Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church, Portland, Oregon

February 21, 1999

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OPENING WORDS

 

"The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

C. S. Lewis

 

We call him Satan, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Beelzebub, the evil one, the adversary, the tempter. The scripture refers to him as murderer, destroyer, roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Skeptics may dismiss him with epithets like Old Scratch, Hopdance, Old Bogie, Old Harry. But in every language he will respond to his generic title: El Diablo, the Devil.

 

There was a time when the Devil was terrifyingly real. Demons were cast out. Witches were burned. People were put to the death because they had become the tools of Satan. Some religious groups still take the Devil quite seriously—and quite literally--but to liberal religious people such as ourselves, the devil usually just turns up in our jokes. Like this one, about Bill Gates.

 

It seems that Bill Gates dies and finds himself welcomed by God at the Pearly Gates. God asks him, "Well, Bill, you can have your choice. Do you want to go to heaven or to hell?" And Bill answers, "I don’t know. Why don’t you show me each, and I’ll make a decision." "So what do you want to see first, Bill, heaven or hell?" Bill says, "I think I’ll see heaven first." So God takes him on a tour of heaven, and it’s pretty much what Bill expected: lots of puffy white clouds and sunbeams, angels flying around playing harps. Then God escorts Bill to hell and introduces him to the devil. "He’ll show you around here—I’ll leave you two alone," says God. And so the Devil takes Bill on a tour of hell. There is a blue ocean and white sandy beaches, full of beautiful people playing in the sun or resting with a cool drink by the sea. Bill is very much impressed. "I thought you’d like this," said the Devil. "You’re welcome to join me here." So Bill goes back to God with his decision. "Heaven is really nice," he says, "but hell is really fabulous. I choose hell." "OK," says God. "Whatever." Then a few weeks later, the Devil comes by to check on Bill, to see how he’s doing. And there he is, chained to a wall, brimstone burning all around him, being tormented by demons. "How’s it going, Bill?" asks the Devil. And Bill says, "This isn’t what you showed me! Where are all the beautiful women? Where is the sandy beach and the cool drinks?" "Oh, Bill," said the Devil, "you don’t understand. That was just the screensaver."

 

The Devil is a liar. "That was just the screensaver," Bill. Typical. He is the father of lies, and his power lies in his ability to deceive. He’ll move in when you’re really in need, and he’ll tell you that you can find relief, that you can get what you want, without paying a price. He’ll tell you not to worry about your values, just this once. He’ll say, "It’ll be OK. I’ll protect you." And what a liar he is! Not only will you suffer in the world, you will suffer great anguish of spirit, for you will have sold a little piece of your soul. You have lost the one thing that no human being can live without—self-respect—because you will have denied your goodness, denied your witness for the good, denied your God.

 

The devil has a long history—quite a pedigree. His predecessors are as least as old as the horned sorcerer depicted on cave walls in France around 7,000 BC. The Bible calls him a lion, a wolf, a dragon, and of course a serpent. Early Christians saw him as a dog with three heads. Medieval priests pictured the Devil as an ugly, repugnant creature—though he could take on other forms for the purpose of enticing victims.

 

Current iconography has him as a tall figure dressed in red with horns, cloven feet, and a tail, sometimes hold a fork. The horns are an ancient symbol associated with gods and goddesses throughout the ancient Middle East, and they represent power, fertility, and growth.. The color red comes from both Egypt and Canaan as a symbol of the desert, of death and sterility. The tail and cloven hooves represent bestiality—the Devil is a fallen angel who has become lower than humans, has become a beast. The fallen angel story echoes similar tales from Greek, Egyptian, and Hindu mythologies.

 

In his epic poem Paradise Lost, Milton pictured Satan as a tragic hero who fell from grace because of pride and envy, but because of his vision and power, he soon took over the underworld and became a worthy antagonist to God. No doubt the most compelling character of Milton’s poem, Satan had human feelings like pity and compassion. After Paradise Lost, the Devil was never the same—he had regained some of his dignity.

 

The Age of Reason--the 18^th century—undermined the Devil’s reputation, and by the time the 19^th century rolled around, educated folks had dismissed the Devil as largely superstitious nonsense. Not to be outdone, however, the Devil fought back, and his reputation has been somewhat restored in this century: the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plus Hitler’s genocide of the Jews and other groups, have gone a long way towards refurbishing his image.

 

Is the Devil real? Yes, he is alive and well and living in Peoria. Not just in Kosovo. Not just in North Korea. Not just in Iraq. Not in those places where those bad people live. But right here in Portland. And sometimes he worms his way into our very own hearts. Now I don’t believe that he is a person, a fellow with horns and a tail, any more than I believe God is a person, but do I believe that there is a force for evil in the world, countering the force for good? Yes, I do. Or if you prefer to look at it non-dualistically, as I do, you might say that the story of the Fall—you know, the Fall of Man, the Adam and Eve and the serpent and the apple story—was a Fall into consciousness and therefore into choice, into free will. And so in order to choose goodness, we have to have an alternative. The Devil has his place, does his part. And perhaps all is part of the mind of God. Or of reality. Choose your language. Choose your metaphor. But do not fail to deal with the powers that be, for if dismiss the Devil, believe me, he will not disregard you. You will be easy pickings.

 

Two out of three Americans believe that the Devil exists, but only born-again Christians seem to have a powerful sense of the presence of the Devil. Social class is a factor. "Look at the parking lot outside any church," says sociologist Robert Wuthnow. "If you see Lexuses and Cadillacs, you won’t hear Satan preached inside. If you see a lot of pickup trucks, you will." Education makes a difference—college graduates are twice as likely to deny the Devil’s existence as those who do not have a degree. As stalwart liberals, we tend to believe in the perfectibility of human beings, tend to believe in the basic goodness of people. We tend to think that mass murderers were all abused as children, and that people who steal were just never taught right from wrong. Not believing in evil—just in bad upbringing—we believe that education is the answer, that fair wages will bring sin to an end. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

 

There’s a bestseller out now, called Explaining Hitler, in which the author, Ron Rosenbaum, a journalist of great skill and thoughtfulness, tries to, well, explain Hitler. How could such a man have existed? What possibly could have motivated him to kill six million Jews and Gypsies and disabled persons and homosexuals? I rushed to get a copy, because that’s always been my question: how could the Holocaust have happened? Rosenbaum reviews the theories. Hitler was "sincere," he really believed he was doing the right thing. Or Hitler was a cynical manipulator, not an evil genius, just someone who was hungry for power and needed a scapegoat for his schemes. Or perhaps Hitler’s father may have been the result of an illegitimate union between his mother and a mysterious Jew and Hitler was driven by an insane hatred of his half-Jewish father. There is the dying mother theory, the sexual perversion theory, and on and on and on. Rosenbaum really doesn’t know, becomes even more of a skeptic, after reviewing all of the explanations, doing the years of research. He finally chooses one theory, but not very convincingly. He says, in fact, "Hitler explanations are cultural self-portraits; the shapes we project onto the inky Rorschach of Hitler’s psyche are often cultural self-portraits in the negative. What we talk about when we talk about Hitler is also who we are and who we are not."

 

We have dismissed the Devil, and yet we see every day in the morning news startling evidence of evil. A sixteen-year-old boy kills a young girl—the latest horror story close to home. And elsewhere a man is going on trial for dragging a Black man behind his truck until the man’s body was literally torn apart. We cannot easily explain these things away. The rationality of science is not sufficient. Perhaps we need a metaphor—the Devil--for ways to express the horror that shakes us to the core—and to find within ourselves seeds of the same impulses: impulses of prejudice, hate, jealousy, forbidden desire. Why was I so quick to reach for the book on Hitler? Because intuitively I knew that it might tell me something about myself, the shadow side—those predilections to blame, to grab power, to be cruel.

 

The advance of secular humanism has left us bereft of ritual, bereft of metaphor. And yet the reality of evil invades our lives at every turn. Andrew Delbanco, author of a book entitled The Death of Satan, says that Satan used to be an attribute of the self, but after the Enlightenment, became something educated people could not believe in. And into the vacuum, he believes, rushed secular explanations. Marxists used words like "exploitative classes" for Satan. They failed to see that economics could not cure sin. And then there was capitalism. Delbanco says, as Americans discovered both the creativity and brutality of capitalism, "<they also> found that . . . to be successful, or even to survive, one had to be a sinner." Where does that leave us, then? Looking outside ourselves for Satan. Anti-Marxist zealots "saw the world threatened by a satanic conspiracy against property and liberty." As one candidate for the Devil fades out, a new one enters. Lately, we have enthroned members of cults or perpetrators of childhood abuse. Their victims do not have to take responsibility for their actions, since in psychological terms, "the Devil made me do it." Delbanco states his thesis simply. He says that "the party of rationality is prematurely convinced that people can endure life without the old metaphors." Without the metaphor, without the naming of the beast, we are conquered by the beast.

