A sea of enemies.

A Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent

March 23, 2025 at Holy Communion

Psalm 25, Luke 11

“Look upon my enemies, for they are many” (Psalm 25:18). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.

This week at the Bible study, as we pondered over our Gospel reading which includes phrases like “Beelzebul, the Prince of Demons,” someone mentioned the 1973 film The Exorcist. The Exorcist, as one of the most influential horror films ever made, has played a huge role in shaping what we think demon possession looks like: violence and obscenity and malice, visions and miraculous strength. When Elizabeth mentioned the film, she said that back in the seventies she had the same reaction lots of people did: it sparked a curiosity. “Does that really happen? Is that what the Bible is talking about when it tells stories about demons? Do I believe this?”

After The Exorcist, horror movies have taken on demon possession as a favourite theme, but the result has not been that more people believe in them. Actually, quite the opposite. The more we have it entrenched in our imagination that demon possession is what we see on the big screen, the more we look around us and say, “I don’t see anybody possessed by demons,” and so we naturally don’t take demon possession very seriously as anything but a scary fantasy.

When we do that, we might be falling into a trap. CS Lewis says it this way in his preface to The Screwtape Letters, in which he impersonates a senior devil giving instructions to a junior tempter: the devil “always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. ... He relies on your extra dislike of one to draw you gradually into the opposite one. … So there are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”

We find the portrait of demons in pop culture so disgusting and so unrealistic, that we have come to disbelieve in demons entirely—and this pleases the devil very well. It gives him more space to work.

How does the devil work, then? I’ll borrow language from our Collect for last week, when we prayed that God would defend us from “all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul.” The devil is the great whisperer.

We have dark thoughts all the time—ranging from minor irritations and negative thoughts about our neighbours, down through inherited prejudices and harboured resentments, all the way into the depths where we occasionally imagine doing horrendous things. Our darkest thoughts sometimes shock us. We think, “How did that get in there? Did I come up with that?”—and that actually makes those thoughts less dangerous, because very few people will act on them. The most dangerous negative thoughts are the ones which do not disgust us, which we allow to take up permanent residence in our minds.

Christian tradition says that our minds are the primary site of the devil’s work. He whispers in our ear, making suggestions of who to be angry at and why, who to lust after and in what way, and how to plan the accomplishment of self-serving glorious ambitions. We treat these as if they were our own thoughts, but really they are the devil’s. They don’t belong to us—at least, not unless we adopt them as our own. Evil thoughts are assaults on the holy fortress of our soul. Their purpose is to hurt us.

In our Collect today, we prayed that God would “be our defence against all our enemies.” A few weeks ago at the Men’s Fellowship, someone told me that he had started reading the daily Psalms from our Prayer Book. “Amazing!” I said. But he had a question: “Why are there so many psalms about our enemies? I don’t feel like I have that many enemies.” And our Psalm today is a case of this. We just prayed that God would “look upon my enemies, for they are many, and they bear a violent hatred against me.”

I told Luke that as I have gotten older and become more familiar with the Psalms, this language has only become more meaningful to me—and not because I have more enemies. The enemies, I explained, are the evil thoughts constantly trying to pull us off the track of faithfulness and peace. And if you think of it this way, you quickly realize how utterly surrounded by enemies we are. Can any one of us spend even an hour without a single thought of resentment, greed, or self-indulgence crossing our minds? We spend every day wading through a sea of invisible enemies—enemies who are only outnumbered by the legions of angels whom we also forget to believe in.

But practically speaking, what do we do about it? As we do in our Collect, we can always pray for help. Get in touch with your intuition, and when you feel a dark cloud pass over your soul, start praying silently and insistently that God would send his angels to defend you.

But our Gospel reading also has something to say. Jesus taught that “when the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and finding none it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there. And the last state of that person is worse than the first.” (Luke 11:24–26). Your soul is a house, he says. It may be occupied by evil thoughts now, but when you want something different, you get it all swept clean. You might even ask God for help to get it all sorted out, because only the “finger of God” (v 20) can cast out Satan. But then the house needs a new occupant, or the demons will come back. God must take up residence: he must be the one occupying your mind, or you’ll be no better in the long run.

As it happens, recovered addicts know this very well. Long-term healing for self-destructive habits involves not only getting rid of the bad habit, but replacing it with a better one. You need a refuge when you have bad thoughts and feelings—a refuge other than the addiction which will destroy you.

So you need to have a spiritual practice. Daily prayer is only optional for people willing to have their hearts occupied by the enemy.

The altar which we will soon approach is also the door between the kingdom of heaven and our souls. By prayer we will open it. Ask God to come down through that door and take up residence with you.