Go to Church or the Devil Will Get You! | A Sermon on Alabama Roadside Landmarks, Temptation, and Satan
A sermon preached at Christ Church Georgetown on the First Sunday in Lent, Year A, March 1, 2020.
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Psalm 32; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11
A news headline out of my home state of Alabama recently caught my eye:
“Iconic ‘Go to Church or the Devil Will Get You’ sign is restored to its place along I-65.”
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. [1]
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. 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 indicate, and I’d know we were 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 report back to my mother as ordered, “All good. Just passed the big Cross.” Which one, she’d ask. The real big one, I’d say. 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 I-65.
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, apathy.
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 up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.
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,” notes that the personification of the devil into the character we know today – the familiar image of a red, horned devil with pitchfork in hand – grew out of early Christianity, an amalgam of bits from dark, evil gods of other faiths.[2]
He writes, “Evil in itself is rather hard to define; but, if we call it ‘the devil’, it somehow becomes more comprehendible. And in an age of illiteracy, for the first 1,200 to 1,400 years of Christianity, images were very powerful.”[3]
We may have moved beyond the time when an image of the devil evoked certain fear and shored up faith; 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”.[4]
If the devil as character – red and winged – lends itself to “literalistic, fundamentalist, quasi-interpretation,” that is easily dismissed, as has been argued,[5] then the devil as the evil “other” –those persons who commit unspeakable atrocities –lends itself to an equally unhelpful bottom line.
The devil has little to do with us.
Charles Baudelaire famously suggested that “the greatest trick the devil ever played was to make the world believe he doesn’t exist,” and I fear he’s quite right.
Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be 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.
Sam Candler writes, “What causes me to go wrong in life is not what is out there in the world; it is what is inside me. This understanding goes against one of the most damaging weaknesses of our modern culture, which is our inclination to look for blame outside ourselves.”[6]
The Season of Lent refuses to allow our tempter to remain an outsider. Lenten penitence instead redirects us, engaging the dark places in our lives and in our very souls; for surely that is where our greatest temptations and most severe demons lie.[7] 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 hoard; to judge; to gossip; to look away from those in need; to let anger get the best of us; to engage in dishonesty, infidelity, and over-indulgence. Here lurks the faceless devil - in the dark recesses of our lives and souls - whose banality coaxes us into a quiet apathy.
In other words, if the devil is to have a face, it is 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 following Jesus; who was first tempted and resisted, so that we might not go the way alone. And we do this not in isolation, but in the midst of 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.”
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] Ibid.
[4] 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).
[5] Matthew Bell, “The Church of England Doesn’t Want You to Worry About the Devil,” PRI, July 15, 2014, https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-07-15/church-england-doesnt-want-you-worry-about-devil.
[6] Dean Samuel “Sam” Candler, The Dark Side of Holiness, sermon at the Cathedral of St. Philip, Atlanta, Georgia, March 10, 2019, https://www.cathedralatl.org/Sermons/the-dark-side-of-holiness. Sam’s sermon inspired many aspects of this sermon, and I am grateful to him for opening this passage up for me in a new way.
[7] Anschutz, “Matthew 4:1-11, Pastoral Perspective”.