 

The big problem, you see, is that when we project evil onto another, literally all hell breaks loose. The shame, the hate, is too great, so I’ll dump it on someone else. Could be the poor. Or immigrants. Or people of color. Or homosexuals. When we recognize, on the other hand, that the tempter is after us, too, then we’re more likely to pay attention to the allure of evil in our own lives and stop seeing it everywhere else but there. We need to recognize that Old Scratch is sitting in our Board rooms, goes to the symphony, eats at some of the best restaurants in town. He even invades our homes and our churches.

 

Let’s look at this tendency to project evil outward by examining a specific case. Do you remember a few years back, the case of Susan Smith, the young mother who strapped her two young boys into the child safety seats in her Mazda and then sent it rolling down a hill into John D. Long Lake there in the small town of Union, South Carolina? How could she have drowned these two adorable children? "She was evil," people said, and they looked for some Satanic cause. The talk shows were full of it. No one except someone entirely given over to evil could have done such a horrendous thing, people said. She must have "lost her mind," they said. "She didn’t know what she was doing." There was something so mythic, so primal, about a mother killing her young. People were drawn to the story, compelled to try and explain it. Newt Gingrich rushed in with his theory: he blamed it on liberalism, the Great Society, and the counterculture. As one commentator said, according to Gingrich, it wasn’t Susan Smith who pushed the Mazda into the lake, it was George McGovern.

 

But her pastor, the Rev. Mark Long, doesn’t see it that way. He believes that Susan knew what she was doing. He said, "God made her a presentation and Satan made her a beautiful presentation." She evaluated them and made her choice. One might ask, "What was so beautiful about Satan’s presentation?" It was beautiful, indeed. Susan Smith wrote in her confession that she was emotionally overwhelmed, that at first she considered killing herself. But she decided against that, because that would leave the children motherless. "I love my children with all my heart," she wrote, in her childish scrawl. "My children deserve to have the very best." Apparently she had become convinced that sending her children to heaven was an act of maternal benevolence. "My children deserve the very best." The Devil did well with this one. He caught her at her weakest point, and then he told her the biggest lie of all: "I’m doing good by doing this evil thing." They’ll have some peace. I’ll have some peace, she thought.

 

And now, how about the rest of us? Why did this story compel as no other story? Why did we read article after article, trying to read between the lines, trying to understand how such an evil deed could have been done? Was Susan Smith a monster, as some said? Only if we cannot see the monster in ourselves. No, I’m not saying that we would ever kill our children. I am saying that we need to remember the times of despair in our own lives, when we would just as soon not go on living. The times when we didn’t have enough money to pay the bills and no hope of getting a better job. The times when we thought somebody loved us, as Susan thought of her boyfriend, and we hoped that he could save us from our fate and we would do almost anything to keep that love. We need to remember ourselves in our most vulnerable moments, when we gave in to temptation--the times in which we acted badly, shamefully, because of our pain or need. Could we have decided differently? Yes. Through God’s grace, yes. Would it have been easy. No.

 

I’ve been talking so far about evil as it pervades our personal lives and decisions. But now I want to say a word about systemic sin. You don’t hear much about that in church—generally we talk about individual struggles with evil. But not so much about the evil that might be imbedded in structures, in institutions. That’s harder to get at. Evils like racism. Evils like destruction of the eco-system. Evils like hunger in a land of plenty. I believe that we have to stop what I might call the "privatization of goodness." We are responsible, not for creating the ills of our society, but for doing our part in eradicating them. When we privatize goodness, we make sure that our children are doing well, that our school is generously funded, that our neighborhood is safe and livable. We forget our connection with the larger whole.

 

This broader sense of responsibility that I am calling for is difficult, because we seem to have so little control. Dennis Halliday, former Assistant to the Secretary General of the U.N., in charge of humanitarian aid to Iraq, told us last week in this sanctuary that because of the sanctions our country has imposed on Iraq, we are responsible for the deaths of 200 Iraqi children each day. Not just our government, but as citizens, we are responsible. I believe that as surely as I am standing here. We have demonized Sadaam Hussein—not that I think he’s a nice guy—but the hell that the Iraqi people are living in is chiefly of our making. What can we do? We can speak to others. We can be better informed by reading alternative news sources. We can march, and we can pray. Our church has done all of these things, and we will continue. We can’t change things immediately, but we can change things. No one can work on all the issues before us, but we can pick one and do our part. You will find that all roads lead to Rome, anyway. And the system of oppression will begin to break down.

