Why I don't believe in Satan

Mark 3.13-15, 19b-27

             Jesus went up the mountain and called to him those whom he wanted, and they came to him.  And he appointed twelve, whom he also named apostles, to be with him, and to be sent out to proclaim the message, and to have authority to cast out demons….  Then he went home; and the crowd came together again….  When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.”  And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.”  And he called them to him, and spoke to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan?  If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.  And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.  And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come.  But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.

 April 19, 2013

Tonight we have word via the news media that the younger brother of the “Boston Marathon Bombers” has been captured alive, and can now be a source of information for a nation that is in love with information, and ever anxious to find the locus for blame.  We must know.  We must understand.  We feel compelled to learn as much from Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as possible, and in due time, exact judgment and punishment upon him.  Whether or not we are aware of it, this is part and parcel of how we reassure ourselves that we are on the side of good/God, as opposed to the ones we have identified as being on the side of evil/Satan.

 

I don’t believe in Satan… mostly because I don’t want to give evil that much power.  Since I was a child I could not accept the idea that there was an embodied, anthropomorphic form of evil named Satan or the Devil.  I had learned that the one I knew as God was the One God, and to name another force and even picture it with a red body, horns and a long tail was to acknowledge that there was another god, albeit a god of evil, competing with my god of good.  Naming it Satan relocated the struggle between good and evil from me to them, making it a battle between two gods: God and Satan.  In antiquity this would have been a familiar rationale.  For me the explanation had to be more complex.

(I confess to inconsistency since I often speak of God in anthropomorphic terms: having a broken heart, desiring our wholeness, weeping with us, dancing with us, etc.)  For me there are two problems with the idea of Satan:  it gives evil potentially equal power to the power of good, which I attribute to God, and even more importantly, it takes the heat off you and me.  Mark’s Beelzebul was the ruler, or god, of all demons.  Some of us might think of the Tsarnaev brothers as subjects of Beelzebul, the lord of demons.  It might even be comforting to think of them as lesser demons themselves, manipulated by Satan.  Still, this explanation is too simple. 

Evil exists.  That is obvious.  But I don’t believe these two young men were evil.  The death and destruction and terror they caused are signs of evil working through them.  Their choices resulted in evil.  But I cannot pronounce them evil.  I look at Dhokhar’s photo on the TV screen, and I see a very handsome young man just a year older than my firstborn grandson which means I know something of where he is in his development toward adulthood. My heart breaks a little.  I see what seems to be a photo of him with his prom date.  I see photos of my grandsons and their prom dates. I see a photo of Suspect #1, and know that this is Tamerlan who was Dhokhar’s brother.  I see in my teenage grandsons a love and fierce loyalty to one another that belies their occasional fighting. My heart breaks a little more.   I cannot imagine the depth of grief that befalls Dhokhar and his parents today over the death of Tamerlan, or the grief of their friends who have expressed shock and disbelief over this tragedy as it unfolded.  My heart is broken.

The idea that we can point to “others” as definitively evil makes it extremely convenient to excuse ourselves from possibly being related to evil.  It is them, not us.  If evil is personified and given a name such as Satan or Beelzebul, thus resembling a human being that embodies, encompasses, and therefore contains all that is anti-life, anti-God, anti-grace, anti-good, then we can make that one the target of our retaliation, and maybe destroy “it.”

Evil is not such an entity.  Evil exists instead, as a force or an impulse permeating all that it can, as is good.  Each is charming and even seductive, and each is exercised, expressed, revered and elevated by good people.  The Tsarnaev brothers were/are not evil, but evil had its way in and through them.  If we borrow the imagery from Jesus’ metaphor in Mark, they simply were not strong enough to resist the evil that invaded their house.  If you and I can humble ourselves enough to find the grace to admit it, that means that sometimes evil has its way with and through us.  Evil can only “plunder our house” if we are too weak to resist it… only if the “strong man” or woman who owns the house is bound up can evil plunder the household, robbing the house of its goods.

When I was in seminary at Claremont School of Theology in California, our professor of New Testament listed a number of scriptures for us to choose from, to explore as the basis for our exegetical papers.  “The Beelzebub Controversy” (this story from Mark) was one of them.  I explored a little, and then watched as all of my classmates (and ultimately I) avoided it completely. This conundrum is daunting, and frankly even today it makes me uneasy to deliberately look for the truth hiding in it.  Lately, however, I’ve been compelled by so much that is happening around us to revisit and reconsider digging for meaning in this scripture.  How can evil win if God is in the world?

