Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent
“If I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God
hath come upon you.”
It is a terrifying and frightening picture, perhaps, the most terrifying and frightening picture of the human soul in the whole of the Scriptures. And, perhaps, this is where the ancient gospel with all of its perplexity and confusion about devils and demons meets the darkness and despair of contemporary culture. No set of readings, it seems to me, speaks more directly to our confusions and uncertainties.
There is far more to this picture than the postures of moralizing righteousness that, at first glance, we might think is the message of Paul in his letter to the Ephesians with his proscriptions against “fornication”, “all uncleanness”, “covetousness” which is idolatry, “filthiness”, “foolish-talking”, “jesting”, all of “which are not befitting”, and “whoremonger[ing]”, as he puts it, all of which are summed up as being “the unfruitful works of darkness.”
It seems like quite a list of the usual suspects of human sinfulness with more than a modicum of focus on sex which troubles our age so greatly. And yet, this list of “the unfruitful works of darkness” is based upon something deeper and more profound, and perhaps, most troublingly so. It will belong to the tradition of moral theology to rank and place the vices and virtues of the human soul in a kind of hierarchy, a kind of system, if you will, such as the seven deadly sins, for instance. And there is something right about that culturally, politically and socially. There is, we might say, the recognition that our peccadilloes, our little sins, as it were, are not to be compared with the ranker forms of evil potentially and actually in our souls and our communities and that are before us in the endless parade of injustices and violences in our world and day. But, be that as it may, there is also the deep spiritual insight that all our sins, from the least to the greatest, belong to the darkness. Paul claims that all of it must come to light.
