Go to Church or the Devil Will Get You
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin on The First Sunday in Lent (C)
Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13
Several years ago, a news headline out of my home state of Alabama caught my eye: “Iconic ‘Go to Church or the Devil Will Get You’ sign is restored to its place along I-65.” [1]
Apparently, social media was buzzing with the news that the sign had been restored to its rightful place by the road after a storm had felled it the previous year.
As some of you know, I-65 cuts through the center of Alabama. As someone who has traveled the state often, I am very familiar with its roadside landmarks, which are varied and many. I’ve preached and shared many a story about them before.
As a child, my mother would often point out the big peach water tower in response to my incessant, “are we there yet(s).” Look, there’s the peach, she’d say, and I’d know we were about an hour away from my extended family in Birmingham.
When I got my driver’s license and began to venture off on my own, I’d often judge my ETA by how close I was to the giant metal cross. Or the big wooden cross. Or the smaller, but no less notable, trio of crosses.
After law school, when my husband and I clerked in two separate Alabama cities, we’d often chat on the phone as he made the commute from Birmingham back to Montgomery. Let me let you go, he’d say. I’m almost there. And I’d know he’d spotted the huge Confederate flag flying high over the interstate.
These landmarks were part of the fabric of my life; and, as such, I developed a sort of apathy towards them. Between the slightly hysterical, overtly religious, and deeply controversial was a girl just trying to get somewhere. Sometimes, they provoked deep thought or discussion (depending on whether I traveled alone or with another). But, most often, I viewed them as little more than data points for where I was along the road; how close, or far, I was from home.
The Go to Church or the Devil Will Get You! sign was no different. I remember as a child being startled by, and a bit scared of, the large devil adorning the sign. He was bright red, and his horns, tail, and unusually large scythe were menacing. But time and exposure eventually dulled him until he evoked not fear, but a chuckle, and then, finally, nothing at all.
The idea of the devil has a long history in Christian theology and Scripture; Satan is present in the Book of Job, where he is given leave by God to test Job, to bring about misery in his life to the ends of disrupting his faith. Some read the devil as present in the Garden of Eden, represented by the serpent, a crafty, wild creature of God’s own creating. And the devil is mentioned numerous times in the New Testament, including in today’s Gospel. In a familiar passage, we are told that Jesus was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil (Lk. 4:1-2).
Artistic renderings of this event vary and include Jesus fighting red, winged creatures, or being stalked by dark, foreboding silhouettes, or engaged in conversation with distorted, larger than life, creatures with grotesque features.
Peter Stanford, the author of “The Devil: A Biography,” (yes, there is such a book) notes that the personification of the devil into the character we know today – the familiar image of a red, horned devil – grew out of early Christianity, an amalgam of bits from dark, evil gods of other faiths. [2]
We may have moved beyond the time when an image of the devil evoked certain fear and shored up faith like it did in ages past; exposure to the caricature dulling our attention and our response. But I think our tendency to put a face on the devil remains alive and well if the popularity of true crime documentaries and podcasts is anything to go by.
We are captivated, aren’t we, by evil incarnate, whether it be in movies, novels, or in news headlines. It is very human indeed to put a face on evil, a face that is not ours, a face that allows us to “name, visualize, vilify” –all to the end of separating “us” from “it”. [3]
Current events unfortunately display this instinct. Recently, two Russian restaurants in DC were vandalized, windows broken, and hateful words painted across the façade. Ostensibly in response to the horror that is happening in the Ukraine at the hands of the Russian government. This is one report of many across the country.
We are rightfully heartbroken for the violence occurring in the Ukraine, and yet to vilify all Russian people –to call them evil—is also an act of violence against them, against us, and against the God who calls us all beloved.
Fleming Rutledge warns us:
Whenever a person takes to themselves the defining of another person or group as evil, they are in more danger than they know. It is in the very nature of the human being to judge other people and groups as evil. We can then give ourselves permission to treat those others as less than fully human, to ostracize them or persecute them and eventually to destroy them. And once we have begun that game, it takes on a life of its own and it begins to dominate us without our even noticing. [4]
If evil incarnate or the devil as a character – red and winged – lends itself to being dismissed as fantastical or something for only the literalist and fundamentalist among us, then the devil as the evil “other” –those persons, groups, or even countries, who commit unspeakable atrocities –lends itself to an equally unhelpful bottom line.
That the devil has little to do with us.
Jesus was led by the Spirit in the wilderness where . . . he was tempted by the devil.
It should be noted that among the artistic renderings of this Biblical event that feature expectedly grotesque and other-worldly devils are several renderings depicting Jesus by himself: alone in the wilderness, no devil in sight.
In those lies the deepest kind of truth: there is no devil in the world that does not also reside inside of all of us. And to grapple with the devil out there one needs first to acknowledge the devil in here.
The Season of Lent refuses to allow our tempter to remain an outsider. Lenten penitence instead redirects us, engaging the harmful places in our lives and in our very souls; for surely that is where our greatest temptations and most severe demons lie. [5] In Lent, we are to become aware of the road we travel, reconsidering our landmarks, considering how truly far we are from home.
We may not know the temptation of being offered power beyond measure like Jesus, but we do know the everyday temptations that accompany being human this side of heaven; we feel the pull of pride, vanity, selfishness, complacency. We know what it means to blame; to hoard; to judge; to gossip; to look away from those in need; to let anger or apathy get the best of us; to engage in dishonesty, infidelity, and over-indulgence. Here lurks the faceless devil - in the recesses of our lives and souls – a devil whose banality coaxes us into a quiet indifference.
In other words, if the devil is to have a face, it may be mine.
This is what Lent calls us to know: that evil lurks within; that we must shine a light on it, acknowledge it, confront it; call it by name; that we must give it to our Creator, Our God, seeking his forgiveness, allowing his Grace.
We do this by following Jesus: who was first tempted and resisted, so that we might not go the way alone. And we do this best not in isolation, but in Christian community. In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
When you confess your sin to another Christian...The expressed, acknowledged sin has lost all its power...The sinner is no longer alone with his evil for he has cast off his sin in confession and handed it over to God. It has been taken away from him. Now he stands in the fellowship of sinners who live by the grace of God in the cross of Jesus Christ.
This is why observing a Holy Lent necessarily involves communion with others, in worship, certainly, but also in prayer, intention, and formation. Together, we walk the pilgrim way of Lent, growing closer to God who sees us as we are and loves us completely. The God who entered our human condition, suffering and dying on the cross for our transgressions, in order to show mercy to all, good and evil alike.
And with that, I get to end with something I never thought I’d say as an adult with any real seriousness:
Go to Church or the Devil will, indeed, Get You.
And I’m only half kidding.
[1] Kelly Kazek, May 17, 2018, AL.COM, https://www.al.com/living/2018/05/iconic_go_to_church_or_devil_w.html
[2] Peter Stanford, “The Devil: A Biography” (Henry Holt & Co., 1996).
[3] Maryetta Anschutz, “Matthew 4:1-11, Pastoral Perspective,” in Feasting on the Word: Year A, Volume 2: Lent Through Eastertide, eds. David L. Bartlett & Barbara Brown Taylor (Westminster John Knox Press, 2010).
[4] Fleming Rutledge, “First Sunday in Lent,” in Means of Grace: A Year of Weekly Devotions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021), 82.
[5] Maryetta Anschutz, “Matthew 4:1-11, Pastoral Perspective,” in Feasting on the Word: Year A, Volume 2: Lent Through Eastertide, eds. David L. Bartlett & Barbara Brown Taylor (Westminster John Knox Press, 2010).