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Sympathy for the Devil Ancient Testimony ~ Luke 4:1-13
February 23, 2014 Michael Ellick
At the beginning of his career, right after being Baptized, Jesus is driven into the wilderness
for 40 days and 40 nights. This "40 days and 40 nights" thing is a reoccurring biblical
motif where humans are delivered from the suffering and slavery of cities, back to the
protection and guidance of nature. It happens again and again throughout the Bible. We see
it in Noah's escape from the flood that destroys all civilization, we see it in the Hebrews'
Exodus out of Egypt, and likewise we see it here at the very beginning of Jesus' story.
In a way all these stories are the direct inverse of the Adam & Eve story. In the beginning,
humanity is driven out of the garden, and every "liberation" story since involves them
having to go back to it in some way (and that might be the best definition of "history"
you're ever going to get).
Well to drive this point home, who should show up to greet Jesus on his 40 day walkabout
but Satan himself. After all, in Genesis it's Satan who tricks humanity out of the garden,
and he seems to show up mysteriously whenever anyone tries to get back. So when Jesus goes
to the wilderness the Devil is there waiting for him, and in their exchange we see the
whole story of the Bible played out in miniature.
Now two weeks ago, I laid out what I believe is the prophetic context for anybody reading
these stories today. As our culture of mass consumption and control continues to expand
exponentially over the globe, the big questions of the 21st Century are all questions of sustainability
and survival. How must we re-organize ourselves if we're to survive? How must we re-conceive
our basic relationships to ourselves, each other, and the planet? Once upon a time we
humans had perfected an indigenous social structure that did pretty well at minimizing
famine, disease, and war. For lack of a better word we could call it "tribalism," and it
kept us alive and stable for over a million years on this planet. But in the past 10,000
years, as humans began to abandon tribalism, we started falling into new kinds of trouble.
With the rise of new agricultural practices that led to constant expansion and consumption,
and from this new forms of hierarchy, and city construction, and Empire building, and
war making, a new kind of human world spread out over the globe that now (10,000 years
later) threatens to collapse under its own weight.
Now, I don't mean to glorify tribalism, I'm just stating the evolutionary facts. For those
of you who asked last time: I'm not suggesting you go out and start your own hunter/gatherer
tribe... At least not yet. But given the specific problems we now face, and the specific solutions
we must be looking for, there is a rapidly growing movement of cross-disciplinary thinkers
who are asking the question: what was it that worked so well about tribalism, for so very
long? What lessons can we learn, or strategies could we adopt in a 21st Century context?
There are many insightful books and dissertations written on this very subject, so if you want
to learn more, or argue with me about it, please be in touch and we can get into the
nitty-gritty. But honestly, I only remind us of all this today to set up what I really
want to talk about, and that is Satan.
So let's talk about Satan. As the big bad of Christian history, Satan (also known as
the Devil, or the Serpent, and countless other amazing names) is basically the symbol for
anything that Christians have decided they're opposed to at any given time. You can fill
in the blank here with any persecuted group or taboo subject matter that has ever been
labeled Satanic: from communism to homosexuality to Dungeons & Dragons. As a high school student,
I once asked our church youth group leader, if we were to spend equal amounts of time
having ***, playing D&D, and reading Karl Marx, which of these things would send us
to hell the fastest? He never answered me.
In the narrative handed down by pop culture, Satan is an Archangel who rebelled against
God and Creation, and for some reason this leads him to torture humanity throughout all
of history. No one ever really says why this is the case, it just is: Satan is a shapeless
horror that courts evil for evil's own sake.
Now in the actual Christian scriptures, we get a little more subtlety and insight than
this, so it's worth looking at how Satan first enters the scene. And for fun let us consider
the possibility that these scriptures are in fact a kind of archetypal memory of all
of Western Civilization. Because what we find in the book of Genesis at it describes the
dawn of our history (which coincidentally enough, if we take Genesis literally, happened
about 10,000 years ago, at about the same time humanity started abandoning tribalism)
what we find in Genesis is the spiritual record of a deep change that happened in the life
of our species.
Satan (depicted as a Serpent) tricks Adam & Eve away from the Tree of Life, by convincing
them to eat from from another tree: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Now in
the Bible this knowledge is presented as a lie (and the Serpent as a Deceiver) but that
doesn't stop Adam & Eve from becoming completely hypnotized by the experience. And once that
happens, once they start to see the world through the false distinctions of “good
and evil,” imperfections start to appear in God’s otherwise perfect world. An artificially
imposed hierarchy of meaning is established, judging and ranking everything, including
ourselves, into greater or lesser value. All of a sudden, we were naked, vulnerable, and
in need of salvation. The clock of history starts ticking, and humans - emerging on the
scene for the first time as frightened farmers and Empire Builders - are ready to do anything
they can to save their own skins.
