Transcription of a Sermon Preached in the Cathedral of All Saints by the Dean on November 10,2024

In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated. I’m going to speak today primarily about the Collect, and then finish by making a reference to the second lesson, the portion from the letter to the Hebrews. Collects are short prayers, just like what it says. It collects our thoughts, it gives us a focus for the day. I had a teacher who said, the Collect is like the red dot on the map in the mall.

It says, you are here. People often ask me, what is this Anglican tradition of being a Christian? What is it all about? I’ll take a paper clip and put it around the Collects in the book Common Prayer. You can look in the index and see where they are. If you read through those prayers, you get a pretty good sense of the ethos of the spirit of this way of trying to live out the Christian life. This is a very beautiful, very ancient Collect that we have in front of us today, and it is a summary of the promise of salvation.

Oh God, whose blessed Son was made manifest, that he might destroy the works of the devil, and make his children of God, and heirs of eternal life. This is why Jesus has come. Now, when I was a young person, I had gone away from the faith, though I was a very pious as a child. Scholars who study faith development talk about 12-year-old atheism. I had that for about eight years, the 12-year-old atheism. I went away from the faith, and I came back to the faith. As I was coming back to the faith, as a lot of people do when they’re coming back to the faith, you negotiate it. You say, well, you know, I kind of like this, but I don’t like that.

It’s sort of the cafeteria approach. One of the things I thought was, well, how can any contemporary person believe in the devil? And of course you can summon up the most sort of silly images of the devil in that frame of mind. I now think, how can anybody look at the history of the 20th century and not believe in the devil? One of the things that changed my mind about the devil the work of a famous Protestant theologian, a man named Emil Brunner, he had a section in his theology on the devil and his angels, and he said that the significance of the devil is that it tells us that evil doesn’t originate with human beings. We’re made good. We’re not as good as we were made to be. We’re fallen.

We’re captivated by evil. But evil comes from outside of us, and it seduces us, and it tempts us, and it captivates us, and it intoxicates us, and we can’t get free from it on our own. In the way the Bible talks about this, this is all the work of the devil. And the Son of God has been made manifest to destroy the works of the devil.

And how does he do that? I’ll talk for a moment about the works of the devil, but the work of Jesus Christ is to bear the sins of the world away with the great sacrifice of love. It’s by this Niagara of love that pours forth from the cross that he drowns wickedness, evil, and washes away our sins. There’s an old spiritual song, and I like old spiritual songs because they often get things that some of us in our sophistication don’t get. There’s an old song some of you will recognize. There’s a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins, and sinners plunged beneath that blood to dissolve their guilty state. Purify us as he is pure.

So what are the works of the devil? The devil, according to the Bible, is like us in that the devil has intelligence and has free will, not like us, a different species. Traditionally, the devil is thought of as one of the angels, a prince of the angels, a fallen angel. And the devil makes this decision. He’s a creature like us, and he’s made to serve God like we are. And he makes this decision, which is an inscrutable decision. And there is something about evil that is inscrutable.

And the decision is this, to rebel against God. Now why would you do that? Doesn’t that sound like a bad plan, to rebel against God? The devil rebels against God. We rebel against God. Why would we do that? Doesn’t that sound like a bad plan?

As I say, there’s something very inscrutable about all of this, something that defies explanation. It’s irrational. Evil is irrational. It’s not according to the Logos. The Logos is the Son of God. It’s the loving reason which rules and governs all things that become flesh in Jesus Christ our Lord. So the evil, sin and evil, it’s contra Logos.

It’s a Logos. That is without Logos. It doesn’t make any sense.

But there it is. I think the best commentator that we’ve got on the decision of the devil is the English poet Milton. Milton has this great poem, Paradise Lost, and he says, in Paradise Lost, better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. Now this idea, this Luciferian prideful idea of freedom is exactly the deal that the devil proposes to the man and the woman in the Garden of Eden. God has created this beautiful world. He’s created the man and the woman.

