I’ve got this cool app on my iPad. It's a dictionary, encyclopedia and thesaurus,
all rolled into one, and I use it a lot. Now
I know what y’all are thinking .
. . Rick’s impossibly literate, cultured, learned, knowledgeable, educated and
erudite. What would he need a dictionary
and thesaurus for? Well, believe it or
not, I am occasionally at a loss for words, and sometimes I
just like to play word games. Like the
time I looked up the word “devil” in the thesaurus, just for grins, and came up
with a pretty good list: Lucifer and Satan.
Mephistopheles and Prince of Darkness.
Adversary, Tempter and King of
Hell. The Debbil. El Diablo, Angel of Darkness and The Nameless
One. And of course, my personal
favorite, Ol’ Scratch.
Lots
of names for something we're supposed to be scared of. But Ol’ Scratch is a popular figure in song and story as well. “That Old Devil Moon.” “Devil Woman.” “Devil in Disguise.” “Devil Dance.” “Friend of the Devil.” “The Devil Wears Prada.” “The Devil’s Right
Hand.” And last but not least, Devil
With a Blue Dress, blue dress, blue dress, devil with a blue dress on. (Sorry . . . I got carried away.)
But
my favorite of all is a song by the Charlie Daniels band: “The Devil Went Down
to Georgia.” It’s about when when the
Devil, behind on his quota of souls, desperately offers a fiddler named Johnny
a deal for his soul: if Johnny beats him at a fiddling contest, he’ll give him
a fiddle made of gold. But if not,
Johnny’ll have to give the Devil . . . his SOUL!!!!
Well. Johnny’s an even better fiddler than Ol’
Scratch, he gets his golden fiddle,
and it’s a twist on the story of blues man Robert Johnson’s selling his soul on a Mississippi-crossroads
Midnight, which itself is a riff on a
venerable folk tradition. So venerable,
in fact, that it's got a number . . . two, in fact. "Bargain with the devil" is motif
number M210 and "Man sells soul to devil" is motif number M211 in
folklorist Stith Thompson's Motif-Index
of Folk-Literature. Put that in your fiddle and smoke it.
Of
course, the most famous example might
be the classical German legend of Faust, immortalized in plays by Christopher
Marlow and Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe.
But even that has precedents,
dating all the way back to the sixth century and a man named Theophilus (presumably not the same one Luke
wrote his gospel to five centuries before).
Theophilus, whose name is
Greek for God-lover, was an Archdeacon at Adana, now a part of modern
Turkey. A humble man, Theophilus refuses to be appointed
Bishop, but regrets it when the man who does
take the job unjustly deprives him of his position as Archdeacon. So naturally, he seeks out a wizard to help
him contact Ol’ Scratch. I mean, that's
what I’d do, wouldn't you?
At
any rate, the devil demanded that he renounce Christ and the Virgin Mary, sign
the contract in his own blood, and made him Bishop. Years later, he got worried about his immortal
soul, and so he prayed to the Virgin Mary to get him out of it. Long story short, after several twists and
turns, including a grade-A scolding by the virgin, she finally intercedes with
God on his behalf and he is absolved.
But the devil doesn't want to give up so easy, but after three days, he
gives up, and Theophilus is freed
from his contract. Shades of Jesus’
three days in the grave.
Now. Even though there really was an archdeacon named Theophilus,
the tale of his pact with the devil is considered to be legendary, even by
the Catholic Church. Which, of course,
has no problem accepting as, er . . . gospel,
that much the same thing happened to Jesus five hundred years earlier. Oh, it's not spelled out explicitly or
anything, but the three temptations of Jesus require as payment the worship of
the devil, which to me amounts to the
same thing as selling his soul. And lest
we divert into metaphysical territory, I have no idea whether Jesus had a soul
or not, but the classical Trinitarian formula has him fully human yet fully
divine, and humans have souls . . .
Anyway. Without opening the can of worms known as
biblical inerrancy, one of the reasons I like this story so much is that it’s
like a folk-tale. It’s a real story, with a beginning and an end, and a
protagonist—Jesus—and an antagonist, Ol’ Scratch himself. It’s quite entertaining, perhaps the most
entertaining one in the New Testament.