So this is the true nature of Satan in the Bible: it's not so much that he represents
Evil whereas God represents Good; it's that Satan is the peddler of a very specific kind
of illusion. An illusion cast so deep into our collective subconscious that even our
best attempts at liberating ourselves go on buying into its basic premise. The consequence
of this illusion is a desperate feeling of panic and alienation from our own nature.
It's not so much an original Sin, as it is the idea that there's an original Sin. But
it plays out like a self-fulfilling prophecy, not only in our individual lives, but as a
society that ends up perpetuating or even creating the very dangers it has imagined
into being.
Biblically speaking, Satan is the voice of fear inside us. It's not just the voice that
tells us we are devalued or in danger before God, it's the voice that possesses us into
any number of self-destructive fantasies, under the guise of protecting or promoting
ourselves. In the Bible, Satan is the voice of Empire building, and to bring us full circle,
there is nowhere we see this more clearly than in Satan's conversation with Jesus out
in the wilderness.
Satan says: Hey Jesus, you look pretty hungry! Wouldn't it be great if there was some secret
power out there that could turn all these stones into bread? It'd be a pity to see you
starve, after all. You can't save anyone that way. Wouldn't it be better if we could just
bend the land to our will and make it do whatever we want to?
But when Jesus doesn't go for this, the Devil tries a different tactic. He takes Jesus up
to the top of the Temple in Jerusalem and says: look, Jesus, it's a dangerous world
out there. Accidents happen, you know what I mean? Wouldn't it be better if you used
your divine power to proactively defend yourself from any harm that might befall you?
And when that doesn't work, Satan teleports Jesus to the top of a high mountain, where
supposedly they can see all the four corners of the Earth. He says: seriously, Jesus, do
you want to save the world or not? Because if you do, first you have to control the world,
and I can give you power over all of this. All of humanity could be at your command,
and you can do with them anything you want to. Even help them if you want. What are you
even doing here if you're not here to help people?
Now I just want to point out that there is no catch presented in any of what Satan offers,
and what he suggests here isn't at all "evil" in our traditional sense of the word. Instead
what's offered is the basic playbook for the last 10,000 years of Empire building: the
specific set of human cultural tactics we call "civilization." So in the Bible, Satan
is the voice of the status quo - the same kind of power analysis that guides every one
of us up until the present time. In this way of thinking - which is yours as well as mine
- salvation comes through the cultivation of power over all the ambiguity and impermanence
of Life. And the fact that Jesus utterly rejects all this is not only the most significantly
overlooked fact in the last 2,000 years, it offers us some clues at to what Jesus really
was doing.
Because when Jesus returns to civilization, his rejection of Satan reminds us that real
liberation never comes from power and control, real liberation comes from the deconstruction
of power and control altogether. Jesus doesn't come to build up a good Empire to fight off
all the bad ones, Jesus comes to dismantle the notion of Empire altogether, by demonstrating
in direct practice a completely different kind of social reality that he calls "the
church."
Now of course this sounds a little strange to us, because 2,000 years later we all know
the Christian church to be the biggest Empire builder the world has ever seen. But if we
look at how Jesus himself lived out this notion in practice, it's clear that his idea of "the
church" had far less in common with the institutions we are currently familiar with, and far more
in common with what I am today referring to as tribalism.
Now what does that mean, and why does it matter to any of us? It means that inside our Christian
scriptures, hidden in plain sight, is a radical archaic revival that demonstrates a completely
different way of relating to the world. For the past 2,000 years this hasn't gotten much
attention from Christians, who traditionally quote scripture in justification of whatever
lifestyle is fashionable at the time. But going forward, I would like to suggest there
is no point in discussing what Jesus said without contextualizing this in the way Jesus
lived.
Because in practice, the "good news" was not just a rejection of the status quo, it was
an invitation back into right relationship with ourselves, each other, and the planet.
The early circles of Believers not only offered full amnesty and forgiveness to all of those
suffering the paranoid dreams of Empire, they offered a social roadmap on how to build a
new kind of human society, rooted in the basic practices and principles that had evolved
within our species for millions of years. In a hierarchical world divided by class structure,
racism, and gender bias, the early Christian church offered a life beyond these distinctions,
arguing that the Kingdom of Heaven wasn't some abstract reward waiting for us up in
the clouds, it was an immanent reality here on Earth that could still take care of us
if we learned how to take care of each other within it.
Now over the next few months, we'll be considering in more detail how these early churches functioned,
and what lessons we can learn from them as we continue to ask ourselves how to meet the
unique challenges of the 21st Century. But at the core of all of this is the acknowledgment
that the most transformational thing each of us can do each day might not be the things
we do out there building power for social change, but instead they might be the things
we do in here, together, as we continue to learn how to live with one other. As Jesus
demonstrates so well in his response to Satan's challenge: the true answer to fear is never
control, it's community.
Amen.