He’s created them to know, love, and serve him. He’s created them for hearts to go up to him and praise and worship and go out to each other in love and service. Created them to bless their maker, to bless each other, and to bless the world. Created them to be the priests of the creation temple, which is the Garden of Evil. One thing they’re not to do, and that’s to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

But what is that? Isn’t it a good thing to know the difference between good and evil?

Here’s my understanding. That is, to take to yourself the authority to decide for yourself what is good and what is evil. To put yourself in the place of God and to say that there is no transcendent moral order to which I must conform myself. But there is nothing good or evil but by saying man makes it so. That was, of course, Socrates’ great debate with the Sophists many, many years ago. Is there really such a thing as the true? Is there such a thing as the good? Is there such a thing as the beautiful? Or is it just by saying we make it so? So you put yourself in God’s place and you determine what’s right, what’s wrong, and you’ll be free, says the devil.

You’ll really be free. You’ll be without constraint. Now, we use the word modern, and the word modern has many positive uses. You know, modern medicine, I like modern medicine. And I like modern technology. It’s like any tool. It can be used for good, it can be used for evil.

But historians and philosophers use the word modern as well. And one of the things that distinguishes the modern era is a particular notion of freedom. And I’ve talked about this before. I keep harping on this. I do. It’s important to understand it. And the modern notion of freedom is you’re free if you’re without constraint.

You’re free if you’re without constraint. Ancient Christians and ancient pagans both thought that they were free if whatever it was that stood between them and the proper end of what it was to be a human being was done away with. Then you’re free. We think we’re free if we’re without constraint. We’re free if we’re in charge of ourselves and we decide for ourselves. It’s the deal the devil offered to the man and the woman. What happens,. The book of Genesis tells us what happens when you take that deal.

When you turn away from God, the devil tempts us to the hatred of God. One of the forms of hatred of God is indifference to God. But the devil tempts us to hatred of God. When we turn away from God, it’s all laid out in the book of Genesis, what happens to us? We turn against each other. They turn away from God and right away there’s the first murder. Turn away from God, turn on each other, and then we turn in upon ourselves.

And one of the things that characterizes, at least in the West, the modern era, is self-preoccupation. Now do you know that the psychiatrists and the psychologists, when they’re trying to measure how neurotic somebody is, how disturbed they are, they will simply try to do an inventory of how much time they spend thinking about themselves. The more time you spend thinking about yourself, the more neurotic you are. It’s not healthy. When life is going well and we’re functioning well and we’re healthy, we’re self-forgetting. And there are even these moments when we’re engaged in something really meaningful and wonderful that’s true and good and beautiful and we’re taken outside of ourselves altogether. So you turn away from God, you turn upon each other, you turn in upon yourself.

This is the work of the devil. The devil doesn’t do much on his own. What he does is draw us away from God and make us instruments of the demonic hatred of God. Now, the twentieth century has been a century where the works of the devil have been very, very evident, and no more evident than in the death camps of the Nazis. The word genocide is being used a lot in our time, and I think it’s being used improperly. A genocide is when, by intention and by methodical design, you are determined to wipe away a whole race of people.

We bombed hundreds of thousands with atomic bombs on Japan. The morality of that was debated at the time. The morality of that can be debated now. This is war.War is very, very terrible. We did not intend to exterminate the German people, and we did not intend to exterminate the Japanese people. The German Nazis intended to exterminate the Jewish people, and they were very nearly successful. I’m wondering if our young people are being taught today how successful that was and how horrible it was. So, six million people. Well, these numbers are so big you can hardly comprehend them. Six million people died in the Nazi death camps.

The camps were so terrible that at the beginning of the war, when a few Jews escaped and made their way to the West and were debriefed by British intelligence officers, the British intelligence officers would not believe them because it beggared the imagination. You turn away from God, which the Nazi regime explicitly did. You turn away from God, and you become capable of wickedness, which beggars the imagination. They say that hell is a bottomless pit. Well, great depths of hell have been sounded in the 20th century. Six million people died. What does that mean?