I’m fascinated with our resourcefulness in distancing ourselves from evil by projecting it onto someone else.  The “other” is the evil one.  We play the role of the good, the Godly.  Personifying evil and calling it Satan makes it ever so much easier to compose our own disclaimers.  When it’s possible to point to a person that embodies evil, we are more free to affirm our separateness from it, to define ourselves as NOT the evil one.  Yet it appears to me that what makes evil so insidious is that it works its way through the actions and inactions of good people… even people who don’t intend harm… even sometimes through people who passionately believe that they are doing the right thing or the only thing they can do.  

A congregation terminated me after I had a stroke, their leaders apparently convinced that it was the best or only thing to do for the good of the church.  It ended my profession in congregational ministry.  It was devastating and created financial fallout for me that I am still trying to sort out.  Evil worked its way through good people who just couldn’t see the full impact of what they were doing – or didn’t care, and I can’t quite believe that.  The damage was not just to me.  In fact the greater damage may have been to the congregation.  How will they teach their children to choose the Jesus way of caring for others, for “the least of these,” for the broken in mind, body or spirit?  How will they ever be able to convince their elderly that they still have worth when their bodies betray them, now that their elderly have watched as they dismissed me because I had a stroke?  What will these leaders do when they, themselves, suffer loss of their full, vibrant, middle-aged fitness… when they become the dispensable ones?

These people were/are not evil.  They just were not strong enough to resist the force of evil when it broke into their house, telling them to cut ties, quick and clean.  Some have even said to me that they have no power in the church.  They do not feel like the “strong person” who is owner of the house. The question that comes to mind is how can a church so effectively disempower its members that there are few if any who are strong enough to resist evil when it intrudes?  I ran into a dear woman, a senior member of the congregation, in the grocery store just yesterday.  She exclaimed over how good I look and how great it is to see me getting around so well.  “We loved you,” she said, “and we were so excited to have you be our minister.   All of us get sick and have things go wrong with our health, but we recover and we go on.  I’m so sorry it didn’t work out.  I was so angry, but no one listens to what I have to say.  Other people make the decisions there.” I wondered if she even knew that I had submitted an extensive proposal for how we would work together, pastor and congregation, through this recovery time… learning and recovering together, being stronger than we might have ever been were it not for my stroke.  I also wondered if she knew that her words were a powerful ministry to me.  I wonder if she knew.

It is so easy to recognize evil when an IED explodes in a public place and lives and property are lost.  But when evil slowly erodes the personhood, the dignity, the ability of people to speak with a voice that is heard and respected, when we take away their power, it is harder for us to recognize evil working through us.  I don’t believe in Satan… because I think personifying evil can be a cop out – it could too easily relieve me from responsibility for my own occasions of weakness when evil invades my house and I fail to resist, and the goods of my household are plundered. 

Evil has broken into our house.  What shall we do?  I am reminded and therefore would be remiss if I didn’t bring to your memory the words of Paul to the Romans (12:21):  “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”  Paul seems to be echoing what Jesus, according to Mark was saying… that when evil breaks into your house, you cannot conquer it with evil; the only way you can overcome it is with good.  Be strong, God's people.  Be strong.

Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy. 

Holy One, be with us yet.  Amen.

 

A prayer for the evening:
 

For all the times we seek revenge and ignore our own culpability...we pray.

For all the times we point to the sins of others and ignore our own...we pray.

For all the times we make decisions based on the color of someone’s skin or the language they speak or the country they call home, but fail to see the times we have been outsiders...we pray.

For all the times we have made assumptions about another, but railed against the assumptions placed on us...ther, but railed against the assumptions placed on us...we pray.

For all the times we have lived in fear, but forgotten the times that we have been the aggressor...we pray.

For all the times that we have forgotten that God does not pick and choose who to call Loved.....we pray.

And for all those living in fear and exile...those living in terror and heartache...those living in anger and hatred...those living with loss and emptiness......we pray.

We pray for all God's Children....that they might know solace and peace and hope....and that the ugly bits of the heart, broken and bruised, might turn to the light and know resurrection. Amen. We pray.

For all the times we have lived in fear, but forgotten the times we have been the aggressor… we pray.

For all the times that we have forgotten that God does not pick and choose who to call Loved… we pray.

And for all those living in fear and exile… those living in terror and heartache… those living in anger and hatred… those living with loss and emptiness… we pray.

We pray for all of God’s children… that they may know solace and peace and hope… and that the ugly bits of the heart, broken and bruised, might turn to the light and know resurrection.  Amen.