 

About the attempt to impeach Clinton—I have a few words to say, now that that hellish chapter in our country’s history is over. Over $40,000,000 spent and months of precious time, over sex and political posturing. I wanted President Clinton accountable, too, but not so much for his sexual activity as for his unwillingness to address with any real concern the major issues of our day. Though I have to confess, I have lost a lot of personal respect for Clinton, our President should be called to task, not so much for dallying with an intern, but for selling out to corporate interests. So Clinton talks about automobile safety seats for children, but never mentions the children who are sleeping in cars because they are homeless. Clinton made a big display about wanting racial justice, calling for a conversation on race, but never challenged the economic status of people of color in this country. Clinton puts Colin Powell out there as his front man, asking for increased volunteerism, expecting churches and social service agencies to take an impossible burden of poverty, while a few get richer and richer. The big political lie today is not about sex—the big lie is that we have a two party system that is responsive to the people. And that when we turn on our TV sets we get "the truth." The truth is that we have a one-party system, the media are the voice of that system, and that system is responsible to the wealthy.

 

The Devil works privately and corporately, then—personally and systemically. And we have to be aware of his wiles on both fronts. How does he work? Differently from the way you might expect. If you have seen the film Jesus of Montreal, you will remember when the Satan-figure takes the actor who plays Jesus in the passion play up into the high rise building, plies him with food and drink, and shows him the city below. "All this can be yours," he says, reminding us of the Devil’s temptation of Jesus. "I will turn these stones into bread." "This will be your kingdom." Empty promises. Lies. But not from an ugly, bestial creature. From a sophisticated gentleman. From one with a sensitive palate, one who knows fine wine, one who dresses in fashion. As the Rolling Stones, put it, "a man of wealth and taste."

 

The Devil will always come in disguise. He tries to cloak himself in virtue. "My children deserve to have the best." Another of his favorite guises is respectability. After all, we don’t want to offend. So we stand passive, in the face of evil. Piety is another of his special garbs. As soon as he seduces us into congratulating ourselves on the depth and profundity of our spirituality, we begin to lose it. Or for the economic system we live under, he will advance himself through "progress" and "efficiency." In times when our corporate interests are endangered, he goes to war dressed in patriotism and speaks of democracy and freedom. As Forrester Church writes, "His finest trick is to dress us up in our Sunday best and point us toward the abyss."

 

The Devil knows us so well, the spiritual weak spots where we are vulnerable, and that’s where he enters. Think of the tragic heroes in Shakespeare. Macbeth’s ambition. Hamlet’s endless intellectualizing and indecision. Lear’s suspicion, and Othello’s jealousy. No, there’s not a fellow with a forked tail dressed in red, but a force drawing us to honor our basest impulses—yes, indeed. For me, the Devil can get close when I somehow get out of touch with my own being—I don’t even know sometimes that I’m angry or sad or lonely—and that is when I am most vulnerable. When I’m needy, and I don’t even know it. As Saint Paul puts it, "The evil I would not do, that I do." Like a couple of times a year when I become obsessed with having some Kentucky Fried Chicken. I mean, obsessed. I drive in to the Colonel’s, get a box of the greasy stuff, take it home, and devour it. I know I shouldn’t be doing this. I know it’s terrible for me. But I want it, and I’m going to have it. That’s the way the Devil works. Gets you when you’re tired, gets you when you’re hungry, for whatever. Gets you to thinking: I want it, and I’m going to have it. No matter what.

 

And what then is our defense against Old Scratch? We sing about it every Sunday. It’s called "the Spirit of Life." The Devil is about death and destruction, but the Spirit giveth life, and life everlasting. The Devil cannot enter without a vacuum of the good. So cultivate the good. Go with love. Love yourself and care for yourself so that no disassembling can seduce you. Ask for forgiveness when you fail, as we all do more often than we’d like to admit. Don’t push the Devil away—he loves to fight. Just ignore him. Choose companions who are true and honest, not given to gossip and negativity. Choose work that satisfies you down to the bones. Look at something beautiful every day and savor it—let it renew your spirit. And lastly I would say, make a covenant with your God—whatever that is for you—every single day. Renew your vow. Pray without ceasing.

 

So be it. Amen.

 

PRAYER

 

Spirit of Life, be our guardian and defender. We know we have a choice, and we would choose the good. In the moment of every day’s most quiet need, remind us that we belong to you, that we are your emissaries in the world. Keep us strong, keep us in love, lead us not into temptation, and may we ever give you the glory. So be it. Amen.

 

BENEDICTION

May love wrap you in its garment and keep you safe. Go in love and go in peace. Amen.

 

 

 

Copyright © 1999, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.