1 Lent A
Preschool Sunday!
Text: Matthew 4:1-11
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
March 1, 2020, 11:00 a.m.
Speak of the Devil
In the Gospel lesson this morning we get the devil in his most prominent role, the defining moment of his career! There’s not another story in the Gospels that has got more of the devil in it. So let’s not miss this opportunity; I want to preach this morning about the devil. I mentioned this yesterday to our preschool director Robin Johnson and her face fell. “For cryin’ out loud, it’s Preschool Sunday,” she told me. Hang with me, Robin, and let’s see if I can nevertheless make a go of it.
Preschool Sunday means, though, that we have to start by talking about what the devil is not. Notice that when the devil tempts with food it’s just plain old bread. The devil does *not* tempt Jesus with brownies, cookies, bakery bars, cake pops, or any of the other fabulous things that our preschool parents have put out in the narthex area this morning. Those things are not the temptation of the devil; oh, no, no! Those things are heavenly – I checked ‘em all out myself yesterday – so we are all spiritually safe spending tons of money on preschool baked goods here.
But that does bring me to the first serious point about the devil. The devil is not a “blame him” substitute for human responsibility. “The devil made me do it” people will say, and I always want to reply, “You let the devil tell you what to do?” Nah; far more likely that whatever happened here was your responsibility. The responsibility belongs to you; don’t you be giving it over to the devil, and give him power over you that he really doesn’t have.
Second, the devil is not your political opponent. Nor is the devil that kid who hates you in your school classroom, nor that neighbor with whom you don’t get along, nor that insufferable relative of yours that you simply cannot abide. There may be demonic forces at work in any of those arenas, but that doesn’t mean you get to say that the one who is other than you is the devil. Our political discourse alone would be so much better if we could get over this one.
Third, the devil is not nothing. This is probably the most serious way we misunderstand the devil, as if he’s no more than a silly, old-fashioned, ancient-world cartoon that we are SO past believing in. Does anybody really believe in the devil anymore?
Actually … a lot of people do. Because they have to. I’ve had alcoholics tell me “the devil himself is in that bottle for me,” and that’s real. Or … anybody who’s known the torments of the disorders of body, spirit, or mind; anybody like that understands all too well the feel of a satanic grip. I had a friend years ago who was a drug addict in recovery, who was willing to tell you if you’d listen about his years of using and all the crime and all the betrayals to support his habit. “I was not in my own mind,” he would say, and I thought that truer words have never been spoken. “It was a hell of a thing, and there’s been the devil to pay.” Hell, devil; these things are not nothing. They are real.
Which has brought us around then from what the devil is not, to what the devil is. The devil is: what in this world is hostile, to God’s intention for this world. There are things of this world that are not of God; our very earliest stories in the book of Genesis recognize it, Jesus here at the very beginning of his ministry encounters it, and you know it well yourself if you’ve ever read history. Or if you’ve ever suffered loss. On your bad days you sometimes know it, when you look into your own heart. There are things in this world that are not of God.
But there’s one other thing that the devil is, that is important to note right here: the devil is one who works by falsehood. I remember one of our high school kids years ago discovering this with great delight when we were reading the story of the serpent in Genesis: “When devil tempts,” she reported to the class, “he tempts with something false. It seems like you’re getting something, but you’re not!” In our gospel this morning the devil offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. But wait a minute! Those kingdoms don’t belong to the devil; they are not his to give; that promise is empty! And the devil will offer you, too, the moon and the stars, but those things he offers you are not his. The devil; brokenness; evil – the things of this world that are hostile to God – they have no such power over you!
Because the victory over the devil has been won by our Lord Jesus Christ. You know Christ’s victory in the story of the temptations, you know Christ’s victory over evil in his cross and resurrection, and you know it in your life every time the grip that something has got over you is broken, and you then come to know liberation – freedom! – and the power of God. It is when you come to that moment of freedom, that you know yourself, in your own life, the victory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
So, yeah, the devil is something that Christians take very seriously. But it’s a mistake to obsess about the devil’s work in this world, or all around you. We take it seriously, but not as seriously as we take the victory of our Lord Jesus Christ. So it is that every sermon – even one about the devil! – must end up with Jesus, because the devil is not all that. Jesus is. And so it is in the sermon that is your life, too; no matter what the brokenness and maybe even the evil that you know. Whatever hell you may have bedeviling you, it isn’t all that. Jesus is.