St. Matthew's Sermons

Sermon for the 2nd Sunday in Lent
The Epistle, 1 Thessalonians iv. 1. The Gospel, St. Matthew xv. 21.
By the Rev’d John Crews

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost

We are now a week and a halfway through Lent. After some initial struggles, many of us might be starting to feel that we might be able to endure in our fasts, that maybe, just maybe, we can maintain our Lenten disciplines.

But I have some bad news.

As our Gospel lesson last week pointed out, it wasn’t until Jesus had fasted a full forty days that the devil tempted Him.

The devil and demons loom large in our lectionary in the first three weeks of Lent. Last week we recalled Jesus’s temptation by the Devil in the desert. This week, Jesus cast a devil out of the daughter of a Gentile woman, and next week, Jesus will be accused of casting out devils through Beelzebub. As an aside, next week’s lesson features one of the great lines in the King James Version, Jesus was casting out a devil, and it was dumb.

Nowadays, it seems that Christian teachings run toward one of two extremes when discussing the devil and demons. Either such talk is seen as the embarrassing folklore of pre-modern peoples. There is no literal devil, it’s merely a metaphor, a personification of man’s propensity for evil and demons merely a misunderstanding of mental illness. The other error is to see the Devil in everything, unseemly. A political foe is under the influence of Satan, an unruly child is in the throes of a demon, or the use of a social security number is a mark of the devil.

Scripture is quite stingy with its information about the devil. Tradition holds that the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve in the garden was the devil. Tradition also holds that Devil was once an Angel called Lucifer, meaning lightbearer, pointing to Isaiah 14:12-15

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

But otherwise, Scripture remains fairly quiet on who the Devil is and why he does what he does and when Scripture is silent on such matters.

Likewise, the nature of demons is something of a mystery. What they are and what their purpose is, remains murky. But despite those who claim otherwise, that primitive superstitions should give way to modern science’s better understanding of mental health, the fact of the matter is that there are demonic entities that plague mankind. True, what may have once been ascribed to demonic possession, schizophrenia and similar mental disorders are better understood and treated through other means, and need no longer be seen as caused by possession, but it has also become evident to the Church that such mental afflictions themselves provide fertile soil for demons to operate, that in our distresses of mind and body, dark forces take full advantage.

They also take advantage of our hubris, and it is almost certain that such attacks will only increase as our society turns from God and more and more embraces grotesque spiritualities like witchcraft. After all, one is more likely to find a spellbook on prominent display at the bookstore than you are a bible.

But while Scripture might be stingy on demonology, what it is clear on is that there is indeed a devil and there are indeed demons. It is also clear from scripture and what the two schools of thought I mentioned earlier miss is that he is exceedingly subtle.

The devil is a wily adversary, and make no mistake, we are in a battle with him and He has more money and resources at his disposal. That is what Lent is meant to teach us. The devil will use everything at his disposal, good and bad, it doesn’t matter what it is as long as the result is the same, our turning away from God.

The devil twists our desires for good things and entices us, twisting those desires. It is a good thing to want to provide for one’s family, to seek security, and comfort but the devil twists those and instead of seeking them in the only place where they can reside, in God’s love for us. The devil prompts us to seek our good in possessions, in wealth, in the created things of this world, all of which are temporary, mere fleeting ephemera that not only fail to provide that which we seek but in our idolatry, sap our souls of the ability to engage in the relationship with Christ that is our duty to provide our families. Seeking possessions, wealth, the things of this world, will in the end, shake the foundations of the security of our trust in God, and rob us of the comfort of Holy Ghost.

The devil hates us. He has contempt for our weaknesses and wants us to share in that contempt and despair, giving up hope. God loves us and wants us to be, in the words of Jesus, “perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” (Matt 5:48) But the devil twists that and argues that unless we are perfect first, God cannot love us. The devil says that we must be perfect and that because we are not yet perfect, we are instead failures. Give up on God, the devil says. And we confirm his disdain for us whenever we do.

And make no mistake, you will fall, we all do. We all stumble. We are all of us, sinners, “[f]or all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23). In our Lenten disciplines, as in life, we will come up short. Our failures are our own. The devil doesn’t need to make us sin, we do that fine on our own. What the devil will do is tell you to give up, that you have failed the test. But that is not the type of testing God does with us. God already knows all. He does not test us to see if whether we are or are not holy. Instead, His testing is for US, it is a diagnostic, a tool for our benefit to show us the areas where we still need work.

Our failures reveal our weaknesses and it is in them we encounter Jesus. As our Collect this morning said, ‘we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves’ and the sooner we learn that the sooner we can put to death the self-regard that is the devil’s playground. The way of salvation lays through the cross and only in Christ is our suffering redeemed, and only in our lives in Jesus can we experience holiness.

But the devil doesn’t want us to work on our holiness. He wants to prevent us, in the words of today’s epistle, to “abound more and more.” He wants you to quit. If we do so because we convince ourselves that we are fine the way we are, that we can’t change, that our salvation is secure, that a Good God would never allow suffering, that it doesn’t matter which God you follow as long as you are a good person, that He doesn’t exist, or that you are an unsavable wretch, it doesn’t matter to the Devil, the outcome is the same, and he has added another name in his little black book of fools.

This Lent, you will fail. It’s inevitable. We are weak, fallible creatures and if you make it through Lent without failing it probably means you picked something too easy to give up, something that didn’t really mean much to you, or something you should have given up long ago, not just for Lent.

So you’ve failed, now what? You gave up eating during the day, it’s the middle of the afternoon and your tummy’s grumblin’ and you can’t concentrate on work, so you say to yourself, ‘I gotta eat something.’ Do you eat a Cliff Bar or do you let the Devil whisper in your ear, ‘You’re breaking the fast, so might as well go all out. Eat that donut.’ Later on, the devil will come back and turn from tempter to accuser, telling you what a miserable failure you are, how everyone will judge you for failing. How God will judge you and find you unlovable.

That’s how the devil operates. Remember, failing to observe your Lenten fast isn’t a sin in and of itself. But gorging yourself is. The devil wants to turn our failures into excuses for sin, and twist sin not as an opportunity to seek God’s forgiveness and a chance at growth but rather a feeling of hopelessness, a rejection of God.


The devil doesn’t need you to worship him, any more than the demons need you to believe in them. The devil just wants you to stop worshiping God and whatever distraction he can dangle will suffice. If you wind up worshiping wealth, possessions, the environment, yourself, it makes no difference to the devil, he has another one added to his column.

But the devil writes with impermanent ink. All we have to do to get our names scratched off is to turn back to God.

In this lies our participation in Christ’s triumph of Satan, in our continual turning back to God. Satan does not win when we sin, the demons do not dance at our failures because they know such occasions are precisely where God’s presence is most profoundly present with us. Blessed are the weak and Jesus came not for the righteous but for sinners. Over and over again, the Prophets of old pleaded with Israel to repent and turn back to God. They failed.

We must not fail. Because there will come a time when we will sin for the last time. We hope that it happens nearer today than closer to our death, but there is a last sin for all of us. When we last sin, who will we be? One who is seeking God’s love or one who fears it?

Only by continuing to press forward can we overcome that fear. Only by small disciplines like fasting where we learn to endure through Christ do we learn to trust in Him when we face those bigger trials that don’t have a known time limit of 40 days. And only in trusting in Jesus do we withstand the temptations of the Devil and of our own hearts.

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost