March 9, 2014 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Degree of Real

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 32
Genesis 2:15–17, 3:1–7
Matthew 4:1–11

“Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.”
Matthew 4:11 (NRSV)

The greatest trick the devil ever played was to make the world believe he doesn’t exist.

Charles Baudelaire

One of the most influential American poets of the nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson, once wrote, “I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word.” Words do have power. They have the power to point out, persuade, cut down, and create. They have the power to innovate, elaborate, deviate, and insinuate.

It wasn’t until I spent a summer, between my junior and senior years of college, at Middlebury College Language Institute, up in Middlebury, Vermont, that I understood for the first time the power that comes with words. I had enrolled into the German Language School for a six-week intensive course. By the end of the six weeks we were to have completed the equivalent of three college semesters of German. Not knowing a word of German, I enrolled as a beginner student. All students, upon arriving, had to sign a contract that they would altogether refrain from speaking, reading, writing, listening, and even singing in any language other than German. And since I knew not a word of German, for the first several days, except for those times in class when my professor told me to repeat after her, I remained speechless. While I expected that I would be speechless, I didn’t know that I would also feel so powerless.

Students in the German Language School slept in their own dorms, ate in their own cafeterias, played on their own sports teams, sang in their own German choral society, and acted in their own German drama clubs. As I silently, speechlessly, watched more advanced students conversing, engaging, and joking around with one another, I felt absolutely powerless. And even though by the end of the summer I could speak straightforwardly and grammatically correctly (with the verb in the second position), I nevertheless lacked the finesse needed to wield words in such a way that they could have any real power. I was not able to convince anyone of anything; to argue with anyone; to elaborate on any ideas; or to insinuate anything at all.

During that summer, the German Drama Club put on a play about what really happened in the Garden of Eden. Though a lot of it went over my head, I remember being fascinated with the dialogue between the serpent and Eve. Thank goodness I knew the basic outline of the story. I knew that God first made Adam out of the dust of the earth and placed him in the Garden of Eden; that he eventually made Eve out of Adam’s rib so that he would not be alone. I knew that God had permitted them to eat the fruit of any tree in the garden except for one: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. I knew that a snake tempted Eve into eating the fruit of the forbidden tree and that she convinced Adam to do so as well.

What fascinated me was the subtle dialogue between the serpent and Eve. The serpent was very shrewd. Like a person who can conceal what he feels and what he already knows, who knows the limits of acceptable behavior and takes care not overtly to cross them, the serpent spoke cunningly. As though he were ignorant of the commandment that God had given Adam earlier— that Adam may freely eat of every tree except for one—the serpent said to Eve, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’” An ever-so-slight variation of God’s commandment, the serpent’s words, though they did not substantively contradict God’s commandment, shaped the dialogue from thereon out. The way the question was asked was intended to make the command of God seem unreasonably arbitrary. Eve picked up on this, played off it, and added to it. Rather than simply and straightforwardly correcting the serpent, she elaborated on what God had actually said to Adam. In reply, she said, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden; if you even touch it, you shall die.” With that bit of harmless exaggeration, the serpent knew that he could strike. Playing off each other, the serpent’s ever-so-slight variation provided an opening for Eve’s bit of exaggeration, and before she knew it, everything that God had intended became distorted.

This past Friday evening, two of our church fellowship groups, Fourth Dimension and Cornerstones, enjoyed a presentation on the art of improvisation. Trained in the art of improv, our instructors led us through improvisation games by which we could gain a sense of what can happen when you (1) are present in the moment, (2) listen to what your partner says, and (3) build on it. No matter the starting point of conversation, what we found was that by following these rules, we could innovate and elaborate. Though we were limited by time, I got the sense that we could have gone on and on and on, ending up far removed from where we began. I got the sense that even what seemed like throw-away words were opportunities that a much more talented, or a much more cunning, person could have made the most of. Whereas the art of improvisation goes by the principle that “you shine when the other person shines,” the back-and-forth and seemingly harmless play of words between the serpent and Eve was at the mercy of the shrewd serpent who, without a doubt, had an agenda.

Words that we might consider harmless can sometimes have ruinous consequences. Through speech, we can kill an idea, introduce suspicion, ruin a good intention. Indeed this is what happened in the exchange of words between Eve and the serpent. Without use of force and without any God-given authority, the serpent wielded words that ruined the good intentions with which God had created the world.

