Do Grownups Believe in Monsters? (Monster: Week 1)

Psalm 74:12-17

Ephesians 6:10-20

                        

Prolific writer of horror Stephen King says: ''I like to scare people, and people like to be scared.”

At the risk of disrespecting Stephen King, let me confess that I DO NOT like to be scared!  I have not seen very many scary movies.  And I plan to keep it that way.  But since I’ve confessed here, let’s see a show of hands.  How many of you can honestly say you enjoy movies designed to scare you?

When I was ten or eleven, I saw the movie “Cujo,” based on Stephen King’s novel.  It’s about a nice, gentle, loving St. Bernard who gets rabies, then goes on a murderous rampage.  I’ve been scared of dogs ever since.  Lately I’ve had to work up my courage just to read movie reviews of scary movies to see how the plotlines work.  A few times, feeling extra brave, I’ve watched the two and a half minute movie trailers.

What’s going on at the intersection of faith and fear?  That’s the question I want to keep before us during July.  I want to explore the good news of Scripture from a fresh angle.  How do Scripture’s stories sound when read in the context of our fear?  What can we discover when we come to the good news as people who have been frightened, as people who can be afraid?  How does faith work for people who live with monsters?

I do think that we’ve all been afraid once or twice.  But I am not accusing anyone of living in fear.  I’m not suggesting that it’s bad to be afraid and that if you only had more faith in God you would never be afraid.  Quite the opposite, I think being afraid is part of life.  And if we pretend not to be afraid, perhaps we do so because we’ve been taught that fear is weakness.  Or perhaps you really have never been afraid, in which case you might be a psychopath.  Or maybe you’re simply not observant enough to notice that life is filled with all kinds of possible harms and threats.

The Bible is fully aware that terrible things can happen to us.  And the Bible has some suggestive things to say about the reality of evil.  Evil is loose in the world as a chaotic, threatening force.  And it often appears to have the kind of power for which we puny human beings are no match.  There are even times when we might wonder whether the power of evil to harm and destroy is superior to the power of God to bless and protect and heal.

The Old Testament raises all sorts of questions about evil.  There is a talking serpent in the Garden of Eden.  Where it comes from we have no idea.  But the serpent is a smooth-talking professional who convinces human beings to walk into the way of harm and violence.  There is God’s voice, asking for obedience and promising flourishing life.  And there is the voice of the serpent, silky and appealing, and yet full of death.  And almost immediately we are transported to a nightmare of a scene, where one brother murders another brother out of jealousy.  Something has been loosed on the world.

Job 40-41 speaks of the earth monster Behemoth and the sea monster Leviathan.  The Psalms occasionally reference these primal beasts of land and sea.  And in fact they reappear, scarier than ever, in Revelation 13.  There is a story about King Nebuchadnezzar turning into an animal, in a werewolf like scene.  There are even angels that appear frightening.  Cherubim and Seraphim are described as flying creatures with four faces and six wings and their bodies covered in eyes.

The gospel stories of the New Testament end with the public, gruesome torture of an innocent man, arrested by Nebuchadnezzar-like politicians.  And the story moves along as a contest between Jesus and various monsters.  There is the chief figure of evil called Satan, or the devil, or Beelzebub.  And there are those demonic powers that infest and inhabit human lives, twisting them out of shape.  And the New Testament ends with Revelation, a kind of sci-fi dreamscape filled with monstrous beasts who threaten God’s good plans for human life.

Our reading today from Ephesians invites us to approach life as people engaged in a fight and a struggle.  Life is not peaceful and smooth progress.  It is not a comfortable way of life full of success.  It is a kind of war for which you need to be suited up in all the strength that God provides. 

Now many of us are quite good at approaching life like it’s warfare.  We’re good at putting ourselves on the good team and casting others as our opponents.  But listen to what our reading says, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12).

This is a difficult but important passage of Scripture.  Other people are not evil.  But there is something like an evil force that can get people in its terrible grip, and when that happens they become capable of harming others, demonic.  Twice in this passage, the writer refers quite simply to evil as a personified figure or character: he refers to “the devil’s schemes” (v. 11) and “the flaming arrows of the evil one” (v. 16).  And yet evil is not made silly by some kind of literal belief in a singular, evil figure called the devil.  Rather, what we have here is a rather sophisticated and complex view of the way that evil is a larger-than-life power that can get people in its grip and cause demonic destruction.

Elie Wiesel died this week.  He survived the Nazi death camps.  But his father, his mother, and his sister were murdered in the camps.  His short book Night is his confession of the shape that evil took in a certain kind of nationalistic patriotism in Germany.  Six million Jews were murdered in an unimaginably cruel genocide.  Now tell me you don’t believe in monsters.

