Sermon: On the Devil and Demons

This sermon is part of our annual “Throwback Sunday” series, where we look at older theological concepts that we may not find helpful (or even tolerable) anymore. We ask where they came from, what were their consequences, and whether or not they are still relevant or meaningful in any way today.

Mark 1:21-28

A few years ago, I was talking to someone during fellowship time who had just started attending our church. They were interested in us because we are a historic peace church. Somehow, our conversation got onto the topic of horror movies, and I mentioned that I loved them, and that my middle school son and I regularly watched them together. This person got a look of confusion and shock on their face and said, “Wow, that was not what I was expecting to hear from a Mennonite pastor.” I was quite certain we had just lost a congregant, until I clarified that I wasn’t talking about slasher flicks. I hate slasher movies. But I love movies or TV shows about the supernatural —  ghosts and hauntings, vampires and zombies. I have such a high tolerance for this kind of supernatural horror show — probably because I’ve seen so many of them — that I’m normally not very scared. 

However, movies about demons, exorcisms?  Those freak me out. Not enough to not watch them but I would never watch them alone.  Recently, I was reading a book about the devil and demons called The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared. This happened to be when I was when I was alone in a house since Jerome and Patrick were on vacation together. The opening vignette freaked me out so much that I immediately got my cross necklace, and I kept it with me every time I read the book. I held it in my hand. And I didn’t bring the book into my upstairs part of my house where my bedroom and office are, where I spend most of my time. It had to be downstairs, at some distance from me.

So, given what I just said, you might think that I’m all in on belief in the devil and demons. And I’m not. I find myself — and I’m guessing this might be true for many of you — approaching the topic from different angles, and depending on what angle I approach from, what I think about the reality of personified evil changes.

So, here’s one angle: the scholarly take on the subject.  The belief in the existence of evil spirits or demons who have the ability to possess people has been common to most societies throughout time, especially before Enlightenment rationalism became globalized. Interestingly, though, evil spirits appear infrequently in Hebrew Scripture; they are not really a big part of the Jewish worldview. The Hebrew word for Satan — pronounced saw-TAN — appears several times in the Old Testament but it either refers to a human being who is playing the role of an accuser or enemy, or a divine being who is a legitimate member of God’s council who acts in this kind of testing, oppositional way on God’s behalf, like the saw-TAN in Job who puts him to the test.

Most scholars agree that it’s only in the Jewish writings of the 3rd or 2nd century BCE that we begin to see a character who is the archenemy of God. The emergence of the Satan we are more familiar with may have been due to the influence of Zoroastrianism, a Persian theology that stated that God was all good and so nothing evil could emerge from this good God. So, you have to have some explanation for why there it evil into the world, and Zoroaster found this in an ancient Hindu story of a battle between the elder gods and the younger gods. Zoroaster said that the elder gods won that conflict, while the younger gods became the enemy of the winners, and their leader eventually became the lord of evil and darkness, who rose to almost equality with God in terms of power, and who had to be destroyed in order for perfect goodness to be possible on earth.

However, Satan — or the devil — really only takes center stage in the New Testament, especially in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. By the 1st century CE, when these gospels are being written, Satan is now being viewed as the ruler of evil cosmic forces, completely opposed to God and, in fact, Satan was even seen as having gained temporary control of the earth.  Now, why this shift; why had Satan become the Big Bad?  It’s no coincidence that these beliefs become prominent just as the Roman Empire was beginning to dominate Israel. That Empire conquered Israel in 63 BCE and began steadily tightening its oppressive economic and political grip in the decades leading up to the time of Jesus and his disciples. This oppressive rule culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 CE.  Most of our Gospels were written after that cataclysm.

It is no wonder that a people ground under by the boot of the greatest empire the world had ever known up until that point may have come to believe in a powerful evil force that had temporarily taken over the world.  This may be why exorcisms are a big part of Jesus’ ministry in those three Gospels. The story of an exorcism that we just heard is the first act of public ministry that Jesus performs in the gospel of Mark. Many Biblical scholars see Jesus’ exorcisms as a political act. Ashe Van Steenwyck, who has preached here, sees those possessed by a demon as particularly sensitive people whose souls have been twisted by the injustice of  that society. “They are people who bear the weight of injustice in their bodies and minds,” she says. So Jesus casting out those demons is a way of resisting the domination of this Roman Empire and the way it colonizes the interior of people.

Of course, in a great, tragic turn, Christianity eventually became the state religion of that Roman Empire. In the Middle Ages, theologians popularized many of the ideas about the Devil and demons that have become standard today. And, tragically, throughout the centuries, imperial Christianity will turn this demonizing theology against a wide range of enemies: Muslims, Jews, women, Indigenous people, LGBTQ people, etc. It’s really easy to make an other of people if you see them as the Devil incarnate or as consciously or unconsciously being an instrument of Satan. 

