Mark 1.9-15                                                                                                     1 March 2009

“FACING DOWN THE BEAST”

Exactly five years ago Mel Gibson’s controversial film The Passion of the Christ came out. It was criticized for intense violence, but some scenes were insightful. For example, I still remember how the film portrayed the Evil One and his wiles, the subject of today’s Gospel lesson. Gibson depicted Satan as this hooded and haunted presence, skulking about, observing the proceedings with a sharp eye. Do you recall this sinister figure skirting the edge of the crowd or looming in the dark of Gethsemane?  You don’t know if anyone else sees him, other than you, the viewer and Jesus. You don’t know if the figure is male or female.  (In fact, while presented as male, a woman played the role.) You don’t know if it is hu-man or some alien form or, with make-up and bad-teeth, some sub-human beast. 

Forget today’s horror flicks ratcheting up terror with special effects, Gibson’s Sa-tan put a chill down my spine. For in those few scenes, I heard the warning form the book of Genesis, “Now the serpent was more crafty than any wild animal.”
As Mark has Jesus going out into the desert, facing down the Evil One to start his ministry, temptation is a fierce wild beast, ready to jump out and bite back hard.
It’s a different and worthwhile way of seeing evil. For it prevents us from views of evil and the world that are too sunny, too superficial, and too sentimental sweet.

This much I know for certain.  At times everyone here has glimpsed evil in a way that is raw, snarling, stalking, hungry, and clever. And if you saw that face of evil, maybe what you saw scared you more than a little.  I don’t know when it was. But if you saw evil in a setting near and dear to you, it was even more frightening still. 

Maybe you were going through a divorce and the face of someone once beloved to you became twisted and contorted with intention to do harm.  Maybe it was someone in a church you attended who with alarming ferocity wanted more than anything to attack and destroy some lay or staff leader. We might not imagine this could happen in the church, but I’ve seen it. Evil likes to hide within the good.

Maybe it was the first time you brushed up against someone you cared about who was addicted to a substance that had taken over his or her life. Their soul, once at peace, had become a wasteland where hard demons now came to roost.  In my summer following divinity school working with heroin addicts. I confess, at times I saw something predatory in the faces reminding me of a demon-beast. It scared me right down to my socks, the voracious and insatiable way it leered out.
Have you ever peered into evil’s face and felt a chill? It’s not something we talk about much.  Lent is when we tell even more of the truth than the rest of the year.

The Boston psychiatrist and Episcopal layman Robert Coles spent the summer of 1960 in Mississippi interviewing folk, black and white, caught up in the troubles of the times.  He interviewed a white supremacist named John, spending hours listening to this man who had plotted many crimes of hate.  What made him do it? What forces led him so far as to brag about killing families? What made this a decent enough human being willing to stoop to such obvious subhuman evil?

Coles elsewhere writes in Children of Crisis, “We must all know the animal in us can be elaborately rationalized in a society until an act of murder can be called self-defense, and dynamited houses become evidence of moral courage.” What is true of addicts and white-supremecists, let us admit, is no less true of all of us.

That is why Mark’s perspective on evil and temptation is so helpful to us.  What I mean by that is if we can, early on in the process of encountering wrong within others or ourselves, confront the beasts and name the demons, we stand a better chance to subdue them.  And the first demon we might name is self-deceit.

Self-deceit makes us vulnerable to wiles of evil.  For we mislead ourselves ever so subtly with dozens of little toss-away phrases.  “Oh, I’m not really that well off.  Money, materialism, that is not a problem for me.  It’s just a problem for the really rich.”  Or how about, “I don’t claim to be a saint.  But I’m not all that bad a person either.  I try to do the best I can, and after all, isn’t that all God can expect?” As soon as I hear myself thinking like that or hear others talking like that, a red light starts flashing, “Caution, Will Robinson.  Elaborate self-justification dead ahead.”
Maybe we need to name demon-beasts like self-deceit. For the more gifted, powerful, and prospered we are, the stronger our temptation. Are we ready for it?

The thing that’s so frightening about evil, when you look deep into its eyes, is you don’t know where it will end.  In Matthew’s version of Jesus’ temptation, Satan invites Jesus to bow down and worship him, and all of the world will be his. Or so it seems. This reminds me of the physicists at Los Alamos in 1945. Do you know what they worried about the night before dropping the first bomb on Hiroshima? J. Robert Oppenheimer and the rest feared that with detonation of the first atom bomb the entire atmosphere would ignite and all of the world would be destroyed.  They feared that in initiating nuclear fission, this process, once started, would not stop. That it would devour all of the earth in a fireball. Talk about evil as ravenous beast! As we look into the eyes of evil, we ask, where will it end? When will it be satisfied? How many more must fall?  How much suffering will finally be enough?

The best answer to this question is found at this table you and I now approach. For here the cycle of evil and violence has been interrupted for all time.  Notice that it was not broken through fear-mongering, threat, coercion and violence. No, the eager spread of evil was arrested through the forgiveness of sacrificial love; through the vulnerability of trusting that God reigned despite the countervailing evidence of betrayal and suffering right in Jesus’ face; through the conviction that because God’s reigns, good is more powerful than evil despite evil’s worst works.

I close with a story from my first year as pastor.  I served a small town church in Illinois. We had very little. I helped out by mowing at the parsonage. In my first year, I welcomed an Irish Setter puppy named Griffin into my life. As I mowed, I let him off his chain and he frolicked zany every which way. You know how Irish Setters are, madcap crazy with wacky antics. They are more playful than you can imagine. And if the adults are like that, the puppies, well, never mind! Griffin would run by me full blast and knock me down.  He would find sticks throw them in the air, catch them and shake them.  He would chase rabbits and squirrels in all directions until my whistle blast summoned him back. He was curious about everything that moved.  Not the brightest animals, some say of the Irish Setter.

Well, one day I gained a new respect for Griffin’s intelligence.  For a large garter snake slithered across my lawn as I mowed.  Griffin will just love this, I thought. So I stopped and picked it up and called him.  He came within 50 feet, turned tail, ran off to sit on a bank at a distance with his ears perked up and tongue hanging. I called him to come closer. No way I am engaging that creature, he looked back.

Griffin could sense this might be something that would hurt him.  How many of us are not so smart as we respond to evil as it slithers through our lives? I thought.   We are curious about it. We underestimate it. We toy with it. We imagine that it would never hurt us. We fail to respect the surprising and ferocious power of evil.

What can we learn from a silly, mindlessly happy dog? Recognize the beast; respect the beast; face and shun the beast.  Trust the Power bigger than you are to deal with the beast.  Then go play in the garden of the Lord with all your might.  Amen.

Prayers of the People

We serve a Master who reminded disciples

that he was without a place to lay his head.

            What does that mean to us?

It means that the Master we serve knows what it is like

to be in real need, homeless, without a place of his own.

            How then are we to serve him?

In the Spirit of humility, in the Spirit of Christ. 

God has favored us with the ability for the task. 

So we offer our prayers with thanksgiving to God.