Sunday, June 30, 2019 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Is Satan for Real?

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 42
Genesis 3:1–13
Ephesians 6:10–18

O loving God, to turn away from you is to fall, to turn toward you is to rise,
and to stand before you is to abide forever. Grant us, dear God, in all our duties
your help; in all our uncertainties your guidance; in all our dangers your
protection; and in all our sorrows your peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430 C.E.)

As we dive into our last big question for this sermon series, the question is “Is Satan for real?” I must admit to you that I don’t like it. I hope none of you who submitted it or something like it take that statement personally. I am not trying to insult you at all. Rather, I have just never liked to talk about Satan, the devil, the Tempter—however you want to name an embodied presence of evil. It has taken decades for me to know how to reclaim this kind of spiritual warfare language, years of theological education to help me reinterpret my own understanding of what it means when we read it in scripture. That is some of what I hope we might do together today. But I still had to begin by confessing my hesitancy.

Part of my strong dislike is due to my growing-up years in Texas, when my playmates would ask me point-blank questions like “Is Satan real?” “Oh yes,” I would respond, knowing full well that I had no idea but also realizing I just wanted this little Christian girl to leave me alone, so I needed to say what she wanted to hear. But I have also avoided this kind of a question, avoided talk about some kind of embodied evil, because I just could not make sense of it. It did not fit within my theological framework of an all-powerful God.

Cindy Rigby, a professor of theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, tells a story about when she was writing her newest theology book. She was working on the chapter entitled “Who Did God Create Us to Be, and What Went Wrong?” Her middle-school-aged son came and stood behind her in order to read a few of the paragraphs she had written. He then threw this question at his theologian mother: “Mommy, you know what saying I don’t like that we say in church? ‘God is good, all the time; all the time, God is good.’ What in the world does that mean, Mommy, when so many bad things happen in the world?” (Cynthia Rigby, Holding Faith: A Practical Introduction to Christian Doctrine, p. 164). Exactly. It is difficult to reconcile what we know of God based on scripture as all good, who made creation out of nothing and called it “good,” who breathed life into the dust of humanity and named us “very good.” It is difficult to reconcile that portrait of our God and creation with what we know of the suffering and violence, if not experienced in our own lives, then experienced by others.

But some of the biblical and theological grounding I received in seminary has helped me reclaim this language of the powers and principalities and interpret it anew for our contemporary situation. One of the insights that helped was to discover just how drastically different the worldview of the ancient Jews and Gentiles was from the worldview we hold post-Enlightenment and now, post-modernity. Unlike in our day, for the authors and hearers of scripture, “the existence of the powers and principalities [was] assumed” (Allen Verhey and Joe Harvard, Belief Series: Ephesians, p. 68). Their existence was received as fact.

As Allen Verhey and Joe Harvard point out in their newest commentary on Ephesians, these powers are frequently mentioned [in Scripture] with a whole “bewildering assortment of titles: rulers, authorities, powers, dominions, spiritual forces, world rulers, thrones, gods and lords, elemental spirits,” just to name a few. We heard several of those titles in this reading from chapter 6.

Another insight was to learn that while they (powers and principalities) are understood in Scripture as spiritual forces, they are also clearly understood as having social and political dimensions too. When the Ephesians heard Paul talking about the powers and the principalities, they knew he was talking about politics. “The powers” referred to realities [that are] spiritual and secular, visible and invisible, at the same time. Our “modern distinction between the spiritual and the secular powers was not made in the first century” (Verhey and Harvard, p. 68). Rather, our spiritual ancestors sought to give personal names to the difficult oppressive realities they encountered on a regular basis. Naming it as Satan or as the powers and principalities was how they could speak of what they felt were forces aligned against God’s goodness, a kind of spiritual sludge, if you will.

And they understood that those forces, that spiritual sludge, had long ago stopped serving the purposes of God, in order to only serve their own purposes and increase their own power, over and against God. Walter Wink writes that our spiritual ancestors like the Ephesians believed that “evil is not just personal but structural and spiritual. It is not simply the result of human actions, but the consequence of huge systems over which no individual has full control” (Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium, p. 31).

But it was not only our spiritual ancestors who understood the forces at work in our world in this way. Black South Africans knew the work of this spiritual sludge. During the rule of apartheid, they were aware that they were fighting not merely white people, the Afrikaners, but the apartheid system itself, a network of power that was bigger than individual people. As Walter Wink notes, “when police were at the door, people inside would warn, ‘the System is here.’ When they would see propaganda on television, they would quip, ‘The System is lying again’” (Wink, p. 41).

So along with Cynthia Rigby’s middle-school son, we are led to ask, aren’t we, how did it all happen? If God is good, all the time; all the time, God is good, then what are these other forces at work in our world? Again, we turn to scripture and to our biblical scholars Allen Verhey and Joe Harvard. They note that according to the Apostle Paul, as we find in many of his letters,

these powers were and are part of the creation that God made and called good. They were not independent of God or antithetical to God in the beginning. God set them in place to hold the world together and to preserve it in God’s love. . . . [They were] meant to be servants of God to keep chaos from overwhelming our common life. And yet . . . these powers—this spiritual sludge—have been corrupted and co-opted by the power of sin. . . . These political and economic and cultural structures that shape our social life no longer are seen as part of God’s creation but as the gods of creation. . . . They are often what we base our confidence and hope upon, rather than God. They are what receive our loyalty and provide our identity and community, not God. [These powers and principalities] try to usurp God’s ultimacy. (Verhey and Harvard, p. 68)

Those two preachers and teachers then bring it home by asking this question: In many of our congregations, what would provoke a stronger reaction—removing the cross from a sanctuary or removing the American flag? I know many pastors who have encountered serious resistance when they tried to move the American flag off of the chancel. Their congregants were not willing to claim Christian first and American second. They did not feel those two identities would ever be in conflict. Paul would say that resistance was the work of the powers and principalities of the idol of nationalism.

Allow me to offer another example that helped me to reimagine the powers and principalities in our day, with our worldview. I offer it because I realize it is a stretch for many of us to think of systems or institutions as having a spirituality of their own, a kind of spiritual force that can be corrupted. So let me use an example from a movie. In the movie Nixon, there is a scene when Anthony Hopkins, the actor playing the president, goes to the Lincoln Memorial at night and encounters anti-Vietnam War protestors. One of the protestors makes an impassioned plea for President Nixon to just end the war and bring everyone home.

But then the protestor looks at Nixon’s face and expresses, “You can’t stop it, can you? Even if you wanted to. ’Cause it’s not you; it’s the system. The system won’t let you stop it.” “That’s right,” Nixon responds before continuing, “There’s . . . there’s more at stake here than what you want or what I want.” “Then what’s the point?” the protestor asks, “what’s the point of being president? You’re powerless!” “No, no I’m not powerless,” Nixon retorts. “Because I understand the system, I believe I can, uh . . . I can control it, maybe not control it totally but tame it enough to make it do some good.” “Sounds like you’re talking about a wild animal,” the young man states. “Yeah, maybe I am,” Nixon responds (Nixon script, dialogue transcript: www.bit.ly/2Jyw3UL).

Now while it is unlikely that actual dialogue occurred, it is illustrative of what Paul would call the powers and principalities of the institutions that wage wars and rely on violence to get things done. In that scene, the President of the United States makes the claim that the forces of violence and entrenchment in Vietnam were too powerful for him to reign in. The system was larger than just him or even the institution of the presidency.

But let’s bring this biblical claim that there is a spiritual sludge that exists in our world, that there are powers and principalities—a spirituality of systems and institutions that have been co-opted and corrupted by sin and evil to such a great extent that they now only seek to serve themselves and grow in power, over and against the will and goodness of God—let’s bring that big question into today. I am not sure I have ever seen a clearer image of the intractability and corruption of systems than the detention facility in Clint, Texas, with way too many migrant children trying to exist with no soap, no toothbrushes, no blankets, no diapers, no clean clothes, little food, no adult taking regular care of them, children caring for children.

And what keeps happening when leaders in either political party respond to these atrocities at our own border? They all blame each other. Or they blame a lack of funding or poorly written immigration laws or the other party for its refusal to work with them. But as all of the congressional debating and politicking continues to happen amongst the adults, the cycle just keeps going on and the kids are shuttled somewhere else for a while but nothing is changing. Children are still sick and scared and separated and hungry and dirty.

I dare say it does not matter to God how they got to our border. They are here, and they are children. Yet the institution of our political system is completely stuck, corrupted. If reform and actual change is happening, no one is speaking about it. Actually, the early Christians in Ephesus would tell us we are dealing with the powers and principalities—a domination system that is a sinful conglomeration of the lust for power and the lure of profit and the demonization of the “other.” And they would be right. If we ever wanted to know what “The System” looks like here and now, this is one example out of today’s headlines.

So what are we called to do in response to the power of the spiritual sludge some call Satan, others call the powers and principalities, and still others call “the way things are” or “the powers that be”? According to our biblical witness, the first thing we do is pray. And no, this is not sending our thoughts and prayers as it has now been defined in our common parlance as a metaphor for inactivity. This is praying Ephesians style, dressed in the spiritual armor of God—actively praying for our political systems to get unstuck and to be put to work in the service of mercy and compassion. Actively praying for our leaders to lead. Actively praying for people of faith across this country to stand as a collective and say “enough.”

And then we act on those prayers by putting the pressure on our elected leaders, becoming part of movements that emphasize justice and compassion. Some are now calling for direct action against the companies profiting from this crisis. And we also resist becoming cynical or numb or just plain avoidant, because Paul and the Ephesians would tell us our complicity by action or inaction is what the powers count on. The spiritual sludge counts on us feeling too overwhelmed so we just go along to get along.

Yet we do all of this grounded deeply in the trust that even the powers and the principalities, the spiritual sludge of our systems and institutions, are not irredeemable. Another promise we discover in scripture is the proclamation that the one we know as God in Christ will not just have the last word on our lives but will have the last word on these powers too. Scripture promises there will be a day when they, too, will be set aright and put back into service for God and goodness and mercy. But until that day comes, our spiritual work continues: the work of prayer, of action, of witness, of resistance.

Is Satan for real? the question asked. That might not be how I would name it, this spiritual sludge, these forces that pull us away from being who we truly are as children of God. But what we call it really doesn’t matter. The question is, as followers of Jesus, are we willing to resist whatever or whomever is aligned against God’s goodness, justice, and wholeness for all? Amen.