                                    ~ Rev. Tricia Thompson Winters 4/2013

 

 

Ashes

 

First Testament Reading from the prophet Joel:  “Yet even now, says the Holy One, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing.  Return to the Lord, Your God, who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.”  (Joel 2:12-13)

 

Tomorrow we enter the season of the Christian calendar known as Lent.  It is a time of turning around and returning to God.  Through centuries of practice we have fashioned and accumulated traditions, many of them rich with meaning.  On Ash Wednesday we “don the ashes of our sinfulness” … or of “our humanity.”  During my affiliation with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) I have found myself in the company of others who are as uncomfortable as I with proclaiming “our sinfulness”… certainly with trotting our confession out for the whole world to see.  I resist the notion that we humans are bad and only God is good or divine.  Many of us prefer to focus on the positive, and err on the side of recognizing the Spirit of God present in every child of God.  Whatever the reason, our spirits squirm when called to accountability for “our sinfulness.”  The practice of wearing a cross of ashes on our foreheads pushes the envelope, doesn’t it?  Yet the practice has potential for deep meaning.

The ashes we use for Ash Wednesday are created by burning some of the palm branches from the previous year’s Palm Sunday celebration, a reminder of how thin the veil is between our embrace of Jesus as Lord and our violence against the Spirit of Christ in how we live together and treat one another.

Humor me a bit and explore a deeper examination of this practice and its potential application to our lives in the spring of 2013.  We need to begin at that juxtaposition of our praise of Christ and our violence against Christ.  Where can you see that kind of inconsistency in the world around you? 

Public praise of Christ as Lord is abundant in the Midwest, the place of my upbringing to which I returned 7 months ago.  On a road trip to visit my daughter, Stacey, and family last weekend a big, imposing transport truck passed me sporting the proclamation, “Jesus is Lord.”  Along US highways are billboards proclaiming “Jesus Saves.”  Near Route 66 (Interstate 40 Highway), at Groom,Texas stands a 190-foot tall cross, the second largest in the Western Hemisphere.  Why do we display the cross as though this instrument of heinous death is something to be proud of?  It is a symbol of terror and shame. On the side of a church building in Tulsa are three murals with the words, “Jesus changed our lives.”  If (Lord) Jesus is such an all-fired big deal in our lives, why are we still crucifying him?   Why do we still allow poverty to misshape the hope and future of generations of our children… and then blame them and lock them up, separating ourselves from them, when they learn to steal in order to eat?  Why do we demonize shooters whose outrage brings death and destruction while ignoring our own responsibility as a society?  Why are we shocked that young people become bullies when bullying is the way of winning in the corporate world, in law, among political leaders, even in church?  Essentially ALL of the heroes, living or virtual, in our children’s lives demonstrate that bullying is how you win, and winning is everything.  Why do we leave so many of our children abandoned and alone, and then put guns in their hands and act surprised when they hurt themselves or someone else?  If Jesus is Lord, truly Lord, then what that congregation painted on their church building would be true of all of us:  our lives would be changed. 

 “Rend your hearts and not your clothing.”  In Joel’s day devout people practiced tearing their clothing and poured ashes on their own heads as a public sign of their remorse for doing wrong.  Such an act would earn them approval from others who would understand it to mean that since they were sorry, they intended to change.  Joel says “Forget about tearing your clothes for others to see.  Instead, tear open your heart, that secret inner part of you, so it can be healed.”  This Lenten season, make the change where it counts, in private, at the core of your being.

As you were reading you may have thought of other ways we claim that we love Jesus while living like we don’t know who he is.  Make a few notes on paper.  Find a place where it is safe to burn that paper, and when it has been reduced to ash, pick it up with the tip of your forefinger and standing before a mirror, make a cross on your forehead with the ashes.  Better yet, find a house of worship tomorrow, stop in and there, in the midst of a gathered community, a small society, don the ashes of your sinfulness and, deep in the stillness of your torn heart, articulate how it is you will begin turning around.  But don’t do it for show.  Don’t wear the ashes unless you dare to try turning and returning to God.

I hear Joel saying that God is gracious and merciful, and waiting for us to turn around and return, without threat of punishment.  There’s nothing magical about this – not even very mysterious.  It is a simple matter of cause and effect.  Your parents probably taught you about consequences when you were growing up.  The crises of our age are not that different from the crises of Joel’s age, and they are brought upon us by our own behaviors, our own choices – individually and as societies.  If we could just bring ourselves to turn around and go another way, back to God, the crises would naturally fade.  The healing we long for would come.  Grace is there already, waiting for us.  Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet.  Amen.

 

The People's Prayer

Creating God, still Center of the world you have made, we come to you in this season of turning and returning.  We confess we do not know how to seek you with our whole hearts, but we know you are our source and our destiny.  In the midst of crazy-busy life, we turn toward you.  Thank you for receiving us.  Seeking you in secret, may we then honor you among humanity, through Jesus Christ, our way homeward to you.  Amen.