The Third Sunday after Trinity (July 3, 2022)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

We all know the phrase “misery loves company.” There are two senses of that phrase. I could be used to mean that people who are suffering feel a need for some consolation. That’s true and good. But the way the phrase most often gets used mean that miserable people like it when other people are miserable too. I can testify to this: if you’ve spent any time around Jude, you know that in our household, we’re pretty big Carolina Hurricanes hockey fans. The Carolina Hurricanes made the Stanley Cup playoffs and lost in the second round to the New York Rangers. The Rangers went on to lose the following series and I not only felt relief but I was glad that my friend, who is a New York Ranger’s fan, was feeling the same sort of misery that I was feeling. Fortunately, that’s not a super consequential example of “misery loves company.” But I think that principal really applies in the case of the devil.

Now when we talk about the devil, it’s really important that we avoid two extremes. It’s important we avoid blaming him for everything. We shouldn’t see him behind every tree. We shouldn’t think of him as equal to but opposite of God. On the other hand, it’s also important that we not ignore him because we reject some caricature of him with red skin, horns, goat legs, and a pitch fork. In fact, in CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters this is the tactic the demons take: it’s better for them if they can convince someone the devil isn’t real. But if they are unsuccessful at that, they attempt to swing the person to the other extreme so that they believe in a caricature. In this morning’s epistle, St. Peter urges us to take the devil seriously because it’s possible for his temptation and sophistry to destroy our souls. In response to Satanic temptation, St. Peter shows us a way forward: a way of humility, a way that clings to the cross, and a way that is sober and vigilant.

To better understand the devil, it’s helpful to understand his first sins: pride and envy. Pride, what we might call self-worship, is evidenced in his great fall. He was the pinnacle of the angelic order, perhaps the most beautiful of the heavenly host. Yet he rebelled against God. His fall is summarized in the great book Paradise Lost by John Milton who has Satan proclaim that it’s “Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.” This proclamation is the foundation of what we call spiritual warfare: the devil and the fallen angels represent this arrogant insistence that a creature may know better than their Creator; that something which is made should have more power than he who made. This is why pride has been considered by many Christian theologians to be the worst sin. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, points out that other sins can be chalked up to ignorance, weakness, or an imbalanced search for the good. St. Augustine once remarked that even the man in the brothel is looking for God. But pride doesn’t really stem from ignorance, weakness, or a misguided search for the good; it comes from an “aversion to God simply through being unwilling to be subject to God,” according to Aquinas. For this reason, pride is considered to be the beginning of all vices, it is the necessary condition for all the other Deadly Sins of greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. Pride, then, is the first sin; a sin the describes Satan’s fundamental orientation towards God.

Now Ben Franklin once observed that pride manifests itself in smugness, arrogance, envy, and domination. The pride of the devil worked itself out in envy towards humanity. Lucifer saw himself as the pinnacle of God’s creation. But in Genesis, we’re told that God made humanity in his image and likeness. We are the pinnacle of creation. Being image-bearers means that we are God’s representatives to creation, his co-regents, mediators between heaven and earth which requires us to be rational creatures. Satan, seeing this, burned with rage and his envy of our position led him to attack our first parents with deception, an episode that we now call the Fall. This toxic combination of pride and envy marks in Satan what we might call a complete and total inward turn: he has completely and totally alienated himself from the Good. And misery loves company. His war on God began in the Garden and continued throughout the course of human history which continues on today. It’s this context in which the Church finds itself. But the good news is that we can see all this from a post-Easter perspective: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” So we know that God and Satan aren’t locked in some sort of cosmic armwrestling match. God has won, he is winning, and he will win. Hebrews 2:14 “he himself took part of human flesh; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.” And so the author of Revelation speaks with assurance about the devil being cast into the lake of fire and brimstone.

now the Church Militant, that is those Christians here on earth, find ourselves in the midst of a struggle as Satan attempts to move us away from our course toward heaven. This is why St. Peter describes Satan as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Now just like someone with a hammer might see everything as a nail, it can become easy for us as Christians to see everything as Satanic, even other people. There’s also a danger that when replace God with ourselves, everyone who opposes us becomes the devil. This is mistaken: St. Paul reminds us that the Church struggles “not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Other human beings we meet, even those who may be antagonistic to the Church are victims who have been born into the bondage of Sin and death. Now this doesn’t mean they lack culpability; people sin because they choose to. While they might oppose us, we can see things for how they really are. Just as God through Moses led the Israelites from bondage in Egypt into the Promised Land and just as Christ leads the Church into a New Exodus from Sin into Holiness, so the Church beckons those born in chains into a new and better way of being that involves humility, dependence on the Cross, and vigilance.

If pride is the root of all the vices, then pursuing virtue requires humility. Resisting the devil means embracing humility in relation to God, recognizing that he is the Creator and we are the creatures. St. Vincent De Paul once said that “humility is nothing more than truth and pride is nothing but lying.” Humility is about the right assessment of self: you don’t think you’re better or worse than you are. The devil often comes to us with lies aimed at inflating our pride: you will be like God; God has dealt you a bad hand and you deserve better; person x didn’t deserve what they got as much as you do. To resist these subtle temptations, we must foster in ourselves a sense of humility. We are always a creature who stands in need of grace. Where God has put us is not an accident; he places us where we are because he “chastiseth whom he loveth.” God, in his wisdom, puts us where we are for our benefit and we know he knows more than we do. And this realization frees us up to genuinely celebrate others because humility recognizes their success is a good thing and that we aren’t the center of the universe.

But how do we foster humility? How do we avoid falling into traps that involve thinking, “I’m the most humble person I know”? The answer is through dependence on the Cross. “Casting all your cares on him” is only possible when we’re aware of what Christ has done for us. On the Cross, Jesus bore all the sins of the world, enabling relationship between God and humanity. As a result, we know what Peter says: “He careth for you.” Perhaps he’s drawing from Jesus’ words about the lilies in the field and the birds in Matthew 6. Just as he cared for the Israelites in the wilderness with manna, so he provides for us by his Cross and the Holy Eucharist. The cross helps us oppose two lies from Satan: it helps us remember that we are not self-sufficient, that we cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps because we need grace; but also it helps us oppose the lie that grace can’t reach us, that we’re unredeemable, that we’re too far gone. Instead, because of the Cross, we cling to God and cast our cares on him.

The final instruction Jesus provides for resisting the devil is to be sober and vigilant. Sobriety here is about being intentional and being in control of our selves. That word can also be translated as “watchful,” and, in 1 Peter 4:7, the Apostle pairs that with prayer. Further, he commends vigilance to us as an exhortation to be alert, be awake, be aware of the story you find yourself in; be aware that temptations are always at hand. To this end, if we want to be sober and vigilant, two indispensable tools in our arsenals are prayer and self-reflection. So we resist the work of the devil when we pursue humility, cast our cares on God by continually going to the Cross, and by being sober and vigilant.

Spiritual warfare is real. As Members of the Church Militant, we find ourselves under constant pressure and attack from our own concupiscence, from the world and its attractions, and from the devil who is a roaring lion. We miss the point when we ignore those conflicts, give our adversary too little or too much credit, or by seeing others as our enemies or the devil. Instead, the best way to fight is living the faithful Christian life: fostering humility so we can see things for what they are; clinging to the Cross for dear life so we can draw strength by casting cares on him; and being sober and vigilant by living lives of prayer and self-examination.

“the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you. To him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.