So ruinous were the consequences that through the ages we have come to know this story as a story about the Fall—the Fall of humanity into sin. In his commentary on this story in Genesis, Reformation leader Martin Luther identified the essential consequence of the Fall to be the fall of human perception. Above all else, in the Fall Adam and Eve lost the ability to see the world as it really was. Their perception became clouded and delusional.

In her fascinating book Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era, historian of theology Susan Schreiner of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago explains the kind of skepticism that pervaded the early modern era, the era of the Reformation in which Martin Luther lived. With so many competing claims to truth, and all of them appealing to the power of the Spirit, the question raised by Luther, Calvin, and others became, Which spirit is inspiring such certainty? Is it the Holy Spirit or a demonic spirit? Because of the driving concern to discern the real from the unreal, claims to certainty never went unchallenged. Even Luther himself was haunted by the question, “Are you alone wise? Can it be that everyone else is in error and has been in error for so long?”

As Professor Schreiner explains, during this era, “ultimate truth and reality always lay beyond, above, or beneath surface appearances” (Are You Alone Wise, p. xiii). As a result, uneasiness about whether one was dealing with reality or with illusions, deceptions, or false appearances grew. The fear of being deceived led the Reformers to emphasize the need for tests. Tests were required because Satan came in disguise, sometimes even appearing as an “angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). In order to be effective, Satan would hide under the guise of goodness.

In her famous book The Origin of Satan, biblical scholar Elaine Pagels shows that both Jews and Christians charged their opponents as being “Satan” in their efforts to demonize them. Furthermore, because Satan was known to come in disguise as one among them, they reserved allusions to Satan not just for any opponent, but specifically for those opponents who were more intimately related to them. We see in the Gospel of Matthew, for example, that the Pharisees even accused Jesus of being a demon. As Professor Pagels writes, “Satan is not the distant enemy but the intimate enemy—one’s trusted colleague, close associate, brother. . . . He is the kind of person on whose loyalty and goodwill the well-being of family and society depend—but one who turns unexpectedly” (The Origin of Satan, p. 49). Those who asked, “How could God’s own angel become his enemy?” were, in effect, asking “How could one of us become one of them?” (p. 49).

Throughout the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is constantly being put to the test. His fellow Jews—the Pharisees and the scribes—are constantly asking him questions, trying to catch him in saying something heretical or in failing to practice the Law. In the story we read this morning, Jesus is put again to the test. This time, as Matthew tells it, Satan appears three times to “test” Jesus. Here Satan resembles a caricature of a scribe, skilled in verbal sparring and adept in quoting scriptures. The test ensues to reveal whether Jesus really is who he appears to be. Twice Satan begins by saying, “If you are the Son of God . . .”

What Professor Pagels points out is that the church comes from a long history of demonization—a history in which Christians were demonized and demonized others. In our anxiety over not being able to detect those who would tempt us, those who would harm us, we projected Satan’s face onto our most intimate foes. We still do this. Not just in the movies we watch and in the novels we read but also in the rhetoric we use when we speak about political threats, we anthropomorphize evil and treat it as though it were separate from us, positioned against us.

If we are honest, however, we know that most of the time temptations do not come with a face, disguised or bare. Despite our clouded, deluded perception of reality, we know that the very temptations with which Jesus was tested are real threats in our lives as well. They are already at work within us. We do not have to demonize other people as threats to whom God intended us to be. Depending on the situation, our greatest strengths can turn out to be our greatest weaknesses. That is why at times we are, each of us, our own worst enemy.

Yes, in our sin, we ruin the good intentions by which God created the world. Like the serpent and Eve we insert suspicion into our relationship with God. We question God’s terms. We twist the truth or exaggerate a claim. And in all of this, we play off each other.

We need to be careful—careful not to get carried away, careful to discern what is real and what is unreal, careful to say what we mean, careful not to spoil a good thing.

The good that God intended is thankfully greater than anything that can detract from or distort it. The goodness of God is thankfully generative. Nothing can stop God’s recreation of the world. No evil can obstruct God’s mighty plan, because God is the ultimate improviser. In time, everything will be put to use for, and no one will be left out from, God’s redeeming work. May it be so. Amen.