, it ends in a mess. What were we thinking?
So Eve eats and Adam eats.
And my heart breaks when I remember the very first thing that God said to them after the fall. God says,
Where are you?
Because from that moment on, we were estranged. We were separated. And from that moment on, we entered a battlefield. It may sound strange to you, coming from an Episcopal priest, but I do believe in the battle between good and evil. And I believe that it is waged right here, in Jacksonville, Florida.
I sat with a business man about three weeks ago at the River Club. We ate lunch and looked out over the city of Jacksonville. Why are things so broken? He asked. And I thought of the children who can’t receive a decent education and the people who are homeless and the soldiers who may be giving up their lives in Afganistan. “I guess that we just wanted to do things our way and not God’s way and that’s when the mess began,” I said.
The story of Adam and Eve tells us a deep truth about who we are. But it is not just about us trying to do things our way. It’s also about something else. Something other than you and me and God. There is another party involved in our lives at times. There is another force. It is about the Adversary.
It may sound strange to you, especially coming from an Episcopal priest, but I believe in the devil.
This one goes by different names in Scripture: demon, devil, Satan (which just means Adversary or the one who opposes), the one who actively pulls us from God’s presence.
The Church in this century has done a poor job of discussing the Adversary. We either scare people to death with horror movies that depict incredible gruesome gore or we write Satan off as a medieval notion, a red man with horns and a tail. No educated person could swallow such a caricature. So we ignore his existence.
When you ignore the existence of the Adversary, you end up blaming humanity for the state of the world. We are just rotten people, or broken people. But sometimes this is just not adequate. Sometimes there is no denying a force that pulls us away from the good.
I think that is why we are so attracted to movies and stories where the good battles clear evil. It speaks a truth to us, though in our world the Adversary is always cloaked and longs to remain hidden.
All of these thoughts that you and I have: these worries, these crazy obsessive thoughts, they do not come from just you. Do not blame yourself for them. They are temptations and they come from a source outside yourself. There is something else that pulls you from God. There is truly a tug of war going on in your mind.
Jesus came to show us the way back to God. He meant for us to follow him. And the first thing that Jesus did, after his baptism, before he did any ministry at all, the very first thing he did was to get to know his own mind. The first thing that he did was to bring out the devil in broad daylight. He let the tempter speak to him and he listened. And then he said no.
Jesus went out in the desert to meet the tempter face to face. He met that ancient snake, that being that opposes the will of God. Jesus knew that out in the desert, with nothing to distract him, he was bound to hear the voice of something other than God, the voice of the tempter.
The tempter is usually hidden to us, but he was not hidden to Jesus. Jesus was so sure about who he was and how he was loved by God that the only way the tempter could appear was to just appear in plain sight and to openly ask the questions.
Jesus was so pure, so clean of heart, that he fasted and prayed for forty days before the tempter would come out and challenge him. But finally, the tempter arrived and tested Jesus in three ways: He challenged Jesus to feed himself, relying on his own self and not God. He asked Jesus to test God by trying to kill himself. And he asked Jesus to worship Him. To all of these temptations, Jesus said a clear and definitive No.
The tempter will also come to you in three fundamental ways. Firstly, the tempter will say, “Let your life be about you and only you. Help yourself! You poor thing! Save yourself! Hold onto your money!” That is a primary way the tempter separates us from God, by getting us absolutely absorbed in ourselves. I once knew a woman who lived in a kind of hell. She lived alone, never having a successful relationship because she was never treated perfectly. Everyone hurt her or betrayed her. She went from one church to another with people disappointing her left and right and she never could admit to being wrong. She had not a friend in the world but still, she was right and she was unfortunate. She lived in hell, but she was right! And the tempter was happy with her.
The second way the tempter works is to get you to despair. Throw yourself down from this height, he says to Jesus. Maybe God will send angels to rescue you. Or to us, he might say, “It is not worth it. Your life is a mess. You are a mess. No one loves you. You deserve to die.” I have seen this kind of temptation live most in an alcoholic who was drinking himself to death and did not care. I had to watch as he threw his life down and for what? Because he couldn’t say No to his temptation.
And lastly, the Devil loves to be worshipped. Serve your temptations, he says. Become obsessed with your vices, your addictions, your needs, your wants. Worship any and all things that separate you from God and you will become so wrapped up in all of it that you will forget who you really are. Worship your relationships. Worship your career. Spend all your time worrying about your weight or how much people like you. Agonize over your money. Serve these things rather than God and you are bowing down to the tempter. And you will spend years of your life running after things can cannot feed you and do not deserve your adoration. You will be like a hamster running on a wheel, running and running and getting nowhere. And the tempter loves every minute of it!
CS Lewis had to write about the devil in story form, because he knew that people would either laugh or they would become frightened were he to openly discuss the issue. So he wrote letters from the Devil’s apprentice to his nephew. He called this compilation of letters The Screwtape Letters. But these fictional letters made some brilliant points.
Let the man become obsessed with protecting his finances. Let him think that he just can’t get up in the morning to get to church. If he does make it to church, let him become annoyed with the loud voice of the woman in back of him who sings off-key. Distract him by getting him worried about his appearance, anything to turn his mind from the gifts that God is offering to him in the Holy Eucharist. Anything.
There is a war going on in your minds. It is not just about you being lazy or a worry wart. There is such a thing as an outside force that enters your mind and pulls you from God. You cannot make that tempter go away, but you can say no to him, just as Jesus did.
Lent is a time in which we dare that tempter. We challenge that one by refraining from something that we love, or doing something extra for God and when the temptation arises and we think “oh, I should just take one piece of cake, after all it’s a party!” Or maybe you wish you had changed your fast to fasting from beets instead, when the doubts and temptations arise, you can see them for what they are- attempts to get you derailed. And you can say no. I am staying the course.
People are not born bad. No baby is evil. People who become evil become so because they have let that temptation carry them into an abyss. Don’t listen to it! Just because you have violent thoughts to selfish thoughts or inclinations does not mean that you are evil. Even Jesus had temptations. You are good and you were made for God. But there is another force at work that is actively seeking to pull you from all that God created you to be. To admit this fact, the truth of the existence of evil, is to admit that there is an enormous battle going on for your soul. And you are the greatest warrior in that battle. And God has given you the tools to succeed.
And when God calls to you and says, “Where are you?”
Turn back from your worries and obsessions and say to God, “Here I am. I am still here.”