The Old Testament seems to
have more than its share: Ruth, Esther, and Job come to mind, as well as Tobit
from the Roman Catholic bible. These
stories are told and retold, and they’re a preacher’s dream because it’s easy
to retell the story, updating it to appeal to folks in the pews. Three years ago, in this very pulpit, I
pictured the devil as a “successful yuppie with tasseled loafers and an Izod
shirt. . . a Starbuck’s in one hand” and a briefcase in the other. In another sermon, I envisioned him in an Armani
suit, big ‘ol cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat, like he’d been watching too
much Dallas or something.
Of
course, it's not just in sermons . . . Popular culture gives us updated devils as well.
Besides starring the typical Aryan Jesus, a turn-of-the-century TV
miniseries gave us two—count ‘em, two!—Beelzebubs, one male and one female, but
both foreign . . . in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Satan is played by a woman, but she is decidedly androgynous. And, of
course, foreign. Finally, in the latest
incarnation—television’s Lucifer—the
title character is played as a suave lady-killer who’s on vacation in L.A. And he’s—you guessed it—foreign.
And
I think it's obvious that our imaginings about the Prince of Darkness say more
about ourselves than they do about
Ol’ Scratch. In the movies, he seems to
reflect whatever the prevailing angst is at the time. Our rising national xenophobia is shown in
the fact that Satan is almost never played
by an American actor. Gibson’s androgynous, female demon reflected his homophobic
reaction to the rising gay rights movement, as well as his well-known misogyny. And my Texan devil reflected my distaste for
rich oil-men and my six year stay in that great state. And maybe too much Bobby and J.R. Ewing.
We
project our fears and dislikes upon the figure of Satan, and psychologists have
shown us that it's often characteristics within ourselves that we don't like, or that we don't want to admit we
have. Thus, my Starbucks-swilling yuppy
just might reflect the fact that I do love my Starbuck’s and all the rest
of my stuff, and though I don't want
to malign Mel Gibson any more than I already have, it's a pretty well-known
pathology to project all the things you hate about yourself onto the opposite sex.
Psychologist
Carl Jung called this figure, this entity—which
contains all the personally or socially unacceptable stuff of our own—the shadow, and he showed that we—both
individuals and societies—project
this figure onto others. In the thirties,
the German people projected all their fears and anxieties onto the Jewish
population of Europe, and ended up killing six million of them. For a long time, since before the Civil War,
white Americans have been projecting all the stuff they hate about their own
selves onto African Americans, contributing to the continuing poverty and
marginalization of our black population.
And
individual projection can be just as detrimental. We’ve all heard it said that “oh, they don't
get along because they’re too much alike,” and probably experienced it as
well. The truth of it is explained in
the phenomenon of projection: we don't like the other person because we see
ourselves there and have projected—all unconsciously, of course—all the stuff
we dislike about ourselves, or are socially unacceptable, onto them.
You
know, Luke never describes the devil, he never tells us what he looks
like. There's no Germanic accent or misogynistic
blue dress or midnight fiddler. He just says
that he tempts Jesus, and leaves it up to us to imagine what he might be.
And
maybe that's the point. Maybe I’m not supposed to personalize Satan, because if
I do, if I imagine the enemy as a person
running around out there, it's too
easy to dismiss it as outside of myself. It's too easy to project all my very human
faults and foibles tidily onto another and imagine that they aren't mine to work on, mine to fix. And when that happens, when I imagine that
everybody but myself is problem,
well, there can be literally Hell to pay.
And
so, on this first Sunday of Lent, when we begin our exploration of what it
means to be human in God’s calculus of salvation, let’s consider this: maybe
the devil isn’t some demon flapping around, whispering in our ears, some guy in
red long-johns sitting on one shoulder, while an equally insipid angel sits on
the others. Perhaps the devil is our own
shadow, our own stuff we project
outside of ourselves, onto the world and those who are in it. And maybe, just maybe, the kingdom that Jesus says is within begins when we accept that shadow, when we become conscious of it so we can stop the cycle
of violence and recrimination and
bring the kingdom of God to fruition both without and within. Amen.
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