That means two out of every three European Jews were exterminated. Two out of every three European Jews were exterminated. At the beginning of World War II, there were three million Jews in Poland. In 1950, there were 45,000. I very seldom speak about anything that’s in the newspapers from the pulpit. I think that my role is to present Christ to you, but I need to speak about this. On October the 7th, terrorists of Hamas slaughtered 1,200 men, women, and children, including babies. They did so intentionally evoking the crimes of the Nazis. There’s a difference between Hamas and the Nazis. The Nazis, there was enough residual civilization, even though Western civilization was even then as it is now in a crisis, but there was enough residual civilization so that they wanted to keep what they were doing quiet, they wanted to keep it secret even from their own people.

Whereas on October 7th, the perpetrators of those crimes wore GoPro cameras and published what they were doing on YouTube. When the camps were liberated, the world was horrified and there was a universal condemnation. It’s been much more muted in our time now. And I don’t know how many of you know that in the city of Anne Frank, in the city of Anne Frank, you all know the name Anne Frank, I think, in the city of Anne Frank, two days ago, gangs of Muslim men were hunting down Jews on the streets of Amsterdam. As we are gathered together this morning, El Al airline is organizing an airlift evacuation of Jews from Holland. The works of the devil, the works of the devil are real. And there’s a particular work of the devil that’s really real, very real in our time.

And it is the uncanny coalition of radical jihadist Islamism and secular hatred of Jews, Christians have a lot of Jew hatred to repent of. We are only able, we are able to engage in that because we are forgetting of the core foundations of our own religion. We are forgetting that the man who hung on the cross was a Jew and we are forgetting his words that he said to the Samaritan woman whose picture is up there over the high altar, salvation is from the Jews. So we are betraying our own religion when we engage in Jew hatred. The hatred of Islam for the Jewish people is embedded very thoroughly in the Koran. I will leave it to the Islamic scholars to determine how essential it is to that faith.

I don’t know, but it’s very early. And it comes from the time of Muhammad. It predates the conquering of the Holy Land by Islam after the death of the prophet. There is a coalition now, and it’s the work of the devil, between the Jew hatred of the radical Islamist jihadism on the one hand, and I don’t know what to call it on the other hand. I think a lot of people would call it the radical left. I’m not sure that the terms left and right work anymore. Because what do you make of the fact that from what you might call the left is coming the Jew hatred of the right?

You know, this all comes from the French Revolution and where people sat in the assembly at the time of the French Revolution. Here’s the thing that I think really separates, really divides. There are those people who think that the great problem, the only thing that stands in the way of our happiness is those people over there who are wicked. They think the problem is some other class of people, people with a different race or class or social position. They divide humanity into pure victims and pure victimizers. They are on a constant search for a whipping boy and the Jewish people will always be prime candidates.

That’s one view of the world and of the human heart. But there are those who, with the Bible, think that the problem of evil and wickedness runs right through the middle of every heart. The human problem is that on the one hand, we’re drawn towards God. On the other hand, we’re tempted towards evil. The human problem is not someone else. As Pogo said so wisely, “We have met the enemy and it is us.”

The Gospel of Saint Mark has wonderful moral teaching by Jesus. I would that we would listen to it and take it to heart. But the heart of that gospel is the struggle of Jesus with evil and the demonic forces. For which he has been manifest, the Son of God. The word of God’s love incarnate has come into the world that he might destroy the works of the devil. The works of evil are real. The works of the devil are real.

There is a temptation to hatred of God. I think that one of the things that is going on in our time is that even though we’re a very secular age, we’re a God-haunted age. And there is an ideological hatred of the Jewish people because they remind us that there is a God. They remind us that God is not mocked. They remind us that there is a God who judges and we want to push God out of our world and push God out of our lives. We want to rage against God.

He’s not an easy target. It’s his people that we can rage against. And so there’s this uncanny work of the devil in our time. And it needs to be identified. And it needs to be utterly rejected in the name of the Savior. But that is not enough. What also is necessary is that we should put our trust in him who comes to destroy the works of the devil, to bring us out of darkness into his marvelous light, who washes away the sin of the world with his great sacrifice of love and brings life and immortality to life.

Jesus Christ, the Lord. Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world. Have mercy on us. Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world.

Have mercy on us. Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world. Grant us your peace and conform our hearts to yours and purify us as you are pure. In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.