Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent
Would you know
the Devil if you met him?
Some of the witnesses
who see Jesus' cast out a demon
clearly don't.
"He casts out demons
by the power of Beelzebub!"
they say.
The strange thing is
that they are indeed
witnesses of the miracle.
They see the demon
expelled from the man.
They have heard this man
speak when, before,
he couldn't.
So they have seen the effect
but they reject the cause.
Rather than see the truth,
they would prefer to believe
that the Devil,
the prince of demons
was the cause.
[PAUSE]
Our Lord points out the irony here.
If you can't tell whether
a demon has been expelled by God
or by the Devil.
Then you can't tell
whether any demon
has been expelled by God
or by the Devil.
So, all the "proper" exorcisms
that have been performed
by the Jewish authorities
of the day
cannot be said definitively
to have been by God.
As Our Lord says,
those who say that
He drives out demons by the Devil
are denouncing their own
authority.
They cut off the branch
on which they sit.
But if they are wrong
and Our Lord casts out demons
through the Finger of God
- the Holy Ghost
- then they are witnesses
to God's presence with them
and must repent.
[PAUSE]
Even today,
there are those
who are afflicted
with the same tendency
to attribute to the Devil
that which comes from God.
There are those Christians who say,
"Unless you believe what I believe
then you are a worshipper of Satan!"
But wait!
If you cannot tell
whether another's belief
is truth from God or a lie from Satan
then you cannot tell whether
you yourself are a "worshipper of Satan".
True, we believe that
what our Church teaches
is right
and therefore,
we must believe that
those who do not believe
what we believe are wrong.
Being wrong is part
of human fallenness
and therefore deserves
compassion and forgiveness,
not condemnation.
We do not tolerate
the wrong doctrine
but we expel it by refusing to adopt it
and by calling out heresy.
Those who accept heresy
indeed separate themselves
from the Church,
but we always should seek
to keep the door of the Church open
for them to come back.
We certainly cannot say whether
a different group of Christians
are "worshippers of Satan"
unless we see Satan being worshipped.
If we want to know
the fruits of the demonic,
they are listed by St Paul
in his letter to the Galatians.
"Now the works of the flesh
are manifest, which are these;
Adultery, fornication,
uncleanness, lasciviousness,
Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred,
variance, emulations, wrath,
strife, seditions, heresies,
Envyings, murders, drunkenness,
revellings, and such like:
of the which I tell you before,
as I have also told you in time past,
that they which do such things
shall not inherit the kingdom of God."
Christians of every sort
commit these faults,
some on a daily basis,
but that does not make their
faith null and void.
It just makes them
in need of salvation
through Jesus
the Perfector of Our Faith.
[PAUSE]
Being a sinner
is not automatic Devil-worship.
Being a sinner
is not automatic damnation.
Being a sinner
is being in need of salvation
through Jesus Christ
and this salvation
is a process which begins at Baptism
and ends with our standing
before the Judgement seat of God.
God does not desire
the death of a sinner
but rather that He repent
and live.
In our lives of repentance
we will encounter the Devil
and we will encounter Christ.
We will,
at times,
confuse the two
- that's the consequence
of The Fall
- but with Christ
we ALWAYS have the opportunity
to repent and be part of His Church.
And that's a mark of the Church
we should recognise.
Christ gathers,
the Devil scatters.
Again,
St Paul tells us
what to look for:
"the fruit of the Spirit is
love, joy, peace,
longsuffering, gentleness,
goodness, faith,
meekness, temperance:
against such there is no law."
Rather than focussing
on turning away from the Devil,
we should be focusing
on Christ.
By focusing on the Devil,
it is as if we are
walking backwards
and we stumble over more obstacles
that he puts in our path.
By focusing on Christ,
we necessarily turn
from the Devil
onto the right path.
[PAUSE]
It doesn't matter
where we are now
as long as we are
committing ourselves
to our salvation.
God sees us not as
black with sin
but rather grey with sin,
still possessing
the whiteness of His image
that has not been
obliterated
but rather clouded
by our separation from Him.
And throughout our lives
spent turning towards Him,
He will purge us with hyssop
and we shall be clean.
He shall wash us
and we shall be whiter than snow.
That is our focus,
our way forward,
by facing forwards to Him.
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