LENT 1 ST ANNE’S DUNBAR

Sermon by Revd Margaret Raven

“Away with you, Satan!”

Readings:

Genesis 2: 15-17; 3: 1-7 – “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat…?’”

Matthew 4: 1-11 – “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert…”

 “ Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that God had made”  

Genesis 3:1

There will have been times when the serpent conned you. I know this to be true in my case……one temptation or another put me in opposition to God. I chose a wrong way.   Pretended God didn’t matter for the time being.

It must have happened to you too?... somehow or another God was in the way of what you or I wanted very much – and we quite deliberately turned our back on God.

“God got in our way”?  Hardly…God the giver of all good gifts getting in our way ?  Not at all!   How did we get to see things that way?

Something intervened to unbalance us, to change our perceptions, shift our values, confuse our judgement – That something is called “the serpent”: ego, self-will, evil, Satan, desire, the devil, pride.

The Prince of Darkness uses Grandiosity, Hubris, Selfishness, our will to power, a desire for fame and fortune, joy and delight taken at the expense of someone else, self-centred fear, a need to be recognized…

The Prince of Darkness operates by destabilizing us,playing to our illusions or fears and, through misrepresenting the issue. We have just heard it illustrated in the myth of Eve: how the serpent misrepresents the issue: narrows the range of options, ignores both the truth and the big picture…..from a report of God generously giving every good gift to Adam along withthe freedom to choose and eat any fruit in God’s Garden we can watch how the crafty serpent misrepresents the truth. The crafty serpent narrows the truth to the two trees whose fruit can’t be eaten. A spark of  resentment is ignited in Eve, along with surge of contradiction buttressed by faultless commonsense reasoning: “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its’ fruit and ate”  Instead of God at the centre of this picture, Eve is now the centre of the picture in her mind. She has forgotten to take into account the obligations of the relationship with God.

The serpent got between God and Eve….. God the gracious creator and host and Eve the dependent, grateful, well-mannered guest with almost total freedom of the garden - by moving the goalposts. , dug a hole  and  focusses Eve on what is forbidden.

The serpent created a doubt  in the trust relationship between Adam, Eve and God where there was acceptance before. The serpent created a desire backed up by intelligent self-justification.

Now The Bad News is that given our insecurities, our secret fears, our clamouring needs, our priorities, strategies and plans derived from our own commonsense,…given our culture of individualism,  self-reliance, achievement, our need for financial security and our desire for recognition and power….The Bad News is that The Prince of Darkness will always be able to drop us in it!

The Good News is that with worship and service of  God at the centre of our living and thinking The Prince of Darkness will have a much harder time coopting us into the anti-God agenda.

Jesus has no problem dealing with Satan’s crafty strategies: Remember them?Surprise, isolation; destabilization; provoking insecurities and self-doubt; misrepresentation/confusing the issue/moving the goalposts; making a bargain…proposing what looks like a good deal

And here is the good news….Jesus (and by implication each of us ) already knew he lived in the love and care of God so his stability couldn’t be rocked and his reasoning  hijacked by shocks, isolation etc. Even famished after 40 days without food he recognizes the temptation is not directed at his hunger but at any lingering insecurities he may have had about being the Son of God (If you are the son of God says the tempter change the stones into bread…). From his knowledge of Scripture Jesus is shown refutingboth the challenge to his relationship with God and resisting hunger a bit longer. He is the Beloved of God. He can stand secure and so can we.

Satan then tried a combination of strategies: the inevitable  insecurities Jesus the man must have had about how to achieve his mission of bringing in the kingdom of God…insecurities of identity and purpose; destabilization  intensified by being dizzy with hunger, swept up from the desert and set high up on a pinnacle of the temple; disinformation – a nice touch - as Satan wrenches scripture out of context to encourage Jesus to do stunts to achieve fame and recognition if- again that is if he is the Son of God.  If you are the Son of God…Jesus overcomes the disorientation. He rejects the “if” and the stunts, and the testing. He is the beloved of God, he can stand secure inside that relationship and so can we. He heard this coming up from the water of his baptism….This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. e is the Beloved of God. He    Being in a reciprocal loving relationship strengthens us all. That is why we work on our spiritual lives in Lent….in order to be strong and firm and energetic and joyful and free.

You would think Satan would have given up at this point but there is one more strategy in the arsenal of evil and that is bargaining…..trying to do a deal. Jesus’s task as Son of God is to convert the whole world. He has to have been worried about how he could possibly achieve such a thing. Satan of course already possesses the whole world so what could be easier?. Bow down to me proposes Satan and you can have the whole world. Sorted. Problem solved. God’s expectations met. No worries!

“Worship the Lord your God and serve only him” quotes Jesus from scripture…..a basic rule of life for him and for us.

Secure in the love of God we can all rely on our relationship with God, scripture, worship, Christian community and service of God as our rule of life and, like Jesus in the destabilizing , complex, difficult and testing times say with confidence: Away with you Satan!