And then, the Enlightenment happened and people really began questioning the idea that evil stems from the existence of mythological beings like the Devil and his minions.  Instead, a more psychological view of evil becomes commonplace. I would call this angle #2 for me.  In its simplest form, this view sees “possessions” in the Bible as diagnosable, like epilepsy or schizophrenia or any number of psychological conditions that easily explain states of being that read as “possessed” to pre-scientific people.

But there’s a more nuanced and, I think, interesting, take on evil that combines psychological with political insights. The depth psychologist Carl Jung and theologians like Walter Wink who draw on his thought believe that there are real and powerful forces in the world that influence it toward evil. But Wink does not believe that these forces are personal beings. He believes they are “powers and principalities” that are formed by and form systems of oppression like militarism and poverty and white supremacy. Wink calls these dominations systems, and in his theology, Satan is the name of the world-encompassing spirit of these domination systems.

Even if we could snap our fingers and magically end these domination systems,  that would not mean that evil would just end. In Wink’s theology, militarism and poverty and white supremacy are the outer manifestation of an inner spirit that “possesses” us. Unless we become aware of that inner spirit — unless we collectively are conscious of it and seek to cast it out — these “demonic” forces will continue to reproduce themselves. We see this so clearly in the history of white supremacy in this country. After 250 years, slavery was abolished. But it didn’t take long for the demonic spirit known as white supremacy to morph into Jim Crow and then into mass incarceration and then into police brutality.  In yet another tragic story of how this demonic reality operates we have Sonya Massey, a 30-year-old Black woman who called 911 for help and was killed in her home by the same police officer who ostensibly came to help. At one point, as the situation is being increasingly escalated by this police officer, she says, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” What evil spirit was she speaking to?

This understanding of evil or the demonic as a social reality that possesses us is one that I believe in. And… I don’t know if it explains everything. This is angle #3 for me. I know too many people whose sanity I trust who have weird stuff happen to them, weird stuff that I’m not sure can be explained solely by Walter Wink’s theology.  I honestly don’t quite know what to do with the things I’m about to mention  My rational mind won’t completely let me believe in them. But, I have a sense of humility that there might be spiritual realities of which I am unaware and I at least need to be open to that. 

Let’s take exorcisms. I know a Jesuit priest who knows a Jesuit priest who is an exorcist. This person is incredibly smart and sane. They do extensive psychological testing to make sure that the people they exorcise are not just experiencing hallucinations or are mentally ill.  Something different is happening to them, and the exorcisms often work when other interventions did not. The book I mentioned recounts a famous exorcism in some detail. The New York Times reviewer said, “Unless you simply refuse to believe multiple eyewitnesses — if you are the sort of skeptic who feels that mass delusion is more plausible than the possibility of powers normally unseen — you will leave (this book) strongly inclined to agree with the author that evil is literally real.”

And then, there’s my friend Fran, who is a therapist. When she was 17, she and her mother were staying, for the first time, at the home of one of her mother’s friends in England. The first night, Fran heard banging on the walls for most of the night, and it seemed to come from the room next door.  In the morning, she told the young man who slept in that room what she heard, and he said he had heard nothing and had slept soundly all night. At the same time, her mother was having weird dreams that something sinister was attacking Fran — in one dream, a big rat was attempting to harm her. The second night, the end of Fran’s bed rose up.  Being a good Catholic, she knew what words to say: “In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to leave.” I just talked about this to her again, and she said:  “I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t having a psychotic break. And, insofar as any one of us can know we aren’t hallucinating, I wasn’t hallucinating.” She told me that her mother felt like the menacing spirit was due to the gossipy, maliciousness that was in that household. In fact, the mother realized after the visit that she no longer wished to be friends with this woman, whom she realized was not a good person. 

I asked Fran what she made of this experience now. She is no longer Catholic; she’s Tibetan Buddhist. She’s not a theist anymore — she doesn’t believe in a “God out there” or Jesus in the same way she used to.  She said, “I believe that we can always call upon the power of Love. When I was calling upon Jesus, I was calling upon Love. And that Love will protect us.” She told me that she had other weird stuff happen to her up through her 30s and 40s, and that she always found that calling upon Love worked, whether that Love was incarnated in Jesus or, later after becoming a Buddhist, in Green Tara.  She agreed with me that Love really is the Lord of heaven and earth, as one of our favorite hymns says. This, I really believe. I invite us to turn to number 605 in our hymnal and sing verses 1 and 3 of that hymn, “My Life Flows On.”