At the Lowell Milken Center I learned that it can get worse.   During the middle of the 19^th century, King Leopold II of Belgium owned the interior of Africa.  It was a profitable business because of rubber plantations.  He enslaved a whole region and under his brutal reign for profit over 10 million Africans were murdered.  Now tell me you don’t believe in monsters.

Sadly, women and children are abducted and abused all the time.  It happens by husbands, fathers, neighbors, uncles, and friends.  It happens in churches.  Brutal campaigns are waged at great cost to women and children in civil wars.  Young girls are kidnapped, brainwashed, and trained to become suicide bombers.  Now tell me you don’t believe in monsters.

When people are mentally ill, they can hear voices that prompt them to do terrible things to other people, even people they love.  When people are in the grip of some addiction, their lives can be twisted into demonic shapes, where they harm others and themselves.  There are people so locked into the hate of racism that they can justify harming and killing those they imagine as their rivals and opponents.  And here’s what really scary: all these situations of abuse, illness, addiction, and racist fantasy are inter-generational.  They are the kind of monster you cannot kill.  The monster slithers from one person to the next, one generation to the next, like a zombie that can never be killed.

I wanted to get to the question of whether grownups believe in monsters.  But let’s remember that we were all kids once.  And kids believe in monsters.

When I was young, we told ghost stories.  I remember two in particular.  One involved a man asleep, with his hand dangling over the side of the bed.  And his beloved dog was licking his hand.  Only it wasn’t his beloved dog.  I remember another about a figure known as the “moth man” – a sinister figure with long claws, that was known to leap down from trees onto passing cars and claw his way through the roof.

I watched the movie trailer for a film from 2006 by Guillermo Del Toro called Pan’s Labrynth.  Anyone see this?  In the clip there was a sweet young girl down in some weird under-ground cave-like space.  She was carrying a purse, and when she opened her purse out flew two little fairies.  At the end of a long table there was a really repellent looking creature, perfectly still, with its claws on the table.  It had saggy white skin and no eyes. 

If I saw this creature sitting at a table, I would scream and run away.  But not this girl.  She moves up close to him and looks him over.  She wanders around the room.  She notices a gigantic pile of children’s shoes.  “Those are children’s shoes, you idiot!  What are you doing?  Get out of there.  This creature eats children!!!”  But she wanders back over to the table, with her back to the monster.  “Don’t turn your back on the monster, you idiot!”  She begins to leave, thank goodness, but she can’t help but notice the plate of big, beautiful grapes on the table.  She reaches for them and the fairies flying beside her go crazy.  They fly into her face, both of them waving their little hands frantically, making it very clear that under no circumstances is this girl to eat these grapes.  But she eats the grapes anyway! 

And sure enough, when she eats the grapes, the eyeless, child-devouring creature begins to stir.  But she can’t see it because she has her back to him!  I’ve never seen a person in my life take so long to eat two or three grapes.  But she’s really savoring these grapes.  Meanwhile, this child-devouring monster’s claws begin to feel their way around the table.  It finds an eyeball, plugs it into one palm.  It finds another eye, plugs it into another palm.   And when it holds its palms up to its head, it can see!  So now it’s chasing the girl down the longest hallway I’ve ever seen.  And the girl finds a door, but her key doesn’t work.  And this weird creature is stumbling after her.  She finds a chair to stand on, gets out some apparently magic chalk, draws a square on the ceiling, then pushes it open like a door.  Then she jumps up, with her feet still dangling, the monster now right beneath her.  And right when he makes a swipe with his claw, she pulls her feet up just in the nick of time.  I was so full of anxiety after this scene that I had to go take a walk.

I believe in monsters.  Not just because the Bible says so.  But because the Bible invites me to a way of life that is a struggle and a fight against the forces that cause pain in human life.  And I find that picture compelling and true.  So perhaps there are monsters.  But the real trick is for us to imagine them at about the right size.  If we dismiss them as child’s play we risk underestimating the harms that can come our way.  But if we inflate them or exaggerate them we risk living in despair instead of courage.  All monsters are on a leash.  God will win.  God’s beauty and kindness and love and forgiveness will outlast all evil. 

This requires a certain posture from people of faith now.  Something like hopeful and compassionate vigilance.  And a realistic view of threats in all shapes and forms – staying awake to pain in all forms.  Because of our faith in God, we refuse to despair in the face of even the most terrible harms done.  We will not despair because what threatens and harms cannot be the final word about the world, nor about us.  The final word is that evil will run its course and come to and end.  In the end, there will only be love.  But we are not yet at the end.  We are in the middle.  So put on the full armor of God, so that you can fight with courage.  Amen.